Immunizing Ourselves Against Spin
There seems to be a very serious risk that indulgence in language like "scathing bipartisan assessment" and cherishing of excellent humor such as this could temporarily blind many to the reality of the makeup of the Iraq Study Group and the actual nature of its reported findings.
Yes, the report does rebut some of the most egregious bits of bush malarkey and sing-songery promulgated over the past few years ("we're winning," "stay the course,""thinks are improving in Iraq," etc.). But it is vital to keep in mind that this group was made up of consummate beltway insiders, covering a political spectrum from somewhere around just right of center to a couple good elephant steps further to the right. All seemingly with a strong motivation to maintain as much of the status quo as possible and at all costs avoid any moves that could engender potential loss of face for the blustering strutting bullies responsible for this human debacle. Loss of face for the guilty warmongers is far more to be feared than, say, a few hundreds or thousands more casualties.
So (1) none of the members apparently was from outside the cult of the Washington beltway, (2) it is a "bipartisan" group only in the most shallow and superficial of senses, and, most importantly, (3) no genuine died-in-the-wool actual opponents of the original concept of attacking Iraq (the country unfortunately famous to the bush insiders for having more "good targets" than Afghanistan) were included.
And, given that multiply-stacked deck, maybe we should be grateful to the ISG for at least temporarily getting some of those damn bushian earworms out of circulation.
What they haven't done, most critically, is to actually take the essential steps necessary to address the principle, common to a majority of Americans these days, that we need to Get Out of Iraq Now. And we cannot afford to let any giddiness over a few tiny setbacks to the bush rhetoric machine, rare, exotic, and welcome as they may be, blind us to that criminal failing.
Glenn Greenwald, in a post at Unclaimed Territory entitled "The principal sin of the Baker-Hamilton Report," provides some refreshingly frank commentary:
Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Steele identifies the most pernicious
aspect of the Baker-Hamilton Report (h/t Zack):
The country's political elite wants to ignore the American people's doubts
and build a new consensus behind a strategy of staying in Iraq on an
open-ended basis, with no exit in sight.
Americans are done with this war. They have given up on it and want it over
with. But the B-H Report has somehow supplanted the views of the vast
majority of American voters as the "mainstream position." The B-H Report
single-handedly cancelled out the results of the last election by
purporting to identify as the "center" a position which is squarely at odds
with the emphatically anti-war views of the American public that is the
real mainstream.
This is what the real centrist, mainstream view is in the United States
regarding the war (via Atrios):
"Americans are overwhelmingly resigned to something less than clear-cut
victory in Iraq and growing numbers doubt the country will achieve a
stable, democratic government no matter how the U.S. gets out, according
to an AP poll. . . .
Seventy-one percent said they would favor a two-year timeline from now
until sometime in 2008, but when people are asked instead about a
six-month timeline for withdrawal that number drops to 60 percent. "
They phrase support for a six-month withdraw plan as "dropping to 60
percent" -- but 60 percent, for the American electorate, constitutes a
decisive and solid majority. It isn't that most Americans have grown
"weary" from the war or that they are "frustrated" and "impatient" because
they like to win. Put simply, they have given up on this war, and favor
withdraw -- now. That just has to be the first, clear premise for every one
of these discussions.
-clip-
There is something profoundly undemocratic about what Establishment
Washington is doing here. As always, they begin from the premise that their
physical presence in Washington and their greater information about the
inner workings of the Beltway bestow upon them not just greater
information, but superior wisdom, elevated judgment (and the fact that they
bear substantial responsibility for what has happened here doesn't seem to
have diluted that abundant self-regard in the slighest).
They now recognize that Americans have given up on the war but they believe
that that view is rash, uninformed, emotional -- "precipitous," to use the
condescending label assigned to that view by the Report. The crazed and
lowly masses need the steady, sober hand of the Washington Establishment --
symbolized by the old Washington relics dragged out to put their stern seal
of approval on the next two years of our occupation (despite the fact that
they were the ones who helped bring about this disaster). And before the
ink was dry on the Report, all of the entrenched propagandists for the
Washington Establishment fell all over themselves praising its great wisdom
and pronouncing it to be the solemn duty of all serious people to endorse
it.
There is something for everyone to love and hate in this Report. That was
necessary to attract the approval stamps of the "bipartisan" members and,
more importantly, to provoke the wrath from "extremists" on both sides --
always the most convincing "proof" for the simple-minded Beltway elite that
they struck the sensible center ("hey, both sides hate it, so we must be
doing something right").
