If Only We'd Consulted Madison Avenue Sooner

According to yesterday’s Post, the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid Rand Corp. $400,000 to study the “brand failure” of the U.S. presence in Iraq. The study was titled “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation,” and its gist, as the Post sums it up, is that the “key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves ‘shaping’ both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a brand identity that places what you are selling in a positive light.”

The rest of the study is chock-full of helpful, cutting-edge military-marketing research.

For instance:

Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the “force” brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies' competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been “We will help you.” That is what President Bush's new Iraq strategy is striving for as it focuses on establishing a protective U.S. troop presence in Baghdad neighborhoods, training Iraq's security forces, and encouraging the central and local governments to take the lead in making things better.

Also:

In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces. They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English. Cultural connections -- seeking out the local head man when entering a neighborhood, looking someone in the eye when offering a friendly wave -- are key.

Furthermore:

Wal-Mart's desired identity as a friendly shop where working-class customers can feel comfortable and find good value, for example, would be undercut if telephone operators and sales personnel had rude attitudes, or if the stores offered too much high-end merchandise. For the U.S. military and U.S. officials, understanding the target customer culture is equally critical.

Wait – this is a lot of information to process, so I want to make sure I’m receiving it correctly. This study is telling us that, when the U.S. occupies a foreign country, it would be more helpful to project a helpful image than a threatening one? And that killing civilians will make other civilians less likely to help our forces?

Jesus. I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.

If your blood pressure doubled while reading these excerpts, I don’t blame you. It’s truly infuriating to think that, as 20-year-olds are getting blown up daily in Iraq, this is the level of sophistication at which their superiors are operating.

Also posted at Campus Progress.

The Bush Years: The Relaunch

On April 26, 2007, I wrote:

"I'm in DC and will be posting sparsely for the next few days. Upon my return early next week, I will resume my heroic schedule of up to five posts per week."

This, uh, didn't happen. Since then I've taken a job as an associate editor at Campus Progress, and I blog regularly here. I haven't forgotten The Bush Years, however; it's time to get back on this crazy train. I'll be mirroring all my CP blog posts here and will probably be writing some TBY-exclusive posts as well. So stay tuned.

The Bush Years: The DC Days

I'm in DC and will be posting sparsely for the next few days. Upon my return early next week, I will resume my heroic schedule of up to five posts per week.

Where's The Outrage?

It came out last week, but everyone should read this McClatchy article. The news about our government, as usual, is bad:

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Voter fraud is a very important issue for Republican Party's political masterminds. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't exist at anywhere near the scale that would elevate it to a crisis, so from time to time they have to fudge the numbers (subs. req.) a bit.

And yet there's still a dearth of real outrage. Sure, Bush's poll numbers are low, but that's passive -- a "when I have time to think about politics, it makes me mad" sort of outrage. Given what we now know about the Bush administration and what can no longer be caricatured as liberal madness (which is was for years and years) but has instead taken its place as fact -- everything from Iraq to Katrina to spying to the more recent U.S. attorneys scandal and the politicization of the GSA -- why does it still feel like most people don't fully understand the impact their leaders can have on them and the country?

Maliki Knocks Down Walls (Not Physically)

The AP is reporting that Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki's reaction to the planned wall around Adhamiya (or Azamiya; it appears there are two spellings) is, well, just like everyone else's:

"I oppose the building of the wall and its construction will stop," al-Maliki said during a joint news conference with the secretary-general of the Arab League. "There are other methods to protect neighborhoods, but I should point out that the goal was not to separate, but to protect."

He also noted that "this wall reminds us of other walls that we reject." Of course it does. It's the same concept.

Horrific Sectarian Violence And 12-Foot Walls: A Recipe For Peace?

The BBC and others are reporting that U.S. troops in Baghdad are in the process of building a wall around Adhamiya, a troublesome Sunni district:

Adhamiya lies on the mainly Shia Muslim east bank of the Tigris river and violence regularly flares between the enclave and nearby Shia areas.

Construction of the 5km (three-mile) concrete wall began on 10 April and the US military says it hopes to complete the project by the end of the month.

US troops, protected by heavily-armed vehicles, have been working at night to build the 3.6m (12 ft) wall.

When it is finished, people will enter and leave Adhamiya through a small number of checkpoints guarded by US and Iraqi forces.

