Angles in America

The deity who walks among us with the name and form of one Glenn Greenwald has deigned to notice our friend Michael J. Totten in reference to Michael's recent reporting from Fallujah, and Michael's criticism of another reporter's relentlessly negative work from there.

There's some degree of murk in the disagreement between the reporters. But the way Greenwald treats them is clear, and illuminating. He casts doubt on Michael's credibility in every case where Michael's reporting disagrees with his own narrative of Iraq (all failure all the time). Then he turns around and quotes him approvingly when Michael reports on the myriad problems and resentments still percolating in Fallujah.

Yes, of course, with him it's a case of implying, "if even a wingnut says it's this bad, you know it is worse," after having tarred you with that brush. [The same thing the extreme right does with regard to the NYT and WaPo.]

But it would be equally justifiable, even from Greenwald's position, to read Michael as an honest reporter without an agenda other than to tell what he sees. He could quote him more honestly in support of his arguments that way, without the gratuitous rubbishing. But gratuitous rubbishing is what GG was put on this earth to perform.

Along the way, Greenwald also applies standards of criticism to Michaels' reporting that he never mentions with regard to the other Fallujah reporter, whom he quotes with entire credulity.

He damns Michael because he "asserts with no evidence of any kind that [Ali] al-Fadhily's report of citizens being arrested for speaking with reporters is false,"but he fails to point out that al-Fadhily's report -- "Many residents told IPS that US-backed Iraqi police and army personnel have detained people who have spoken to the media" -- is 1. hearsay at best, 2. printed without supporting evidence.

Did al-Fadhily speak to anyone who was so detained, or only to people who told him other people have been detained, which is how I read that sentence. That kind of reporting wouldn't pass muster with a local news editor, but it's gospel to Greenwald.

That this scribbling weasel is held up as a modern day Daniel Webster is a sign that the right wingers may have a point after all about the intellectual anorexia of the anti left.

Here's Michael on the Marines in Fallujah. This is just good war reporting. The ghosts of Walt Whitman and Xenophon nod in agreement, from the shadows, reading this stuff. It serves nobody's side, nor is meant to:

“Was there one fight in particular that was intense or memorable?” I said. “The kind of story you would tell your kids or your friends back home?”

“I don't talk to my friends back home about it,” he said. “We pretty much only talk amongst ourselves.”

“Is it because they don't want to hear about it,” I said, “or you don't want to talk about it?”

“It's because everybody glorifies it so much, I think,” he said softly and a little bit sadly. “Everybody thinks it's cool. You know?”

“You mean American civilians glorify it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Guys our age. You go home and you always get those stupid questions. Did you shoot anybody? Did you kill anybody? How many people? I just don't personally deal with that. I had a great uncle who was in the Korean War. I talk to people like him about it. As far as regular people, I don't. If they ask I just tell them it was nothing. That's what I hear from everybody else, too. They feel the same way.”

“How do you feel about what happened here?” I said.

“I definitely think it was necessary,” he said. “I don't have any regrets. I'm glad I did it, and I would do it again. It's good to see the city the way it is and to go to the same neighborhoods. They're so much cleaner now. These people are doing things on their own, they're taking care of their own stuff. When I was here three years ago, I never would have imagined this place would ever be like it is now. It reminded me of Tijuana. When we got here it just seemed like everything you could think of that was bad, this city had it going on. Now they have regular families thriving in the city. There are people working neighborhood watch, working together. It has turned around a lot. I didn't even want to come on this deployment, but now seeing the city the way it is, I'm glad I did. It's like a closure on everything.”

No News is No News

Hollywood screenwriters hit the picket lines Monday. Screenwriters. They tell stories. They write fictions and jokes.

Which are the modern version of "news."

Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America East, is glad that his union brothers now include the staffs of two programs that have a visceral connection with their young, obsessed audiences.

“These two shows are a big source of news for a whole generation that was not around for the 1988 strike,” he said. “Losing Stewart and Colbert is something like losing Cronkite during the Vietnam War. And because they are accessed in any number of ways both on television and on the Web, ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ are exactly what we are talking about at the bargaining table.”

Try not to understand what that means.

I'm Letting Greenwald Take Over My House

[Posted by reader_iam]

I am all about housework today, specifically tasks which 1) bore or annoy me terribly and thus require mental distraction and 2) require me to move frequently from room to room and from floor to floor of our rambling old home. Thus, all day I have had Book-TV--C-Span II--blaring from two strategically placed televisions on each of two floors.

