Sunday, March 30, 2003

THE SMOG OF WAR     ...Because "Fog" seems too pretty a word, evoking a natural phenomenon.  No, there's something very man-made about the horrible way we are getting news from the likes of CNN.  These are choices that are being made.  Aaron Brown doesn't have to recite Republican Talking Points about Hussein's Republican Guard. (Check out Aaron embarrassing himself while interviewing Daniel ellsberg.  Busy, busy, busy has a snippet.)  Embedded reporters didn't have to buy the administration's initial rosey scenarios hook-line-and-sinker, only to later express themselves shocked, shocked, that they not might be back in their studios in time for  sweeps.     Initially, the embedded reporters were playing their roles perfectly.  Administration officials  pronounced themselves pleased.  (Does it bother journalists to be treated like a Ministry of Information?)  After Rumsfeld's bad press week, now he is less pleased, complaining of the "massive volume of television [~] and it is massive [~] and the breathless reports can seem to be somewhat disorienting."       It's not that difficult to understand the change of heart. The "embeddeds" were perfect for the seamless, quick war Rumsfeld envisioned.  We saw that in the first couple of days.    They moved with the troops, recording every advance as if we were watching a football game.  You can picture how Rummy thought it would happen.  "Shock and awe" topples the wimpy Republican Guard in the first few nights, and a couple days later, during primetime in the U.S., the embeddeds would roll into Baghdad atop tanks, recording Iraqi parades of joy.  Dr. Sanjay could take much needed medical supplies to a local hospital.       Note to the New York Times: the administration's problem is not "fickle" public opinion.  The reason there is fluctuation in polls, and general confusion, is that we are only now getting around to having the national conversation we should have had before  entering a war.  How long will this take?  How much will it cost?  Is there an exit strategy? (Hello? Mr. Powell?  About that Doctrine?)     The war still may be "quick"--who knows--but that is not the only question.  The news about the possibilities of "winning the peace" is not promising.  The world, and particularly the Arab world, sees this as an invasion, as do apparently many Iraqis.   No amount of pictures of marines handing out water bottles is going to change that.     10:29:34 AM    comment []

MY CHICKENHAWK RANT (everyone else got one)     Things don't seem to be going well for Donald Rumsfeld these days.  He's spent the last couple of days backtracking from the administration's previous chatter that the war in Iraq would be a cakewalk.It seems "terrorist" -journalist Seymour Hersh has given Richard Perle a break and is now lobbing his bombs in Rummy[base ']s direction.  It[base ']s just not good news for this chickenhawk administration to have headlines reading "Rumseld Ignored Pentagon Advice on Iraq."  An unnamed senior Pentagon official is quoted in an upcoming article in The New Yorker, explaining the current predicament of troops near Iraq with reinforcements weeks away, "This is the mess Rummy put himself in because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground."            There is one thing I would change about that sentence, however: he didn't get himself in the mess.  He is safely ensconced in Washington, where "messes" are purely political.  He did, however, create quite an unpleasant mess for the soldiers out there.  Today's news of a suicide bombing does not bode well, nor does the tone of this statement from Hersh[base ']s source: "The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements arrive."       All this because the Republican Guard did not follow Republican talking points about how this war was supposed to go?     And dissenters are being made to feel unpatriotic because we dare voice dissent regarding this administration, its war, its ulterior motives, the lies it was founded upon, and, yes, the fact that it is being run by chickenhawks who, despite not having taken the opportunity to serve their country in battle when they could have, seem untroubled about the prospects of sending other people[base ']s children out there.     And other people[base ']s children they are.  I found this article in the New York Times Week in Review both enlightening and depressing.  Citing studies of the demographic makeup of the military, the article authors conclude:         A survey of the American military's endlessly compiled and analyzed demographics paints         a picture of a fighting force that is anything but a cross section of America. With minorities         overrepresented and the wealthy and the underclass essentially absent[[sigma]] This paragraph reminded me of my two favorite Chickenhawk excuse[base ']s for not going to Vietnam.  Dick Cheney once said, "I had other priorities in the 60s than military service." But even Dick[base ']s "priorities" excuse takes second place to Tom Delay[base ']s.  He was asked at the 1988 Republican convention why Dan Quayle and he had not served in Vietnam.  His response, according to reporters who were heard him:         As Mr. DeLay explained to the assembled reporters, so many minority youths had                 volunteered for the high-paying military jobs offered those willing to go to Vietnam that         those wanting to escape poverty and the ghetto took up all the available slots, leaving no         room for people like him and Mr. Quayle. My father was one of those minorities volunteering for the Army and keeping good patriots like Delay and Quayle out.  He father served two tours of infantry duty in Vietnam, the first with the 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell Kentucky, the "screaming eagles" we have been hearing about so much in recent days.     I guess, Mr. Cheney, my father just didn[base ']t have his priorities straight in the sixties.  Or perhaps instead my parents were more like Lori Luckey, mentioned in the Times article.  She is described as "a single mother of three girls [who] said the main reasons she signed up for the Marines were to to get a chance at a career and the opportunity for advancement, to see the world, and to obtain a dental plan and other benefits."     My Dad made it back alive.  I thought of him this morning as I read that NYT story, just as I thought of him Friday night when the Idiot Caller from Springfield Ohio asked Larry King (see my previous posting):              CALLER: Is napalm a chemical weapon? If it is not a chemical weapon, why are we not            using it against the Republican Guards on the outskirts of Baghdad, since it was such an         effective weapon in Vietnam? Larry[base ']s guests let Springfield Ohio down gently, suggesting it would be a public relations nightmare to douse an Arab country with poisonous chemicals.  Coincidentally, however, yesterday's UK Guardian ran a story about Agent Orange and its effect on the population of Vietnam, to this day       While the authors of that article focus correctly on the Vietnamese, I would also like to suggest to Mr. Springfield that Napalm wasn[base ']t that great on the troops he supports either.  You see, I[base ']ve seen my Dad run to a medical textbook every time he has an ailment to see if his symptoms coincide with exposure to Napalm.       And you know what[base ']s weird?  He[base ']s not scared that they[base ']ll diagnose him as exposed, he[base ']s hoping they will.  Is my father crazy?  No, my father's not crazy, he has just been trying for about a decade to get the VA to grant him disability benefits I know he deserves, to no avail.  His plight with the VA is just one in a sea of mistreatments afforded to Veterans.  The administration that is demanding so breathlessly that we support our troops, or else, is cutting funding for Veterans benefits.   Lovely. ***          Maureen Dowd is good today.  The opening lines:         We're shocked that the enemy forces don't observe the rules of war. We're shocked that it's         hard to tell civilians from combatants, and friends from foes. Adversaries use guerrilla         tactics; they are irregulars; they take advantage of the hostile local weather and terrain; they         refuse to stay in uniform. Golly, as our secretary of war likes to say, it's unfair.         Some of their soldiers are mere children. We know we have overwhelming, superior         power, yet we can't use it all. We're stunned to discover that the local population treats our         well-armed high-tech troops like invaders.         Why is all this a surprise again? I know our hawks avoided serving in Vietnam, but didn't         they, like, read about it?   9:12:59 AM    comment []