Mustafa, a resident of Adhamiya, told the BBC, "I resent the barrier. It will make Adhamiya a big prison."

Mustafa obviously won't be the only unhappy one. The average Arab -- and this really must be a cultural thing, because I don't understand it at all -- doesn't like having to go through checkpoints run by an occuppying power to leave his or her neighborhood. People are so strange in that part of the world.

The article also notes that "[t]he US military says the barrier is the centrepiece of its strategy to end sectarian violence in the area but insists there are no plans to divide up the whole city into gated communities."

My question is this: Where to go from here? Because the plan, if I'm reading it right, goes as follows:

1. Build walls to separate two ethnic groups that are slaughtering one another.
2. ???
3. The warring ethnic groups war no more.

Number 3 would be a lovely conclusion to the war and also rhymes nicely, so I've been wracking my brain in an attempt to fill in the middle step. Unfortunately, I'm coming up completely empty. Any ideas?

Hopefully the tacticians in the Pentagon and Baghdad are smarter than I.

Yeah, The Kid Who Graduated College At 19 Has Maturity Issues

From a Boston Globe piece on Amobi Okoye, a recent graduate of the University of Louisville who next Sunday will become the youngest person ever selected in the NFL draft:

Okoye skipped two grades in school, started high school as a 12-year-old, and arrived on the Louisville campus at 16. He graduated with a degree in psychology in 3 1/2 years. As a 19-year-old senior last season, Okoye was second on the Cardinals in sacks (8) and tackles for loss (15), and fourth in tackles (55). Louisville defensive coordinator Mike Cassity said Okoye took the leap his senior season from solid player to impact player. It's that potential for growth that has NFL scouts drooling.

But oh no, there's a catch!

Okoye is still growing, on and off the field. Scouts project he could be as tall as 6-4, and while he played at 295 pounds last season, he was 312 as a junior and 305 as a sophomore. The biggest question about Okoye is maturity. Red flags were raised earlier this week when Pro Football Weekly reported Okoye was one of three players who admitted in one-on-one interviews at the combine that they had used marijuana. The others were Georgia Tech wide receiver Calvin Johnson and Clemson defensive end Gaines Adams. The interviews are supposed to be confidential and for the eyes of NFL teams only.

How many more years of this sort of idiocy do we have to endure? And do we really need our sportswriters helping to propagate it? I understand that Christopher L. Gasper (the author) wants to cover his bases, but Okoye's admission is about as relevant to the question of his maturity as would be the discovery that he sometimes fought with siblings when he was 12.

(ESPN.com recently ran an AP story on Okoye that is also worth reading, even if you're not interested in football. He seems like a remarkable kid.)

Using Incompetence Competently: A Primer

I can't help but feel a little bad for Alberto Gonzales. Five hours before a pissed-off Senate Judiciary Committee wouldn't be fun for anyone. It was odd to hear him helplessly fumble his way through so many answers, given that he had supposedly been preparing for weeks.

Of course, we still aren't getting the full story. We still don't know who was responsible for the list of U.S. attorneys to fire, what the list-making process entailed, or why exactly the prosecutors were fired. And the fact that neither Gonzales nor Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff, has given a straight, coherent answer certainly lends itself to the already plausible theory that the idea came from within the White House.

This seems all the more likely when you trace the finger-pointing. Gonzales claimed today that he had "limited involvement" in the task of figuring out who to fire, and largely delegated it to Sampson. Sampson, in his testimony before the same committee a few weeks ago, acknowledged that he "was responsible for organizing and managing the process by which certain U.S. attorneys were asked to resign." This led to an entertaining-slash-infuriating between Sampson and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI):

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: [D]id you keep one file where you kept information related to this project?

MR. SAMPSON: [J]ust as, sort of, a drop file in my lower right hand desk drawer.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: Did somebody else keep it for you?

MR. SAMPSON: No. There really was no file. There really was no documentation of this. It was an aggregation of views and various lists and notes at different points in time. As the process finalized in the fall of 2006, it became a little more formalized, but only in the sense that we were working in the senior leadership of the department to finalize the list.

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: So this was a project you were in charge of, this was a project that lasted for two years, this was a project that would end the careers of eight United States Attorneys, and neither you nor anybody reporting to you kept a specific file in your office about it?