-clip-
And Ivo Daalder, posting at TPMCafe, dubs it "The ISG’s False Hope":
The biggest problem with the ISG report is that it, like much of
Washington, buys into the notion that because the consequences of defeat
are so dire we should not accept the reality that we have lost. Even as
they paint a devastating picture of the disaster that has befallen Iraq,
the commissioners insist that we must continue to try to make things work —
bring neighbors in, train Iraqis, urge reconciliation — in the hope that
the situation there will turn around and get better. But hope, as Colin
Powell was fond of saying, is not a strategy. Worse, it offers Americans
and Iraqis the false prospect that with a bit more effort, and a change in
policy, defeat in Iraq can be avoided.
The most basic flaw in the report is the belief that political
reconciliation is still possible in Iraq. But there is no evidence to
support that belief — and there is plenty of evidence that the opposite is
true. Iraqis are dying at a rate of well over 100 per day — which adds up
to 40-50,000 Iraqi men, women, and children perishing each year. Many times that number are seriously wounded. Those that aren’t killed or maimed areleaving Iraq — currently at a rate of 1 million Iraqis per year. These are numbers that affirm, in ways that no spin can counter, that Iraq is now and has been for quite some time descended into a deadly civil war — a war in which Baghdad, the Iraqi capital city, stands at the bloody center.
-clip-
And Joe Galloway, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, puts it even more bluntly - "Leave Iraq now; don't wait until 2008 election day":
After nearly four years of living in what can be charitably described as a
state of denial, everyone in Washington, from President Bush to the Baker
Commission to incoming defense secretary Robert Gates, to outgoing Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the study group assembled by Marine Gen.
Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has finally admitted
that pretty much nothing is going right in Iraq.
Duh.
Our president, who froze the whole process of planning and fighting a war
by declaring that he was "staying the course" even when the course was
obviously wrong, finally abandoned those words, if not his dogged pursuit
of "victory" in a place which has denied victory to a string of foreign
invaders dating back to Alexander the Great.
The Baker Commission issued its report - which primarily recommended that
we begin talking with Iraq's friends and enemies next door and Iraqi-izing
the war by handing things over to Iraqi forces before we begin pulling out
in time for the 2008 presidential election - on a day when 10 American
troops were killed on the roads of Iraq by improvised explosive devices.
All things considered, it was too little, too late and too long a wait if
you have a son or daughter serving a third or fourth combat tour in Iraq -
something that few, if any, of the above referenced politicians and wise
men have contributed to the war effort.
-clip-
Yes, the report does rebut some of the most egregious bits of bush malarkey and sing-songery promulgated over the past few years ("we're winning," "stay the course,""thinks are improving in Iraq," etc.). But it is vital to keep in mind that this group was made up of consummate beltway insiders, covering a political spectrum from somewhere around just right of center to a couple good elephant steps further to the right. All seemingly with a strong motivation to maintain as much of the status quo as possible and at all costs avoid any moves that could engender potential loss of face for the blustering strutting bullies responsible for this human debacle. Loss of face for the guilty warmongers is far more to be feared than, say, a few hundreds or thousands more casualties.
So (1) none of the members apparently was from outside the cult of the Washington beltway, (2) it is a "bipartisan" group only in the most shallow and superficial of senses, and, most importantly, (3) no genuine died-in-the-wool actual opponents of the original concept of attacking Iraq (the country unfortunately famous to the bush insiders for having more "good targets" than Afghanistan) were included.
And, given that multiply-stacked deck, maybe we should be grateful to the ISG for at least temporarily getting some of those damn bushian earworms out of circulation.
What they haven't done, most critically, is to actually take the essential steps necessary to address the principle, common to a majority of Americans these days, that we need to Get Out of Iraq Now. And we cannot afford to let any giddiness over a few tiny setbacks to the bush rhetoric machine, rare, exotic, and welcome as they may be, blind us to that criminal failing.
Glenn Greenwald, in a post at Unclaimed Territory entitled "The principal sin of the Baker-Hamilton Report," provides some refreshingly frank commentary:
Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Steele identifies the most pernicious
aspect of the Baker-Hamilton Report (h/t Zack):
The country's political elite wants to ignore the American people's doubts
and build a new consensus behind a strategy of staying in Iraq on an
open-ended basis, with no exit in sight.
Americans are done with this war. They have given up on it and want it over
with. But the B-H Report has somehow supplanted the views of the vast
majority of American voters as the "mainstream position." The B-H Report
single-handedly cancelled out the results of the last election by
purporting to identify as the "center" a position which is squarely at odds
with the emphatically anti-war views of the American public that is the
real mainstream.
