... of open, accountable government and our system of checks and balances -- including the press -- doing its job, there's this side-splitting piece of work from the normally rather staid Independent Institute, courtesy MaxSpeaks.

But then again, as Eric Martin asks, "Why bother to revise history when you can bury it?"

But seriously, is this supposed to be some kind of new form of argumentation whereby you cite evidence that completely eviscerates your point and then claim you're right?

Public television, its supporters say, is especially important for people who cannot afford cable or satellite television. But 62 percent of poor households have cable or satellite television, and 78 percent have a VCR or DVD player.

George Will to 38% percent of poor households: you do not exist.

As for his larger point ... really now. Television completely sucks in terms of transmitting actual information and ideas, and everyone knows it. And come on, George Will has PBS written all over him! Bowties? Also funny how Will mentions BBC America in his list of other channels worth watching.

PBS is the last DJ.

A Thought: Maybe he's just lashing out because his show is cratering?

I must apologize for being remiss in my duties here at chez Nadezhda over the past few days. The front desk has been left empty for extended periods, and it's really my fault. Praktike has been on an amazing production streak at LaT and the Chef has been covered with dust from head to toe reclassifying the entire central library collection at TerrorWiki. Prak has been kind enough to cover the front desk here from time to time.

I've been off doing some remodelling, as well as planning another room (I'm afraid I'm a frustrated interior designer at heart!). And I forgot to leave a note on the door to go round back.

So here's a bit of something until the crew leaves and I get the construction mess cleaned up.

These are comments I wrote over at Eric Martin's place a week before the inauguration. I think you might find some of it relevant to discussions since the inaugural address -- how the Bush Administration is repositioning re the "GWOT" vocabulary, the relations between the CIA and DOD in covert operations, and the rumbles of cross-border excursions in Iraq.

The comments aren't addressed to the specifics of the current brouhahas, but sometimes I have to remind myself to keep the big picture in mind as I react to specific events or disclosures, especially the more outrageous. So I find it helpful to occassionally go back to look at something I said, even if it was only a week ago. [ed., no comments about senior moments now, you hear?]

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For context, the discussion at Eric's was about Norman Podhoretz' "revisionism in real time" (to use Eric's felicitous formulation) and the various "enemies within" to which Norman's salvo was likely addressed. My remarks begin with an important and timely question from Alex:

A serious question: If Bush decides to invade another country [i.e. Iran or Syria, ed.], do you think he will attempt to use the congressional authorization from the Iraq War for permission, OR do you think that he will ask for a new authorization, OR do you think he'll just go ahead?

Sorry, I'm impatient. Can't wait for your answers. I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THIS CONGRESS WITH AUTHORIZE ANY NEW WAR DURING THE REMAINDER OF THIS PRESIDENCY, excepting following an attack of course. Zero.

My response, edited a bit for readibility but otherwise just stream of keyboard:

See the excellent recent Lawrence Freedman piece on The Iraq Syndrome, which will be Rumsfeld's legacy, in the same way Robert McNamara's was the Vietnam Syndrome. My very quicky remarks on Freedman are here.

I believe Freedman is absolutely correct about an Iraq Syndrome. There's a big difference between a significant portion of the public being willing to continue to support (or at least not openly oppose) Bush and the US invasion because "America right or wrong." They get their backs up when somebody suggests that the President and the US did the wrongn thing.

It's another thing altogether for those same people to support a further adventure. They're going to be awfully gun-shy, pun intended.

The causus belli would have to be sufficiently major that it triggered the viscera of Americans across the political spectrum. The US would have to feel itself under direct attack -- not some argument of possible future threat that must be prevented or preempted. Unless we have a meltdown of our political system, the Bush Doctrine as a military strategy is dead, but there's not anything yet in its place.

If a new intervention were pushed by the Bush Administration, a much larger portion of the general public this time around would want to know in great many more of the details about military overstretch, quagmires and exit strategy, possible "blowback," etc. These issues were dismissable in the wake of 9/11, with the drumbeats being echoed by the MSM, and with the "lessons of Vietnam" dismissed as either irrelevant or "we've gotten over Vietnam by now."

By contrast, Iraq is, shall we say, still fresh in the mind? We've got a new situation that's looking more and more like quagmire from any and every angle. And this time around, the MSM has a whole other narrative in which to filter and frame pronouncements from the Bush Administraton.

I'd say the foregoing description of a general public that is more cautious or less willing to take Bush's pronounements on faith is similarly equally true for a goodly portion of Repubs on Capitol Hill. Most are not of the neo-con persuasion. Also, they're politicians, so the reluctance of a larger portion of their voters, and the willingness of a larger number of their home districts to take a hard look at the bill-of-goods the Bush Admin would be selling if they followed the Poddy script, is likely to put the brakes on any adventure. We're already hearing rumbles from Repub Congressmen after visiting their home districts.