MR. SAMPSON: Senator, I didn't keep a specific file on this issue.

You know, I would just toss stuff in there -- it wasn't like I was doing anything complicated, like analyzing the prosecution records of U.S. attorneys. When I had a chance, I'd jot a note on a napkin and drop it in the drawer. I kept Skittles in there, too!

So if Gonzales claims that this project was mostly Sampson's job, but Sampson didn't really seem to be, you know, doing that job in a meaningful way, then it certainly stands to reason, giving what we know so far about this scandal and about this administration's tendency to consolidate power, that Gonzales and Sampson may have been taking their orders from on high. In other words, the reason they weren't diligently reviewing the U.S. attorneys' records was because they weren't really the ones making the final decisions.

The immediate consensus from everyone who watched the proceedings today was that Gonzales did very poorly and that he has managed to further diminish his reputation. Well, not everyone:

President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General's testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators' questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses. The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.

That's a press release from the White House. Good to know that Gonzales "again" cleared this up. How many times does he have to do that before those annoying Democrats (and Republicans -- props to Messrs. Specter and Coburn [EDIT: the Times just posted a story about this here]) understand that there was nothing untoward in the extremely irregular, almost completely undocumented firings of several well-qualified, highly regarded U.S. attorneys?

What I love is that this is now the second time (at least) that a widespread acknowledgment of incompetence is the best the administration can hope for. That is to say, the best-case scenario for Bush and Rove is that everyone nods and agrees Gonzales and Sampson are terrible at their jobs. There's a parallel between how Gonzales is handling this scandal (or being asked to handle it) and how the administration dealt with the WMD fiasco. In both cases, the guilty parties came at their inquisitors with an aw-shucks, shrugging attitude: "Ugh. I can't believe we handled this in such a silly way! Well, you live and learn." If the focus is not on the possible motives but on the sloppiness of the administration, then the absolute worst that can happen in that certain people lose their jobs. No one will ever figure out who is really pulling the strings, why, and the radical means they're pursuing to fulfill their ends. That's why it makes infinitely more sense for Gonzales to sit up there and take his punishment, for he and Sampson to hem and haw and confuse even themselves, than it does for them to come clean. Looking incompetent is part of the ploy itself.

Hell, you can even add Abu Ghraib to the list of scandals to which this tactic applies. There, it was stupid, careless, angry soldiers inflicting torture. They were the problem, not the government's policy on detainee treatment itself. And what became of that policy? Sure, it was discussed in angry voices by legislators. But was it ever really reformed?

Fall guys left and right.

PS - I forgot to mention this, but it's pretty important: Arlen Specter sounds a lot like Admiral Ackbar.

"IT'S A TRAP!"

Ridiculously Offensive Conservative Punditry Meme #5132: It Was The Va. Tech Victims' Fault

"How the hell do 25 students allow themselves to be lined up against the wall in a classroom and picked off one by one? How does that happen, when they could have rushed the gunman, the shooter, and most of them would have survived?" - Neal Boortz

"How could there be only one shooter--who was able to go a half mile away to commit a second set of shootings? Were there two and was this a coordinated terrorist attack?
...
Why am I speculating that the 'Asian' gunman is a Pakistani Muslim? Because law enforcement and the media strangely won't tell us more specifically who the gunman is. Why?

Even if it does not turn out that the shooter is Muslim, this is a demonstration to Muslim jihadists all over that it is extremely easy to shoot and kill multiple American college students." - Debbie Schlussel

"Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake -- one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad." - John Derbyshire

"There's no polite way or time to say it: American colleges and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregated dorms, politically correct academic departments and designated 'safe spaces' to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions -- while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University's anti-Minuteman Project protesters).

Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.

And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense." - Michelle Malkin

"The Virginia Tech killer was Korean, not American. I haven't seen any anti-Korean stuff around. I haven't seen much condemnation of the Muslim world either, which is where unbelievable violence takes place every day. No, it's the USA that's bad. And much of this anti-American stuff comes from within.

