Tag: Iraq

McCarthyism and MoveOn.org

Conservative supporters of the war in Iraq are spreading a bizarre meme — that MoveOn.org’s New York Times ad attacking Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us” is the moral equivalent of McCarthyism. A few examples:

  • “We may be about to witness a McCarthy-Army-Welch moment in the debate over Iraq. This time, the role of McCarthy is played by MoveOn.org, a liberal political group that launched its own attack on a respected US Army figure.” — Peter Feaver, former National Security Council staff member, writing in the Boston Globe.
  • “MoveOn.org has thrown down an unprecedented attack on an American general’s character and honesty. It is a disgusting overreach, one that brings to mind Joe McCarthy’s attacks on the Army half a century ago.” — Hugh Hewitt, radio talk-show host and blogger, in the Los Angeles Times.
  • Blogger Dean Barnett posts of a photo on Townhall.com of Sen. Joseph McCarthy being confronted by lawyer Joseph Welch at the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, at which Welch memorably spoke up on behalf of an officer who’d been targeted by McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
  • Sen. John McCain called the MoveOn ad “a McCarthyite attack,” according to this report in the Boston Globe by Lisa Wangsness.

OK, enough. You do see what the problem is, don’t you? McCarthy was smearing government officials by accusing them of being communists. MoveOn is smearing Petraeus by accusing him of being a known associate of (gasp!) George W. Bush.

And though it may have been wrongheaded for MoveOn to suggest that Petraeus would shade the truth on Bush’s behalf, it would be a stretch to call that offensive, let alone “McCarthyite.” Shading the truth about the war — its causes and its prosecution — is, after all, the modus operandi of the Bush White House. Pete Hegseth, writing in the Weekly Standard, accuses MoveOn of calling Petraeus a “traitor.” Hegseth needs to think through the implications of what he’s saying.

I have no love for MoveOn, and I fail to see how blowing its members’ money on a full-page ad in the Times advances its cause. There are not too many Times readers, I suspect, who continue to support (or who ever supported) the war.

I also think that Petraeus stands as one of the few honorable leaders in this terrible folly. His analysis — that U.S. and Iraqi troops are making progress on the ground — seems eminently reasonable. Too bad Iraq’s leadership continues to rip the country apart. (And yes, I understand that Petraeus wrote an overly optimistic op-ed piece for the Washington Post just before the last presidential election, an act that could be seen as political.)

This past Sunday’s “Meet the Press” was valuable, both for the downbeat assessment offered by retired Marine Gen. James Jones and former Washington police commissioner Charles Ramsey, members of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, and for Sen. Joseph Biden’s take on the MoveOn ad: “I don’t buy into that. This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth.”

Petraeus‘ truth, unfortunately, is just a small part of the picture. But unless President Bush is suddenly the new Nikita Krushchev, then MoveOn’s ad can’t possibly be compared the tactics of the late, unlamented Joseph McCarthy.

The Sadr solution?

Maybe it’s because it seems as though Moktada al-Sadr is going to win anyway, but I’m intrigued by Bartle Breese Bull’s op-ed in the New York Times, “An Enemy We Can Work With.”

Sadr is certainly not going to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, but we’re long since past that notion. In Sadr’s favor: he and his family were bitter enemies of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and his father was killed by Saddam; Sadr’s movement of the dispossessed has far fewer ties to Iran than does Iraq’s Shiite elite; and, at least according to Bull, Sadr has privately, though grudgingly, lent his tacit support to the American occupation.

There is not going to be a good outcome in Iraq. Bull points the way to a possible least-bad outcome that we could live with.

Correction confusion

A correction uncorrected — or technically accurate? You make the call. Check out these excerpts from the New York Times concerning Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s reaction to President Bush’s plan to send more American troops to Iraq.

News story, Jan. 12:

The Iraqi leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, failed to appear at a news conference and avoided any public comment. He left the government’s response to an official spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, who gave what amounted to a backhanded approval of the troop increase and emphasized that Iraqis, not Americans, would set the future course in the war.

Correction, Jan. 13:

An article yesterday about the Iraqi government’s response to plans by President Bush to deploy additional troops referred incorrectly to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s absence from the government’s news conference. Mr. Maliki was never scheduled to speak; it was not that he “failed to appear.”

Editorial, Jan. 14:

Now, with Mr. Bush unwilling or unable to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to take the minimum steps necessary to justify any deeper American commitment, we recognize that even that has become unrealistic. Mr. Maliki gave the latest White House plan an even chillier reception than it received in the United States Congress, boycotting a Thursday news conference in Baghdad announcing it. He apparently would have preferred to see American forces sent to fight Sunni insurgents in western Anbar Province, leaving Baghdad as a free-fire zone for his Shiite militia partners.

It looks to me as though the Times editorial backs off the previous day’s correction and re-embraces the first account, in which it was reported that Maliki “failed to appear.” I don’t think you can “boycott” an event at which you were never scheduled to appear. So no, I’d say the editorial is not technically accurate, at least if the correction is, you know, correct.

Which raises a question: Does the Sunday editorial page go to bed so early that a correction published in Saturday’s paper can’t be taken into account? And even if that’s true, shouldn’t the Web version of the editorial have been updated?

More: Media Nation has been reliably informed that (1) the Sunday editorial page ships on Friday afternoon and (2) corrections generally don’t appear on the Web before they’ve been published in the print edition. So there you go.