This is what the real centrist, mainstream view is in the United States
regarding the war (via Atrios):
"Americans are overwhelmingly resigned to something less than clear-cut
victory in Iraq and growing numbers doubt the country will achieve a
stable, democratic government no matter how the U.S. gets out, according
to an AP poll. . . .
Seventy-one percent said they would favor a two-year timeline from now
until sometime in 2008, but when people are asked instead about a
six-month timeline for withdrawal that number drops to 60 percent. "
They phrase support for a six-month withdraw plan as "dropping to 60
percent" -- but 60 percent, for the American electorate, constitutes a
decisive and solid majority. It isn't that most Americans have grown
"weary" from the war or that they are "frustrated" and "impatient" because
they like to win. Put simply, they have given up on this war, and favor
withdraw -- now. That just has to be the first, clear premise for every one
of these discussions.
-clip-
There is something profoundly undemocratic about what Establishment
Washington is doing here. As always, they begin from the premise that their
physical presence in Washington and their greater information about the
inner workings of the Beltway bestow upon them not just greater
information, but superior wisdom, elevated judgment (and the fact that they
bear substantial responsibility for what has happened here doesn't seem to
have diluted that abundant self-regard in the slighest).
They now recognize that Americans have given up on the war but they believe
that that view is rash, uninformed, emotional -- "precipitous," to use the
condescending label assigned to that view by the Report. The crazed and
lowly masses need the steady, sober hand of the Washington Establishment --
symbolized by the old Washington relics dragged out to put their stern seal
of approval on the next two years of our occupation (despite the fact that
they were the ones who helped bring about this disaster). And before the
ink was dry on the Report, all of the entrenched propagandists for the
Washington Establishment fell all over themselves praising its great wisdom
and pronouncing it to be the solemn duty of all serious people to endorse
it.
There is something for everyone to love and hate in this Report. That was
necessary to attract the approval stamps of the "bipartisan" members and,
more importantly, to provoke the wrath from "extremists" on both sides --
always the most convincing "proof" for the simple-minded Beltway elite that
they struck the sensible center ("hey, both sides hate it, so we must be
doing something right").
-clip-
And Ivo Daalder, posting at TPMCafe, dubs it "The ISG’s False Hope":
The biggest problem with the ISG report is that it, like much of
Washington, buys into the notion that because the consequences of defeat
are so dire we should not accept the reality that we have lost. Even as
they paint a devastating picture of the disaster that has befallen Iraq,
the commissioners insist that we must continue to try to make things work —
bring neighbors in, train Iraqis, urge reconciliation — in the hope that
the situation there will turn around and get better. But hope, as Colin
Powell was fond of saying, is not a strategy. Worse, it offers Americans
and Iraqis the false prospect that with a bit more effort, and a change in
policy, defeat in Iraq can be avoided.
The most basic flaw in the report is the belief that political
reconciliation is still possible in Iraq. But there is no evidence to
support that belief — and there is plenty of evidence that the opposite is
true. Iraqis are dying at a rate of well over 100 per day — which adds up
to 40-50,000 Iraqi men, women, and children perishing each year. Many times that number are seriously wounded. Those that aren’t killed or maimed areleaving Iraq — currently at a rate of 1 million Iraqis per year. These are numbers that affirm, in ways that no spin can counter, that Iraq is now and has been for quite some time descended into a deadly civil war — a war in which Baghdad, the Iraqi capital city, stands at the bloody center.
-clip-
And Joe Galloway, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, puts it even more bluntly - "Leave Iraq now; don't wait until 2008 election day":
After nearly four years of living in what can be charitably described as a
state of denial, everyone in Washington, from President Bush to the Baker
Commission to incoming defense secretary Robert Gates, to outgoing Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the study group assembled by Marine Gen.
Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has finally admitted
that pretty much nothing is going right in Iraq.
Duh.
Our president, who froze the whole process of planning and fighting a war
by declaring that he was "staying the course" even when the course was
obviously wrong, finally abandoned those words, if not his dogged pursuit
of "victory" in a place which has denied victory to a string of foreign
invaders dating back to Alexander the Great.
The Baker Commission issued its report - which primarily recommended that
we begin talking with Iraq's friends and enemies next door and Iraqi-izing
the war by handing things over to Iraqi forces before we begin pulling out
in time for the 2008 presidential election - on a day when 10 American
troops were killed on the roads of Iraq by improvised explosive devices.
All things considered, it was too little, too late and too long a wait if
you have a son or daughter serving a third or fourth combat tour in Iraq -
something that few, if any, of the above referenced politicians and wise
men have contributed to the war effort.
-clip-
posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:55 AM
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