The anti gun crowd has hopped up today. Elements at NBC News, The New York Times, Rosie O'Donnell, the British press all screaming about how terrible the Second Amendment is." - Bill O'Reilly

"First it was Johnny Muhammad, now it was Cho Sueng Hui aka Ismail Ax. Precisely how many mass shooters have to turn out to have adopted Muslim names before we get it? Islam has become the tribe of choice of those who hate American society. I'm not talking about people who grew up as Muslims, confident and secure in their faith, good fathers, sons and neighbors. I'm talking about the angry, malignant, narcissist loners who want to reject their community utterly, to throw off their 'slave name' and represent the downtrodden of the earth by shooting their friends and neighbors." - Jerry Bowyer

Which quote is your favorite and why? I'm having a tough time with this. My first inclination was to go with Bowyer, who decides to play the Muslim card, an interesting choice given the lack of evidence connecting Cho Sueng Hui to any sort of grand, globe-spanning Islamofascist conspiracy. John Derbyshire also makes a strong case for the top prize. (And he lets us know that he fires guns all the time.) O'Reilly's offering is tempting too, because it's so very O'Reilly -- it comes from a world in which The New York Times, the British press, and Rosie O'Donnell all have an equally powerful and pernicious anti-American agenda. Unfortunately, O'Reilly quickly dropped out of contention by proferring a halfway sane opinion on gun control mere seconds after unmasking Rosie.

There are a lot of worthy contenders, but I am going to have to go with the inimitable Michelle Malkin. She manages somehow to combine several common conservative complaints into a veritable soufflé of outrage at the liberal culture that prevented these unarmed students from properly defending themselves. In connecting political correctness and speech codes to the coddling of youth to academia's liberal bias to intellectual passivity to physical passivity, Malkin competes in an all-night dance marathon against logic and leaves the poor lad panting against the wall.

So I'm forced to say her comment is my favorite. What do you think?

(H/T to Media Matters for compiling some of these gems.)

The "War On Terror": Rickety And Useless

On Monday, British international development secretary Hillary Benn [CORRECTION: see below] gave a speech in New York in which he made a convincing argument against the phrase "war on terror":

In the UK, we do not use the phrase "war on terror" because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives.

It is the vast majority of the people in the world - of all nationalities and faiths - against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger.

What these groups want is to force their individual and narrow values on others, without dialogue, without debate, through violence. And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength.

Benn is right: The war on terror formulation serves the PR purposes of a thousand different militant groups and is a strategic blunder of epic proportions. Reading Benn's comments, I was reminded of what happened when I called in to an awful right-wing talk show somewhere in central New Jersey. The guest was promoting some DVD and book about the global jihadist conspiracy and the danger it posed to us civilized Westerners. The phrase "Islamofascism" came up, and I couldn't help myself. I dialed the number, told the producer what I wanted to talk about, and waited. I got on relatively quickly, and the conversation went something like this:

HOST: "Jesse, welcome to the show."

ME: "Thanks. I just wanted to disagree with your use of the term 'Islamofascism.' I feel like it's a mistake to lump all these groups together. When you look at Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah -- they all have different goals and were formed for different reasons. Many of them aren't really about fundamentalist Islam, and it makes things more difficult when we sweep them all into the same category."

HOST: "Whoa. Jesse, Jesse. You do realize they are trying to kill you, right?"

That was it. Since I disagreed with the manner in which terrorism was being debated, I clearly didn't understand that there existed, somewhere, people who wanted to kill me. I've seen this happen a thousand times on a thousand different shows -- anyone who doesn't toe the absolutist line is told they are either naive or a traitor. If you don't admit that we are in a battle for our very existence, that our enemy is absolutely evil and we are almost absolutely good, and that the enemy hates us because of our way of life (an intentionally loose term that can be filled in on the fly -- they hate us because we vote, they hate us because we let our women wear bikinis), then you are part of the problem.

The war on terror is an intellectual framework that, thanks to its broadness, answers several tough questions in advance: Who are we fighting? Whomever terrorizes us. Whose fault is terrorism? Theirs, obviously; we're the ones fighting terrorism. When have we won? When there are no longer groups committing terrorist acts. It's unfortunate that these questions were neutered so shortly after 9/11. It would be nice to, you know, debate them.

It would also help us focus our efforts. It's tactically insane to treat Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian government as parts of the same undifferentiated mass. This lack of precision, this inability to comprehend nuance, comes from the war on terror model, which postulates that the cause of terrorism is evil itself. Evil, of course, isn't reductive and can't be bargained with, so it's not worth sitting down with any of these groups.