Currently just starting: A broadcast of a program at the Cato Institute back on Aug. 7, featuring Glenn Greenwald, who will speak for 30 minutes, listen to someone else react for 10 minutes, and then react himself for another 5. I'm wondering, which household tasks go best with GG as the background?

What, Do You Think?

[posted by Callimachus]

Glenn Greenwald is miffed because Daniel Drezner called him a pacifist. As if there could be any such coherent ideology behind his outpourings. A whole sack-full of pundits in what is mis-called the liberal wing of American politics can be described most accurately not by what they are, but by what they are against: people from Greenwald to Michael Moore to Cindy Sheehan to Maureen Dowd.

This is more, I think, than simply happening to stand in opposition to the ruling party. Which is why I usually think of them collectively as "antis."

The state of the world makes it easy for them. Default single-superpower American hegemony allows a mere attitude toward the United States and its defining institutions to pass for a world-view that's been thought about for more than 60 consecutive seconds.

The old pacifists of the 19th and early 20th centuries at least had to face a multi-polar militarized world, where disarmament could proceed sanely only through international agreement and institutions. That still didn't stop a dedicated minority of idealists from advocating unilateral disarmament of Britain or America, of course, in the firm faith France, Germany, Russia, and Italy would then see the light and follow. But the complex realities of the case kept most pacifists from going down that path (the saner ones sometimes are called pacificists) and it kept the general public from buying into the argument at all in any large numbers except, tragically, in the 1930s.

Their modern descendants, however, can say, and believe, "the sole cause of problem X in country Y is the United States and its policies. Change the policies, remove the United States from the situation, and the problem naturally will resolve itself." Or not, but in any case the interposition of the United States in country Y is, in their formulation, a greater evil than any which could result from problem X.

So what is Greenwald? He recently wrote, "the U.S. should not attack another country unless that country has attacked or directly threatens our national security ...." Which (leaving aside the Gordian knot of marking the bounds of "national interests") would seem to define him as a "defensist" in the old view. Their motto was Vegetius' Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. Seventy years ago, that meant supporting the maintenance of a military so strong it not only could repel an invasion, it would discourage another power from even attempting one. In the current framing, it would involve an active and vigorous policing of the borders and immigration, and enhanced surveillance and espionage.

None of which sounds like Glenn Greenwald's position (or Molly Ivins' when she lived, or Paul Krugman's, etc.).

Greenwald himself almost makes it explicit: I suspect, if he thought about it, he'd say the playing field is so tilted, so lopsided, there's no point in having a set of rules for everyone. Just enough ropes to tie down Gulliver.

Put simply, there is no reasonable way to compare the use of military force by the U.S. to any other country on the planet. We spend more on our military than every other country combined. We spend six times more on our military than China, the next largest military spender.

It has been difficult for me to find any passage in the vast corpus of Glenn Greenwald that addresses military policies or global politics generally that isn't a sentence complaining of America and its imperialism. This approach to the world goes down a path that ends in saying Iran and North Korea should not be sanctioned for pursuing nuclear weapons because they do so in justified fear of America. Or that terrorism against civilians is explicable, if not justified, because it is the only effective tactical weapon against so mighty a military power as America.

Even if it never goes that far, the attitude fails to take the simple step of turning the thing on its head and asks who but us will keep pirates from the international waters or deliver mass amounts of humanitarian relief in natural disasters, given the unwillingness or inability of most of the rest of the world to field a muscular military. If not this, then what? And is "what" better? And for whom?

But that would be thinking, and thinking takes time away from automatic writing.

His insistence is that America is an "empire" or pursues "imperialist" policies. It is interesting to me how eager he is to apply that word to America but he studiedly avoids it with reference to the historical USSR, writing instead of "Soviet influence." He asks what defining behaviors of past empires we have not shown: How about the core one: "the possession of final authority by one entity over the vital political decisions of another. This need not mean direct rule exercised by formal occupation and administration; most empires involve informal, indirect rule. But real empire requires that effective final authority, and states can enjoy various forms of superiority or even domination over others without being empires."

In fact, he's pretty confused about who his enemies are and what they think.

Ruling the world that way through superior military force -- starting wars even when our national security is not directly at risk -- is the definitional behavior of an empire.

No, it isn't. Those sorts of behaviors are characteristic of two different philosophies: militarism, which sees wars of conquest as means to advance civilization, and what might be called "crusading," which allows that, in some cases, military action against a nation even in the absence of a direct threat can open a path to greater overall freedom and justice and stability in a region or the world.

