Washington Post Death Spiral Watch

(Non Brad Delong edition)

Jim Hoagland has an op ed in today Washington Post with an excellent title "Needed: Honesty on Iraq". I'm betting that some editor wrote the headline, though, since the article reads as if it were written by someone from another planet who had no concept of earth-bound reality and no actual knowledge of the history of the US and Iraq.

To begin with, the op ed is that favorite in the journalistic nihilistic universe of the Washington Post, it is a "meta" piece--that is, it doesn't really bother to be honest about Iraq, but rather, it talks about the need for politicians to be honest about Iraq. What Jim Hoagland thinks the US should do in Iraq he doesn't deign to say beyond suggesting a generalized "stay the course." There is the usual Washington Post pretence of "pox on all their houses" with Hoagland claiming to find fault with all three candidates for President, although of course he really only finds fault with the Democrats. There is the familiar Washington Post editorial bloated rhetoric, with Hoagland generously sharing with us that the three politicians are "insulting the future," whatever that is supposed to mean.

But it is in recounting the history of the US with Iraq that Hoaglan launches into fantasyland. Here he is on Bill Clinton: "Bill Clinton used sanctions and pinprick missile attacks that helped protect the Kurds and Iraq's Arab neighbors. But those tactics also had the effect of aiding Hussein in grinding into dust any remaining social cohesion in the country." So, without any evidence presented, Bill Clinton somehow becomes a partner of Saddam Hussein in the oppression of his people. In the previous paragraph Hoagland skirted lightly over the fact that the Reagan and first Bush administration had provided material aid to Hussein (" did little to prevent or to punish" Saddam's actions against the Kurds is Hoagland's closest approach to that truth) , going so far as to send Donald Rumsfield to shake the tyrant's hand, and then proclaims the first Bush in some sense the "victim" of the policy ("They reaped Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait as reward.") Somehow, no doubt for reasons of space, the first Gulf War goes unmentioned, as does the immediate aftermath when President George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraq's shi'ites to rebel and then stood idly by when Saddam viciously put the rebellion down, even though we had overwhelming military force on the ground in the area. Somehow in Hoagland land, protecting the Kurds so that they could set up their own defacto state (which has some earmarks of democracy in it, however it may fall short) is "aiding" Saddam, but standing by while Saddam slaughters his own people is not worth mentioning.

Other inconvenient facts similarly are kept at bay. The Clinton administration had a fairly activist foreign policy, which did involve military action in the Balkans to protect Bosnia from a ruthless dictator, and then engage in the diplomacy and peace-keeping and aid necessary to keep the whole enterprise afloat. This sort of nation-building, which presumably Hoagland is retrospectively advocating that Bill Clinton should have done in Iraq, was of course the subject of attack by George W. Bush when he ran for President in 2000.

In the world of editorial writing, at least as practiced by Hoagland, word counts are the only restraint. But in the real world in which politicians must act, there are limits of resources such as money and troops. Hoagland talks about "moral obligations" that Iraq poses for Americans, but he seems to ignore the actual financial and physical obligations of the war on Iraq. I'm all for John McCain spelling out how much his "victory" in Iraq is going to cost in blood and treasurer, and what sort of taxes he's going to levy to pay those costs. Let's see, the war is approaching $200 billion a year and at best we've managed to achieve a fragile stalemate. Are we talking adding another $100 billion/year? $200 billion? and for how many years?

The war in Iraq has been a disaster because it has been from the beginning based on lies. The Washington Post Outlook section in which Hoagland's op-ed appears has as its lead story an article that points out that after five years, we still don't know the real reasons we went to war in Iraq. Colin Powell went before the United Nations and lied that we had proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Paul Wolfowitz went before congress and said the war would pay for itself. Donald Rumsfield, he who had gone to Baghdad to shake the tyrant's hand, assured us that there would be no need for hundreds of thousands of troops and that the war would be over quickly. They told these lies and the Jim Hoagland's of the press repeated these lies and now say in that oh-so-grand "no insult to the future" way, we must continue to muddle along because "fresh thinking is badly needed."

When I first read Hoagland's let's-be-honest-without-being-honest op ed, I thought how Thucydides had dealt with the way words decay in war and how partisans stop speaking the same language even when the words remain the same. I looked up the passage (Thucydides is talking about the civil war in Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War) and found it more apt than I had recalled:

"To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action."

Could anything better describe the behavior of the mainstream press when it came to their reporting and cheer leading on Iraq?

Shut up and sing!

On the day my home town newspaper (The Washington Post) came out in favor of that dispicable dictator Pinochet (and really, what does a terrorist murder on Washington's Embassy Row, 3,000 + murdered Chileans--they were all leftist anyway---and 20,000+ tortured citizens matter when there is MONEY to be made?) Nick and I saw an early show of Shut Up and Sing, the Dixie Chicks concert tour documentary. It was painful to revisit early 2003. The nation was living in some mass hallucination. One of the previews was a documentary of the Jim Jones People's Temple mass suicide, and while wild horses could not drag me to see that depressing film, 2003 sure seemed in retrospect a period when the great bulk of the nation was drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid.

The key moment was the first one. As the movie showed, up to a million people were on the streets of London protesting the soon to take place war. The Hammersmith theater where the concert took place was a wonderfully intimate venue. A young woman deep inside the pop music bubble could never expect her words to stir up the storm of protest that followed.

That's why the film's look back was so depressing. I could not believe then, I can not believe now, that the Bush administration's mendacity was accepted with such alacrity, and that those who didn't accept it would be greeted with such universal derision. Natalie Maines doesn't come across as a deep thinker (although she does come across as someone with integrity and no shortage of self-confidence and ability to think for herself). She was just some ordinary person who said, the emperor has no clothes, and got bashed for it.

There's a bit of sentimental mush in the movie (a bit heavy on the motherhood side) but the film is great on the hippie aesthetic of the LA recording sessions, honest about the money-making corporate side of the business, ditto honest about the Chicks ambitiousness.

Bonus item was Oregon Republican Gordon Smith waxing sanctimonious about how the "Hollywood" personalities shouldn't be surprised when there is a business consequence for expressing an honest opinion. Smith has lately been shedding aligator tears about the immorality of the war. Hope this clip gets played a lot when he's running for reelection trying to explain why he was for the war before he was against it.