The most tragic result of the war on terror's rickety facade has been Iraq. Imagine if, after 9/11, the administration had described the conflict in more accurate terms. Imagine if all of the cable news networks that ceaselessly flashed idiotic electrified logos touting THE WAR ON TERROR as the fall's hottest new product had instead had the temerity to question the formulation the American government presented its people. Would the Iraq war have happened if we were fighting something less vague than "terror" itself? If the proper people had questioned President Bush, had asked him, "How can you possibly link a nationalist, secular tyrant leader like Saddam Hussein to a radical pan-Islamist like Bin Laden?"? But it wasn't important enough. Terms like "Sunni" and "Shiite" and "pan-Islamist" weren't yet en vogue, because we weren't fighting anything that specific; we were fighting terror.

"Neoconservative" is used far too often, too loosely, and in too conspiratorial a manner, but the fact of the matter is that the neoconservatives -- Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, just to name a few -- were and are largely responsible for the war on terror and its stark, epic imagery. The BBC ran an excellent critique of the neoconservatives' role in designing the war on terror in "The Power of Nightmares," a three-part documentary that aired a few years ago and which can be watched on Google Video. It's very effective at explaining the neoconservative infatuation with big, evil, Enemies to End All Enemies. For a while, the Soviets served this role, then no one, then, after 9/11, the Islamofascists. The people who have been most influential in leading us to war in Iraq see America's destiny as nothing less (or more complicated) than fighting evil, and have never let the nuances of reality interfere with this messianic vision.

It's 2007 and we are still unable to have a mature, intelligent discussion about terrorism. I hope an American politician or two will take a cue from Hillary Benn and start to deconstruct the war on terror, which has gotten us nowhere.

(Almost forgot: I would be remiss if I failed to mention James Fallows's excellent Atlantic piece from last fall, "Declaring Victory," which expertly explains what's wrong with the U.S. approach to fighting terrorism.)

[CORRECTION: I originally had the international development secretary's last name as Bunn, not Benn, throughout the post.]

The Bush Years: An Ambiguous Introduction

I've resisted starting a blog for a long time. My previous attempt, Stem The Tide, didn't last that long and wasn't very good. But I reached a point where I realized that, as someone who wants to somehow make a career out of writing about politics, a blog is a necessity. I need a place where I can force myself to regularly respond to what's going on, feel out out my positions on certain issues, and figure out what works and doesn't work vis-à-vis my style of writing and commentary.

I don't have a very clear idea of what this blog will be, but I do know what it won't be. It won't be the place to go for breaking news (my goal for the moment is four-to-five posts per week). It won't be the place to learn about the inner workings of the Senate Select Subcommittee on __________. It won't be insidery. It won't react quickly to the finer points of Bill X mere minutes after Bill X is introduced. It won't explain why Obama could have trouble with exurban Reagan Democrat soccer moms with two or more kids.

That is to say, I don't think I'm in a position to dig deep, to muckrake or provide the kind of analysis the pros do. What I am in a position to do is try to figure out how politics works on a larger level. I'm most fascinated by the divide between how the world is presented to us by politicians and how it exists in reality. This divide has gotten progressively starker since 9/11 and is the reason it is such a fascinating, terrifying time in American political life. Nothing is more important than the impact politicians have on how we view the world, and this impact arises from buzzwords, from myths repeated until they become fact, and from the marriage of political expedience to our psychological and sociological needs.

Americans, in short, are being manipulated. This is neither unique nor new; every government manipulates its people. What is new is the culture of manipulation and how loud it has gotten. No free country has as broken a political discourse as the United States, because no free country comes so close to treating its political discourse like a circus or a competitive sport. Blogging has improved things in some regards, but it has also paved the way for millions of more blowhards in a country that has had no shortage of blowhards since the advent of AM radio.

None of this really answers the question at hand. So here's an answer, sort of: I'm not sure exactly what this blog will be about. I guess we'll see.

Why I'm Looking Forward To The Freak Show

It's been covered heavily but is worth a brief recap: Last month, John McCain, sitting with reporters on the "Straight Talk Express" and already wrangling with the oh-so-difficult issue of whether U.S. taxpayer money should fund contraception efforts to combat AIDS in Africa, was broadsided with a nasty trick question that would leave even the most intelligent, quick-on-his-feet politician reeling.