Bush in a Flash

I was out during President Bush’s speech last night, so the first thing I did when I got home was to start looking for the video on the Internet. So kudos to New England Cable News, which had posted it in easy-to-load Flash video. Even CSPAN.org couldn’t beat that.

As for the substance, I have to confess that Bush’s words came across as recycled boilerplate to such an extent that it was hard to pay attention. Besides, most of the details had been leaked out in the preceding days. But I found the lead of this Sheryl Gay Stolberg analysis in the New York Times to be suitably horrifying:

By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

Unless you believe that Bush knows more than all of the aforementioned people (including the voters who rejected his policies last November), then you should be as horrified as I am.

Muzzling Valerie Plame

The never-ending story of Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA operative who was exposed by columnist Robert Novak in the summer of 2003, has taken another odd turn.

According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, the CIA has blocked a book that Plame wants to write on the grounds that it would endanger national security. Incredibly, Plame would not even be allowed to write that she once worked for the CIA, though hundreds, if not thousands, of journalists have reported exactly that.

No doubt the so-called Plame scandal is a big, honking mess. Originally some critics of President Bush (including me) believed the White House had leaked to Novak, Matt Cooper, Judith Miller and others in order to punish Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had proclaimed in a celebrated New York Times op-ed piece that his skeptical report on Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Niger had been ignored.

That theory became less likely when we learned last August — from Isikoff and David Corn of The Nation — that the original leaker was Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state who’d been an internal opponent of the war in Iraq. Nor has it helped that Joe Wilson has proven less than credible (see these Daily Howler posts). Yes, Dick Cheney’s former chief aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, faces charges for his alleged role in outing Plame. But at this point it’s hard to believe we’ll ever get to the bottom of this.

But why censor Valerie Plame? No, a former CIA employee should not be allowed to reveal secrets if doing so would make us less safe. But this seems aimed more at stopping a book that would prove embarrassing to the Bush administration — and it calls to mind this piece of lunacy, from just a few weeks ago.

Just, but smart?

Saddam Hussein deserved what he got. But wouldn’t it have been better if his execution hadn’t looked like just another chapter in the sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis? This account, by John Burns and Marc Santora of the New York Times, describes Saddam’s hanging as the moral equivalent of a roadside bombing.

Update: Here is the video of the actual hanging. (Via Little Green Footballs, whose proprietor, Charles Johnson, pretends to think there’s a functional difference between posting the video and posting a link to the video. His acolytes share his phony outrage.)

Saddam’s last minutes?

It looks like Saddam Hussein will hang not long after this item is posted. Though I’m personally opposed to the death penalty, such opposition strikes me as ridiculous in the Iraqi context. Still, I’m of a mixed mind.

On the one hand, it seems a shame to execute him while he’s still on trial for far greater crimes than those of which he’s been convicted. Accountability is important, and this short-circuits that process.

On the other, from my safe perch at Media Nation Central it seems as though some segment of the Iraqi population is still afraid that Saddam will return to power — and that the Sunni insurgency is actually hoping he’ll come back. In the end, that might be even more important than formal accountability. (I say “formal” because it’s not as though we don’t know what he’s done.)

Thus, now is probably as good a time as any.

Photo by Alessandro Abate and used under the terms of Creative Commons (cc). Some rights reserved.

Surge protector

Search Google News for temporary surge Iraq and you’ll get some 1,660 results. The idea of bolstering American forces with an additional 30,000 or so troops for a short period of time has become popular enough that even U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the incoming Senate majority leader, briefly endorsed it.

But what is really on the table? Last Friday, a segment on the NPR program “On the Media” strongly suggested that the press has misunderstood the term “surge,” with its connotation of a temporary increase. In fact, it appears that the “surge” the Bush administration is reportedly considering consists of a long-term increase in troop strength, temporary only in the sense that the Bush presidency will end at some point.

The transcript has finally been posted, and it’s revealing. Take a look at this exchange between Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the “surge” proposal now being considered by the White House, and “OTM” co-host Brooke Gladstone:

Kagan: The media has been using the term “surge” very loosely. And I think that’s actually a bit of a problem, because there have been various ideas floated for very short-term troops surges of relatively small numbers of troops. And I think that that would be a big mistake, and it’s not what we’re calling for.

We’re actually calling for an increase of troop strength in Iraq of about 35,000 combat troops; 20,000 of those would go into Baghdad. So I think a part of the problem that we have is that people are not being sufficiently precise about which proposal they’re discussing when they talk in terms of a troop surge.

Gladstone: So when Harry Reid, the incoming Senate majority leader, refers to a surge, he’s talking about two or three months; you’re talking about anywhere between 18 to 24.

Kagan: Yes, exactly. It’s really important to keep that distinction in mind. The idea of a two-to three-month surge is not meaningful. And the enemy expects to do that sort of thing. They expect us to come in briefly and leave. Doing that kind of thing plays right into the enemy’s hands.

As Gladstone and her other guest, Foreign Affairs magazine editor Gideon Rose, speculate, the use of the word “surge” is more a matter of marketing than it is policy, although Kagan assures Gladstone that he’s not part of any such marketing effort.

Rose puts it this way: “The problem is that the real version of this involves a sustained, increase in troops and a long presence in Iraq. And there’s no appetite in Washington for any policy like that. I mean, when Kagan talks about a sustained surge, he’s really talking about a long-term escalation.”

That’s something the media need to keep in mind. Because when reporters allow themselves to be deceived, they end up as conduits for deceiving the public as well.