What he's really "anti" is those two things: militarism and the crusading spirit. For some reason he tangles it all up in imperialism. They are not the same. A distaste for militarism can go hand in hand with, for instance, a fondness for diplomacy, which would be laughable in someone who claims to be exercised primarily over imperialism. If there was a greater aid to imperialism than militarism, it was diplomacy, which allowed the great powers (almost by definition European Christian nations) to carve up the world bloodlessly amid the musical ring of champagne toasts.

Astute (pr. "ass-toot")

[posted by Callimachus]`

Which is richer? A blurb from gasbag Glenn Greenwald praising as "astute" a leftish attack blogger who posts a piece attacking a right-side blogger for writing a sentence that runs on too long.

Or the very first comment, which, from a liberal blogger sitting (as far as I can tell) in the U.S. calls a conservative blogger bound for al Anbar a ... you guessed it: "chickenhawk."

As for the attacked blogger's allegation that the sole point of Democratic legislative tactics with regard to Iraq is, "staining the President's hands with blood and thereby profiting politically from the situation," I suppose it overstates the case, as charged. Certainly staining his own hands is one of Bush's proven capabilities.

But it is not an unreasonable reading, given the lack of a coherent explanation for what else they might be up to. Saying abandoning Iraq will make us safer, but then pulling off the protection of U.S. citizens who report suspicious activities at home; talking of more diplomacy without explaining who you have diplomacy with among terrorists; saying we'll remove ourselves as targets in Iraq but still keep troops in-country to hunt al Qaida without explaining how to do that without being a target.

In the same news cycle you have Barack Obama saying our leaving Iraq likely will spark a bloodbath, but that's not our problem, and John Kerry lying that America's abandonment of the battlefield won't spark a bloodbath, because it didn't in Vietnam.

And all the while the only thing they seem to do in harmony is complain that Bush is just drawing out the decision to end the war so the next president, presumably a Democrat, will have to take the blame for the retreat.

It reminds me of the old "Life" cereal commercial with the kids pushing the bowl back and forth, saying "I'm not gonna eat it." It doesn't necessarily imply they're saying, "you eat it." Because in the end they find a little kid and get him to eat it. Down there in Washington, however, there's only the two parties.

[Obama's off-the-cuff answer also included a perhaps-telling omission: "We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea." As also, incidentally, think those of us who "care" about the U.S. military.]

Protest Too Much

In Is Elusive, Taped Bin Laden Manipulating U.S. Domestic Politics?, Joe Gandelman of "The Moderate Voice" asks, ... well, the title says it. He uses the Basque terrorists of 1970s Spain as an example:

But many analysts inside and outside the Spanish government contended part of ETA's strategy — particularly under the Franco regime — was to cause its statements and acts to get the government to clamp down which would serve several purposes: (1) It would divide the country even more, (2) It would cause the government to perhaps overreact and be branded as represssive, and make new enemies (3) It would accentuate existing political divisions and heighten polarization — thus weakening the central government.

Could that be part of bin Laden's goal here as well?

Anything Osama says in public is calculated to weaken America, whether it's rhetoric to rouse the Arab street, or, as this seems to be, a shiv thrust into the U.S. body politic.

So, Joe and I agree that Osama's tape is meant to harm America. Joe sees Osama playing some kind of insider's game, where he accurately assesses the fault lines and shifting balances between the various domestic positions in the United States and calculates how to surgically intervene, using the domestic press to amplify his attack.

I just don't see any evidence that he's that savvy about us. In fact, in reading bin Laden's pronouncements over the years, I see plenty of evidence that he does not understand us at all. Or rather, he understands us partly and imperfectly. His essential view of America is "decadent, soft, and ruled by Jews." We were supposed to flounder in impotence after 9/11. We were supposed to fail and flee in Afghanistan.

That's not to say Osama's stupid. I suspect George Bush's address to the Arab world is just as puzzling to its audience, and Bush doesn't have the excuse of being stuck in a cave somewhere above Peshawar.

But Osama's cartoonish vision of America suffers from double-distortion. First, he sees through the ideological filter of Islamism. Hitler, Stalin, and the Imperial Japanese made the same mistake, and they all paid for it. Ideological filters historically give a house of mirrors view of America.