Well, not really:

Q: "So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?"

Yes, it's 2007, and yes, a presidential candidate was asked that. McCain's awkward, waffling response became one of the early highlights of the '08 race:

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) "You've stumped me."
Q: "I mean, I think you'd probably agree it probably does help stop it?"
Mr. McCain: (Laughs) "Are we on the Straight Talk express? I'm not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I'm sure I've taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I'm sure I'm opposed to government spending on it, I'm sure I support the president's policies on it."
Q: "But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: 'No, we're not going to distribute them,' knowing that?"
Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) "Get me Coburn's thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn's paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I've never gotten into these issues before."

John McCain has been a senator for 20 years and has never come across the issue of AIDS prevention. Interesting. This bizarre exchange, in which McCain had to tread very carefully so as not to fully acknowledge reality, is precisely why I am so excited for the GOP primaries.

Likely GOP primary voters are a hardened bunch by now. They've witnessed a term and a half of one of the most incompetent, poorly run administrations in history and have decided they want more. Republicans love to trot out the term "mainstream America" and juxtapose it with Democrats. So you can understand how thrilled I am that the Republican presidential candidates must now rely on a voting bloc that is, well, out of touch with mainstream America. As the Times puts it in an article explaining why McCain has little choice but to continue vehemently defending the war:

Republican primary voters, unlike the rest of the nation, appear to remain supportive of the president and the war, and the generals on the ground are asking for public patience in pursuing the new policy of pouring more troops into Iraq. Backing away from the White House and the war now could prove problematic for any candidate seeking the Republican nomination even if it could prove helpful in the general election.

So anyone who wants to come out of the weak GOP field has to appeal to voters whose views are markedly different from those of the general population. McCain is the most interesting candidate to watch because he has the most to prove to the core faithful. He has had the "moderate" label clinging to him for years, which has helped his career, but now it's an albatross and he doesn't have much time to shed it. (Romney and Giuliani have some similar problems regarding their stances on social issues, of course, but neither has been a longtime enemy of the right wing of the Republican party, as McCain has.)

The entertainment will come from watching McCain and co. walk the tightrope. On the one hand, they need to reach out to people who for the most part don't believe in the effectiveness of condoms, the truth of evolution, or that Iraq was an ill-conceived or poorly executed war; on the other hand, they can't say anything so abjectly stupid that the country as a whole takes note.

As for the candidate who's able to successfully traverse the primaries and get the nod, he could be in trouble. It's going to be very hard to attract enough of the GOP base to win the primary without a message that will cause most of the country to blanch. That's why Giuliani is in the best shape. The fact that he's held up as a "homeland security candidate" is baffling given that his incompetence made 9/11 worse, but this gives him almost infinite leeway on issues that could trip up McCain or Romney.

Likely GOP primary voters are steadfast in their convictions. Giuliani, they (and the remarkably lazy mainstream media) have decided, is a hero, the father figure best able to protect us from Evil in a post-Bush world. Unless Romney can convince evangelicals that he is one of them despite his Mormonism, the religious right will be looking at a race devoid of an outwardly devout, Bush-like candidate with a chance at succeeding. So, given the hard-right obsession with terrorism, with apocalyptic battles and American pride, why not Rudy?

Giuliani would have far and away the best shot of any Republican in the general election, so hopefully I'm wrong. But regardless of who gets the nod, I look forward to the freak show.

Richard Perle Still Doesn't Get It

In Foreign Policy's latest Seven Questions, the magazine interviews neoconservative mastermind Richard Perle. Perle, of course, takes what is now a very common position amongst those who pushed hardest for war -- good war, bad execution. Neither a convincing opinion nor a surprising one. Where his logic really starts to eat itself is in his contention that, if Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as a terror magnet, this is a good thing:

FP: Francis Fukuyama wrote in the New York Times last year that "Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists." Do you agree?

RP: I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but it's an improvement if it is. Let me explain: Afghanistan was certainly a magnet, and jihadists traveled there from wherever they originated. They were welcomed there, they were trained there, and they worked under very favorable circumstances, with lines of communication and the ability to plan and organize. Now, the jihadists who have flocked to Iraq are themselves in constant danger, large numbers of them are killed, and they're certainly not in a position to plan operations against American territory. So if you ask me whether we are safer with jihadists converging on Baghdad or jihadists converging on camps in Afghanistan and planning events like 9/11, there's no doubt that we're a lot safer because they're converging on Baghdad.

