When Mendacity is the Best You've Got

The pallets are starting to overrun the loading dock here; I guess impending Dog Days among other things (early-onset senility?) are to blame.

I have several posts on standby for various reasons, most prominently the need to maintain mainstream life and relations. Several of these theoretical posts relate to vacation follow-up and that "other life" I allude to and hence picture-processing and such, but frankly once back into current events it's tough to do the proper compartmentalizing.

Other pending posts, including one I was immersed in last night, are more in the category of trying to fit Tolstoy into a Harlequin Romance package. (Not that I have a readerly familiarity with either, come to think of it.) Too much vital info to be so crunched and oversimplified. My ideal may not be realizable with my limited talents.

So instead you are getting this, more in accord with my skill-set. And timely and urgent to boot, especially if, like me, you were offended by the disgustingly slap-happy and dishonest "report" by warmongers O'Hanlon and Pollack after their Disneyworld Adventure in Baghdad-on-the-Riviera. I was intrigued that in the self-incriminating media swooning over their idea that "we might win!" no journalist at all from what I could tell remarked on the previously-observed concept that visits like this are often largely stage-managed. In particular I would have thought that any journalist with at least the courage of a mouse would have considered and prominently commented on whether this particular bit of flackery might be worth reflecting in the mirror of Senator McCain's outrageous report from his April visit. (He talked of Happytown after being escorted by an armored battalion with multiple gunships overhead - but we all knew that.)

The military has been from what I can tell increasingly prone to engage in full-out propaganda a la Viet Nam. Lies are basically the routine now. Not that they weren't willing from the start to frag those rogue journalists (rarely from here, obviously) when they strayed into gathering information that was not DOD-sanctioned. But there was a period when, perhaps naively (them and me both), we seemed to get an honest general or higher-up with the courage (and sense!) to disavow the rabid propaganda of such as rumsfeld and cheney. Sadly most of the actual vertebrate senior military types seem to have curiously willfully or not taken retirement. It would sure be nice to hear some candour from them now!

Petraeus seems to be fully kool-aided, err, indoctrinated, as one who both swoons at 43's feet as his paymaster and is totally complicit, given the failure of his prior responsibilities In Country. That was, as I recall. something like training Iraq security forces.

The Horse's Mouth has some fascinating insights on the performance of "our" "media" on this topic:

Here is a list of the big news orgs and network shows -- compiled from here, here, and here -- that lavished coverage on Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack over their now-infamous Op-ed saying that we just might win the war in Iraq:

Pollack:
CBS Evening News
CNN Newsroom
CNN Evening News
CNN Situation Room
MSNBC Tucker
NPR Talk of the Nation
O’Hanlon:
CBS Early Show
CBS Evening News
Fox News Special Report
MSNBC Hardball

O'Hanlon and Pollack:
Fox News Sunday

As noted here yesterday, national security analyst Anthony Cordesman went to Iraq with O'Hanlon and Pollack, and reached a strikingly different conclusion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, where Cordesman works, just told me that they sent out a release about this yesterday morning.

Over 24 hours later, here's a list of the media outlets that have covered it, according to a Google news and Nexis search:
CNN
Agence France Press
UPI

Yep -- one major network.

Really, it's worth stepping back and pondering just how unprofessional and dysfunctional the media's performance has been on this story to date. It starts with The Times's editors, who actually allowed these two to con the paper's readers into forgetting their unflagging support for the invasion and the surge, letting them get away with describing themselves only as war critics. That embarrassing flub then colored virtually all the coverage that followed. Because of it, the big news orgs persuaded themselves that there was something counterintuitive about their conclusion -- and proceeded to report, in one outlet after another, that these war "critics" had suddenly found reason to be hopeful.

Now we have a story that's genuinely counterintuitive -- that is, that a companion of the two went along and reached very different, and far more pessimistic, conclusions about the prospects for success in Iraq. Not only is this counterintuitive, but there's also conflict here, too -- Cordesman flags his disagreement with his esteemed colleagues in the first paragraph of his synopsis. This also puts Cordesman at odds with the White House, which relentlessly flacked O'Hanlon and Pollack's findings. And the media response to Cordesman thus far? Virtual silence.

I'm told that some reporters have inquired about the report, so things may change; I really hope they do. As of now, however, the silence that has greeted Cordesman's far more detailed report -- from the same news orgs that gave exceptionally generous, and outright misleading, coverage to O'Hanlon and Pollack's optimism about Iraq -- stands as a sad, though perhaps fittingly pathetic, postscript to this whole affair.