The other mistake Osama makes is trying to figure out what is going on in America's head by reading its media. He has no choice. Unlike the ETA, al-Qaida cannot monitor its enemy nation from within. Even if al-Qaida were fluid among us, its ideological rigor and contempt for kafirs would block it from correctly reading the vast stretches of American outside the Beltway. Even Europeans, who know us better than Osama ever can hope to, have a difficult time seeing us.

Osama has to try to play us, and he does try. But he does so by the direct path of encouraging what he sees as a surging anti-Bush, anti-war majority that will weaken the faction in America that is hurting him.

Joe's suggestion that Osama is playing a sophisticated game is based on references to other blog postings. But the sites Joe quotes don't offer any reason to believe Osama has in mind the political strategy they claim. We're arguing with each other more now, but that doesn't mean that's what bin Laden wanted all along. You can't measure his intent simply because the right side has noticed how much Bin Laden's points resemble those of the angry left. Yet that's what the people cited in Joe's post do:

My DD's Scott Shields notes the content of bin Laden's recent tape and how it helped spark a furor over MSNBC's Chris Matthews comparing bin Laden's comments to filmmaker Michael Moore:

When bin Laden cites domestic polling figures or mainstream criticisms of Bush, he's not doing it because he's a fan of Michael Moore or Howard Dean or reads the New York Times, as Matthews and his fellow talking heads Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson insist....He obviously doesn't care about the political affiliation of the people he kills. The reason bin Laden says these things is to create tension among the American electorate. It's a standard tactic of war and it's frustrating to see the media take the bait without question.

Bin Laden's goal is tearing America down. He doesn't care if it takes airplanes crashing into buildings or fomenting a civil war. It's all just means to an end. On this front, it seems that he might be having some success, as evidenced by the rhetoric coming from the right and accepted as conventional wisdom by people like Matthews. I've seen a few commenters question why we are so worked up over Matthews' stupidity. This is why. The narrative that he is pushing is the one bin Laden wants out there.

In other words, in this view, bin Laden wants the right to start pointing fingers at the left...which will infuriate the left...which will cause another reaction from the right. And no one benefits from bitter polarization, even though it might be beneficial in a given election.

I agree that polarized slagging is bad for America, but the rest of this is just nonsense.

Osama doesn't have to be a "fan" of Moore or Dean to note that they agree with him on many points, and many Americans agree with them. One thing he can see, even from a cave, is that tens of thousands of Americans paid money into Michael Moore's pockets, and tens of thousands backed Howard Dean for president.

Some on the left tirelessly trumpet the fact that bin Laden's Islamist social critiques of the liberal West tend to converge with those of American Christian fundamentalists. But he doesn't condemn homosexuality simply to try to break up the West into squabbling factions, does he? Sometimes a fatwa is just a fatwa.

The man has a consistent position. It happens to agree in some matters with positions embraced by assorted folks in the West. But it has the largest terrain of agreement with those who consider Bush a bigger threat to themselves than bin Laden. Why is that surprising? Why does it require some grand conspiracy theory that he's only pretending to agree with people who have arrived at conclusions that favor his goals?

Joe quotes Glen Greenwald of Crooks And Liars:

The Matthews smear illustrates the fact that it has become routine in our national political dialogue, and among our nation's journalists, to equate opposition to George Bush with subversiveness, treason, and support for Al Qaeda....

This tactic of equating Democrats with bin Laden is designed to eliminate dissent and to stigmatize Bush’s opponents as traitors.

First of all, which journalists are those? And don't tell me talk show blowhards are "journalists" just because they're on TV, sitting at desks.

Second, being a dissenter in a time of war against an enemy who wants to destroy your culture puts you in an inconvenient place. You have to accept that your principled stand inevitably aids, or at least comforts, that enemy. It takes a mature mind to confront that hard choice. Just as it takes a mature mind to support a risky war that could go spectacularly wrong and is sure to kill innocent people.

You have to be a dissenter knowing that you'll unwillingly serve something you hate, but you believe it is worthwhile to do this, because the alternative is worse, and you accept the consequences.

Yet an awful lot of people seem to want to skip right past this difficult decision. They seem to want to avoid even discussing it, or being forced to confront it. This is understandable, since such people often are motivated by a quest for a moral purity. And the decision to oppose a mildly religious president who is in a death match with a fanatical religious killer is a highly compromised place to be, if you allow yourself to see it plainly.