Now, it's important to remember that he's responding to a hypothetical, and one he isn't sure he agrees with. Nonetheless, the content of his answer is very telling and reflects some of the biggest misconceptions about Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror. Since Perle's reasoning is faulty on almost every level, I'll just focus on the three facts that most undermine it.

1) The Iraq war made -- and is making -- more terrorists. Perle seems to be implying that there is a set number of terrorists. So, since we've been able to divert some of them from Afghanistan, a welcoming environment, to Iraq, where much of the population dislikes foreign fighters, we're winning. Things don't work this way. The Iraq war, as the U.S. government's own intelligence reports have shown, has radicalized much of the Muslim world, and has drawn in many young men who would otherwise have had little interest in jihadism. So it's not a choice, as Perle is arguing, between having terrorists in Iraq or having terrorists in Afghanistan. We have both, and thanks to the war jihadism is spreading far faster than it would have otherwise.

2) Afghanistan does provide a more welcoming operational environment for Al Qaeda, but we're losing there as well. Things have gotten so bad in Afghanistan and Waziristan, Pakistan's lawless northwest frontier, that even the mainstream media have picked up on it. In recent months, both Newsweek and Time have run stories about the failure of the U.S. and NATO to make permanent progress against Al Qaeda and the Taliban there. Al Qaeda's command hierarchy was largely smashed after the Taliban was ousted, but, now that the organization is starting to rebuild with little interference from the West, it's likely that the next large-scale attack will be hatched in Afghanistan or Waziristan. Of course, one of the reasons we've been unable to lock things down on this front (apart from the region's massive, treacherous geography, our inability to understand the culture there, and the difficulty in rooting out an enemy that can bleed into local populations) is -- you guessed it -- that we're devoting far more resources to Iraq. And, as everybody now knows, Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.

3) There aren't that many foreign jihadists in Iraq. For Bush, Perle, and the others who have framed this war as part of an existential struggle against Terror or Islamofascism (one of the most ill-conceived buzzwords in recent memory, and worth its own post), nothing is more important than pushing the idea that the carnage in Iraq is the result of meddlesome foreign influences and wave after wave of Al Qaeda members sweeping in to set up shop and launch a series of massive, devastating attacks against the U.S. If, instead, it's mostly just Iraqis killing Iraqis and Iraqis killing U.S. troops and vice-versa, then a) this really can't be logically tied to the war on terror, since none of the parties involved attacked us prior to March 2003, and b) there's a strong argument to be made that the war was unwinnable, that the forces unleashed by the post-Saddam power vacuum were too powerful to be contained by a U.S. effort of a politically or economically feasible scale. So it's unfortunate for Bush and Perle's rhetoric that such a small fraction of Iraq's violence comes from outside Iraq. The Brookings Institution estimates (PDF, see page 22) that as of last November there were a grand total of between 800 and 2,000 foreign fighters in Iraq -- an almost negligible fraction of the insurgency. The majority of the fighting in Iraq is either between Iraqis or between Iraqis and U.S. troops. Foreign fighters simply don't have the support of most native Iraqis, would be hard-pressed to establish any kind of permanent presence in the country, and have not stormed Iraq's borders on a scale that would support Perle's reasoning. It's a very convenient fiction, however.

So why is Perle making these claims? Did he not do his homework, or is he being disingenuous and trying like so many other pro-war types to salvage whatever he can from a huge, smoking pile of rubble? I'm really not sure. But his comments are yet another reminder that the people at the helm in the post-9/11 world either don't understand the way terrorism works, or don't care enough to learn.

Why Blogging Won't Replace Journalism

Last Friday's TNR Online featured a piece by Carolyn O'Hara, an assistant editor at Foreign Policy, that quickly generated controversy. O'Hara talked about Josh Marshall's attempt to solicit TPM readers as researchers in the wake of U.S. attorney scandal document dump. "In a few scant hours," she wrote, "this merry band of citizen-muckrakers produced enough commentary, most of it barely decipherable, to rival the document dump they were fervently scrutinizing." She went on to criticize the idea, popularized by Jay Rosen and others, of "ordinary Joes, toiling for free to dig for the stories that the mainstream press can't or won't touch."