All of this is equally applicable, BTW, to any proposal for humanitarian interventions that involve peacemaking -- not just helping disaster victims like the tsunami. The Iraq Syndrome will put any thoughts of a repeat of interventions in the Balkans, or going into a Sudan, under the microscope across the political spectrum, not just from the old-fashioned anti-war Left or the isolationist Right.

The thing to watch for is mission creep in Iraq. Please note that although Rumsfeld was pretty direct about denying US-supported Iraqi death squads (by the Pentagon, didn't say anything about the other agency, heh) he was notably less straightforward about crossing the border into Syria by US special forces.

[ed., I highlighted Rumsfeld's statements on Syria because I found astounding the naivete of certain right-wing bloggers when they dumped on Rumsfeld for being too "casual" in his reaction to the Newsweek article on the Salvador option. Donald Rumsfeld may decide to appear breezy some times in responding to the press, but his responses are never "casual." If he said he hadn't read the article, you can go to the bank on the statement as being factually accurate. If you inferred, however, that he was unaware of every last jot of every sentence in the article in terms of what he could and couldn't safely say, you are a fool. He is the only one of the leading lights of BushAdmin1 to have been caught in an out-and-out falsehood over the invasion of Iraq only once. And that case appears to have been a slip of the tongue he has regretted fiercely. Always, always parce Rumsfeld -- most especially when he's being "casual."]

I hate to keep returning to Vietnam, but there are features of that conflict that should at least be examined occasionally. One is the understandable temptation by both the WH and the military to go to where they think the source of the problem lies -- across the neighboring borders. The international and domestic political fallout can be considerable, as the Cambodian bombings demonstrated. And mission creep can also be a factor in spreading instability outside of the country of conflict. That's just a commonsense observation, not a moral judgment.

Now one of the big problems is that, unless we take Kristol's proposal and bomb the Syrians openly, the BushAdmin and the military have to conduct deniable operations. That means one or both of two things. We ultimately engage unofficial/paramilitary groups to do the incursions. We lie through our teeth about it publicly.

The latter course was adopted by the Nixon WH with respect to Cambodia (hey -- Kerry's Cambodia story to this day can't be documented because it's shrouded in a system designed for deniability). And at some point, deniability exploded in their face, and LBJ's Credibility Gap became Nixon's Grand Canyon of government-by-deceit. That was a terrible scar on US domestic politics writ large, not just on the future conduct of US foreign policy.

Now, as for Finlandization [ed. appropo of Podhoretz]. I don't have a reference for you at my fingertips that gives you a broader history. But it's the Poddy codeword for the sinister policies of creeping appeasement of the guys who were running the show in Reagan II -- not the stalwart anticommunists of Iran-contra and the NSC but the (sneer) diplomats. He and Midge were still yammering about Finlandization at conferences on Europe after October 1989!

The reemergence of Jimmy Baker must have them in a cold sweat. Baker is the incarnation of evil because he's so much more plausible than the cartoonish anti-war Left. Granted the Podhoretz crowd is all geared up for realtime revisionism (take a gander at Roger Simon's comment section on the Podhoretz article if you want to see an awesome example of your [Eric's] meme in action). But if you want to know who their real enemy is, it's Jimmy Baker and his ilk because that smooth talker is one dangerous man.

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Follow-up from Alex:

[O]ne major difference between now and Cambodia is the media. I think secret runs into Syria would land on Al Jazeera in a heartbeat, although I do allow for the possibility that there is lots going on in Iraq that we simply don't know is happening. From what I understand from press reports, the press is quite restricted from moving around by the insecurity.

Another question that I find interesting to contemplate is the military force size question in relation to the possibility of invading "the next country." Unless all the retired military analysts are lying about our force strength, attacking a new country doesn't seem feasible at this time. And that begs the question of just what we would do if WE were attacked here and wanted to retaliate. Shift forces from Iraq or Afghanistan?

I think if it really came to that, particularly following an attack, that there would be a serious readjustment in the world view to send troops, including NATO and maybe UN, to replace troops in Iraq and redirect them (maybe borrow some from Afghan., too). What I don't like is being in the position of being so vulnerable, especially for no good reason.

I heard that Baker had made a statement, but I haven't tracked down what he said yet. In fact, I have been waiting for him to speak ever since Scowcroft's and Zbig's comments last week. What I would dearly love to know is the current status among Bush 41, Brent and Baker. Can you say strained?

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From nadezhda to Alex --

Here's a link to a press report of Baker's speech.