To avoid that they strangle interlocutors' voices with nonsense like the chickenhawk meme. Or they attack every questioning as a bid to "eliminate dissent." Some opponents in fact will be traitors. It's not a moral crime to attempt to distinguish honest dissent from wanna-be treason, in fact it's a necessary mental activity as a citizen of a nation at war. Yes, I may question your patriotism, politely, but it's in hopes you'll have an answer for me. If I don't question it, you won't have the chance to explain to me how this works.

Greenwald goes on:

That the GOP has transparently wielded this tactic almost from the moment the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center is reprehensible enough. But it is simply no longer tolerable for the media – which was intended to serve as a Fourth Estate check against government propaganda of this type – to continue to be the primary instrument for the dissemination of this smear.

Joe, a veteran journalist, really ought to be embarrassed to repeat this tripe. The media "was intended to" serve as an independent anti-propaganda force in America? What the hell does he think we are in this business, some Roosevelt-era agency? The media of 1787 was the original political propaganda pump in America, and that's exactly why it was granted protection from official interference.

When I hear that it is "no longer tolerable" for the media to point out something obvious, then I recognize the path to totalitarianism. I'm sort of surprised that Joe lends his imprimatur to this.

There are few things more important than combating this notion, so prevalent among the Chris Matthews of the world, that opposing George Bush is tantamount to supporting Al Qaeda, or relatedly, that it's perfectly acceptable to equate Bush opponents with bin Laden but it is terribly crass - even treasonous - to aggressively criticize the President.

And would one of those "few" more important things be actually defeating bin Laden, bringing a coherent effort to a long war against Islamist terrorism, and placing long-term civilization survival above partisan advantage in the next electoral cycle? Greenwald doesn't say so. I honestly doubt it was in his head at the time he wrote that passage.

This is not a winning tactic for the angry anti-war left: Focus on the little dispute inside the big one. Elevate it to be the main dispute. "You splashed water on me!" "But the house is on fire, and I'm trying to put it out." "No, you splashed water on me, and you did it on purpose!"

Back to Joe:

So if one of bin Laden's intents is indeed to sow and accentuate divisions and bitter polarization within the United States we can assume he's getting reports of what the right and media types such as Matthews are saying and how it's angering those on the left, which causes more anger on the right.

I don't believe bin Laden is a stupid man. But imagining him choosing this over-elaborate tactic in the place of the much more obvious one that also aligns with the text of his recent speech really makes him out to be an incompetent.

Bin Laden sees a White House that is committed to making life difficult (literally) for him and his friends, and a U.S. military that is capable of doing so. Yet he sees, through the lens of the media, that his enemies in the White House rest on a shaky foundation of a population that wrings its hands over the human cost of war, is seething with hatred of Bush, is eager to disengage from the Islamic world, and has the power to topple the present administration.

The ugly truth is, bin Laden does start to make sense to a big chunk of the angry left when he talks like this. Andrew Sullivan found an example at Daily Kos before the comment disappeared, perhaps due to the unwelcomed attention:

"I realized that I empathized and agreed with bin Laden's hatred of Bush and all he stands for. Bush is not America and while Binny may just be baiting us, I would welcome a truce if it included the impeachment of Bush as part of the bargain. You know the state of the nation is bad if it can get me to look at Binny boy in any light other than a fundamentalist wacko mass murderer. But, at this point in time, I honestly feel more disdain for Bush and his administration than I do for bin Laden."

Kos' readership is huge and diverse, and his defenders decry attempts to paint them all with one cherry-picked color. But this poll on the site itself, measures the percent of readers who despise Bush more than Bin Laden at 41 percent.

Such people can help bin Laden. That's as much a fact of war as the image damage from the Abu Ghraib photos. He wants to persuade more of us to think as they do and act as they have acted. They will have to live with this unpleasant fact. As Mennonite conscientious objectors in World War II had to live with the truth that they were doing Hitler a small favor and Hitler would have clapped them in Dachau without a thought. No one said it was easy to make adult choices.

Is it therefore stretching it to conclude that he'll do whatever he can in coming months to inspire more comments from the right and media types, to cause more fingerpointing and to cause more negative reaction and polarization? Wouldn't he want to see the water boil a bit more — especially during an election year?

That's just lame, Joe. "Every time you criticize the anti-war left, the terrorists have already won." Talk about stifling dissent.

Prediction: this will play well with the GOP base but it's going to scare independent voters away from the GOP in droves.

Prediction: independent voters don't give a flick about whether anti-war zealots get their feelings hurt when people notice they talk like bin Laden. We're more interested in actually making progress in getting bin Laden to be either irrelevant or dead.

[Tweaked for clarity, 1/25]