TNR's commenters tend to be feisty, and their reaction was swift and furious. "If Jon Chait wonders why TNR is rather distrusted in the blogosphere," opined one of them, "look no further than columns like this, which serve to tear it down." Another called O'Hara an "imbecile." Most telling, however, was this observation: "Sometimes, I get the feeling I'm watching monks and the Church right after the printing press was invented." That is, now that the Pandora's Box of blogging has been opened, traditional media outlets, both large and small, are screwed.

Many of the comments seemed to be informed by the battles that have gone on between TNR and sites like Daily Kos and Atrios. Simply put, there's little love lost between TNR and certain parts of the liberal blogosphere. TNR sees a good chunk of Kos and Atrios readers as fringe, reactionary left-wingers (or at least writes about them in a manner that would suggest this), while many liberal bloggers, still infuriated over TNR's support of the war and not huge fans of Marty Peretz, see the magazine as a mouthpiece of the neoconservative movement. (For what it's worth, I think many progressives underestimate TNR's independence, but that's another post for another day.)

So the commenters largely saw O'Hara as part of the elitist, credulous media crowd that, in their eyes, is threatened by the rise of the citizen-journalist. It's unfortunate that they were so conspiracy-minded, because O'Hara made a valid point that deserves more debate. Since the rise of blogging has largely coincided with a spreading, devastating distrust of traditional political news outlets, many are thinking the following:

1) The mainstream media's coverage and analysis of politics have been absolutely reprehensible for the past several years.

2) Blogging is a much more democratic medium; it grants access to anyone who wants it and can be used to spread stories that the mainstream media ignore.

3) Therefore, the future of political reporting is blogging, including blogging by those whose occupation is not journalism.

1) and 2) are completely accurate, but I think it's wrong to think that 3) follows. Blogging is good for many things; one of its most important functions is to critically monitor traditional news coverage. No other medium allows such a quick response time and such wide dissemination -- mere minutes after the Times or Post prints a story riddled with errors, millions can know about it. This is fantastic, and this is where those who talk about the mainstream media no longer having a monopoly on the news are absolutely correct.

Many people take it one step further, however. The traditional roles no longer apply, they say: The roles of news consumer and news producer are bleeding into one another. Journalism as an occupation is obsolete. A lot of these assertions come from bloggers, of course, who are rightfully angry about the laxity of news coverage in recent years, but who also have an agenda.

The fact of the matter is this: Any worthwhile news or analysis blog is worthwhile because of the traditional, age-old rules of journalism. If your blog is good, it is because you are skeptical, you know how to fact-check, and you're not unwilling to develop sources or look at old stories from a new angle. None of these skills is new -- what is new is the medium in which they are practiced. But the medium itself doesn't contain any magic powers. An excellent politics blog isn't excellent because it's a blog; it's excellent because its author or authors practice good journalism.

I understand the impulse to distrust the news outlets that have failed us and to wish them the worst. But it's unrealistic to think the average citizen can come home from work, log on, and rival the efforts of most journalists. Journalism does require skills, and has failed us not because there is some inherent flaw in the idea that some people are journalists and some people aren't, but rather because professional journalists have failed to do their jobs properly. Blogging has a role, and a very important one, but the best journalists -- whether they be news writers, columnists, or bloggers -- are those who practice a core set of skills that remain unchanged despite all the new technology at our disposal.

The most realistic scenario is not one in which millions of amateurs take the reins and replace traditional journalism, but rather one in which traditional journalists face healthy scrutiny from bloggers and are forced to do their jobs (traditional journalists, of course, will be blogging more and more, and blogging will make it easier for talented young journalists to get noticed). The aggregate efforts of all the bloggers and commenters out there can certainly change the course of things and force stories to the forefront, but professional journalists -- those with the time, skills, and contacts to get to the bottom of stories -- will always be our best bet for chipping away at the thickening wall between government and the people.

Welcome

Welcome to The Bush Years. Sometime soon I'll provide a little more information about what I'm hoping to do with this blog. In the meantime, I have my first couple posts ready to go. Enjoy, and check back here frequently.

Thanks,
Jesse