It's about time! However, the way I read the situation, Baker is out there running interference for Dubya. This is where the BushAdmin is generally headed, but somebody's got to tell the faithful that it's time for a reality-based policy. Rude awakening for many, I fear, if the comment thread on Roger Simon re the Podhoretz article is any indication.

Kevin Sites, the freelance journalist who shot the video of the Marine shooting the wounded Iraqi in the mosque, has been well-known for some time for his warzone blogging from Iraq.

Sunday he posted a painful open letter to the Marine unit which he had been accompanying through much of the Fallujah fighting. A very personal story, and an attempt to communicate understanding and perspective from all sides of the terrible choices war presents.

He closes with a thought that should be remembered daily about all the actors in this teledrama as we watch Fallujah and Baghdad and Mosul from afar:

So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera -- the story of his death became my responsibility.

The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.

I pray for your soon and safe return.

One of America's increasingly prominent scholars in the fields of international relations and national security is none other than MC MasterChef's own professor at BU, Andrew Bacevich (specialty American military affairs). His op-ed today in the LATimes, "Unsafe for Democracy," is a timely reminder of a dimension of the recent election that has not received enough attention. With most post-mortems focusing on why Kerry came up short -- why Bush voters didn't pull the lever for Kerry, rather than an assessment of why Kerry voters rejected Bush -- no serious appraisal of the foreign policy voting patterns has received any prominence so far.

The President and his supporters have claimed bluntly that because he won, the Democrats should be expected to "stop campaigning" and support his foreign policies to promote "healing" and "national unity." All well and good from a "rally 'round the troops" standpoint, especially as serious fighting has just been launched in Fallujah. But in terms of how America should position itself in the world going forward, a substantial portion of Democrats and independents who voted for Kerry believe continuing down the road that the Bush Doctrine has placed us on would be a profoundly dangerous mistake.

Although a large portion of the electorate has begun to feel that the US got off was unwise to invade Iraq, a fundamental debate about the role of the US in a unipolar world has not yet been joined. During the election campaign, most of the pointed critique of Bush Admin policies and actions -- from either Democrats or the press -- involved relatively narrow issues, such as the feebleness of the grounds for the invasion of Iraq or the lack of competence in planning and execution of the post-invasion phase. Even those claims didn't receive a great deal of public attention until late in the campaign because of the slow process by which concrete evidence emerged that countered the Admin's fantastically rosy pictures of reality. (See discussions in "Media Tipping-Point " and "What will those dumb Americans do next?"

Bacevich argues, along the same lines as John Ikenberry's "Liberal Leviathan" analysis, that the witches brew of traditional conservative US foreign policy principles with Wilsonian idealism is neither sustainable at home nor acceptable abroad. Bacevich does not outline his preferred approach -- whether to shift from conservative to liberal traditional principles and/or to jettison Wilsonianism in favor of some version of realism or a new idealism . But that political elites must recast the discussion in terms other than the "false coinage" of "freedom" and "democracy" cannot be disputed.    more »

Columbia Journalism Review had arranged with Farnaz Fassahi to keep a journal of her experiences during the time she was reporting from Baghdad late this summer for the Wall Street Journal. It was only toward the end of her assignment that her email to family and friends became a cause celebre on the internet. CJR has now published her journal.

[UPDATE 10-28-04] by nadezhda

Apparently Mr Stewart hit several nerves in a portion of the body politic. Via Jeff Jarvis (who's got gobs of goodies this week -- see also his Michael Powell/Howard Stern coverage):

10-25-04 Exploding TV

: By the latest count, the Jon Stewart CNN segment has had more than 1.4 million views on iFilm -- not to mention all the BitTorrent distribution. Welcome to the future of media: A distributed network is more powerful than a centralized network. And the people you once called viewers are your best marketers (if you have anything worth marketing).

: Just noticed that iFilm calls this all viral video. Good title. [BTW, the viral video link also includes iFilm's segments of the Bush one-fingered salute and Eminem's Mosh, among other "crazy stunts, funny ads, dumb blondes, and gross clips"; ed.]
[...]
: Here's where you can get the latest counts on iFilm's clip: It's over 1.5 million now. [10-28 update, over 2 million, and again, not counting BitTorrent; ed]

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And here's a more analytical take on the Stewart/CNN confrontation that captures my viewpoint of what the fuss was all about, from Andrew Cline of Rhetorica, who's become a daily read. This goes a long way towards explaining why I thought it wouldn't have made sense for Stewart to ask Kerry "hard" questions in that format. Stewart would just be "playing" at tough journalist, goofing on the media. If Stewart tried to have a meaningful exchange about an issue with Kerry, they'd have to abandon the Daily Show format. That's because the structure of the interview and news shows, which Stewart is lampooning, prevents anything "tough" other than "gotcha."

The Daily Show is not about politics. It's about media. It is 30 minutes of satire about what it is the news media do day after day and how it sometimes hurts us. There is much humor to be found in that because humor is often a defense mechanism--a way to live with circumstances we'd rather were different.

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The absurdity of campaign rhetoric's disconnect from either reality or intentions is further highlighted by AP's extensive interview with President Bush on Airforce One. Please tell me how the following differs in any material respect from Kerry's stated policy objectives, especially when taken together with recent remarks by Rumsfeld on troop draw-down after January elections.

President Bush says he doesn't envision a longtime presence of U.S. troops in Iraq similar to post-World War II deployments in Europe and South Korea that continue today.

"I think the Iraqi people want us to leave once we've helped them get on the path of stability and democracy and once we have trained their troops to do their own hard work," Bush said Monday in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press.

Still, Bush said, "It's very difficult for me to predict what forces will exist although I will tell you that Iraq's leadership has made it quite clear that they can manage their own affairs at the appropriate time."

If free and open Iraqi elections lead to the seating of a fundamentalist Islamic government, "I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy," Bush said. "If that's what the people choose, that's what the people choose."

Why can't our leadership -- from both parties -- speak to Americans in something other than sound bites for second graders? Why can't Bush take advantage of the debates to articulate a sensible view of the "vision" that informs his expectations about future steps the US is likely to take in Iraq? Has the White House campaign strategy relied so totally on being able to demonize Kerry's approach as nothing but "cut and run" in disguise that they have abandoned the public conduct of US foreign policy from the White House?   more »

There are several closely related themes floating around the political ether:

1. the increasingly evident disconnect between fact-based reality and the policy decision-making and execution by the Bush Administration over the past three years, especially in relation to Iraq
2. the credibility gap, which is becoming a chasm, between fact-based reality and the claims of the Bush Administration regarding its policy and the results of its policy
3. the apparent continued credulousness regarding the Bush policies within a substantial portion of the pool of potential voters in November's presidential election, and
4. the failure of the US mainstream media to identify and communicate effectively these various disconnects.

Sunday's NY Times Magazine piece by Ron Suskind is the talk of the day, and both bondra and praktike have offered their personal takes on the tale of why a president, and the apparatus structured to serve him, have become so disconnected from a world view and an intellectual process that are the sine qua non of governance for the country's professional elites. Relying on the explanation of "faith" (not necessarily religious, but at least moral certainty) for the president's attitudes and behavior, Suskind extends this explanation to the portion of the public who not only continue to support Bush's re-election, but share his assessment of both the primary foreign policy goals of the US and how the US is and should be going about achieving those goals.

I also have a personal take, which is consistent with bondra's and praktike's views but comes at the conundrum of Bush and his supporters from a bit different angle than Suskind's. I began to sketch it out in an earlier response to bondra using a Viet Nam analogy as a sort of typology of politicians and opinion groups. I'll try to get to fleshing that out a bit further in the next few days after I finish some more of Charles Kupchan's The Vulnerability of Empire, which deals explicitly with the dynamic between elite decision-making and public opinion in foreign policy. But in the meantime, I want to go back to the issue of the "credibility gap" itself.
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bondra -- Responding to your "Bloody hell, can those Americans get any dumber?" I'm amazed that you managed to get through that tendentious gobbledygook from the Guardian. Jonathan Raban has concocted an exotic brew of American exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, nativism, and charismatic evangelicalism. Did he leave out millenialism? I got lost. And he lays this unholy mess at the feet of our Pilgrim heritage, the victor over our enlightened Virginia tradition in the eternal manichean conflict between "religion and reason." Whew!

I understand the impulse of Europeans (in this case I include Brits) to try to apprehend the value systems and belief structures that could produce a re-election victory for someone they view as demonstrably and odiously unqualified not only to be President of the United States but leader of the world. They don't get a vote, yet their futures are certainly affected by the resident of the White House. The objective of analysis, however, is to "demystify," not produce some incoherent kabbalistic theory to prove the inherent incomprehensibility of the "other". (One could make the same comment about most writing on followers of Islam.)

I must pick a quarrel with you a bit on the "merits" (not of Raban's piece but of why Bush retains a considerable base of support on foreign policy, even from people who have concluded that Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket). First, from polling data on specific beliefs**, it's clear that there indeed remains for at least a third of the population a considerable disconnect between perceptions of the entire Iraq saga, as narrated by the Bush Admin and the BC04 campaign (with constantly shifting details, to put it most charitably), and the accumulating evidence from official reports and credible information from the ground.

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