WhirledView

POW Experience and the Presidency

by Cheryl Rofer

When I heard Wesley Clark say, on Sunday, that while John McCain's behavior as a prisoner of war was honorable, it wasn't a job qualification for the presidency, I breathed a sigh of relief that at last someone was calling the McCain campaign, and possibly even more so, the media, on the unthinking conflation of things military with things civilian.

McCain's POW experience speaks to a particular kind of military discipline and honor. Those qualities have some relevance to the character traits we want in a president. But too often, McCain's POW experience seems to stand in for experience in foreign affairs, military command, and numerous other intellectual/managerial qualities we want in a president. I thought that Clark made the distinction nicely, and that it was a distinction that needed saying.

So ensues the faux outrage over any criticism of anything military. Andrew Bacevich has pointed out the militarization of our society, which includes putting military experience beyond criticism. Today he has an op-ed in the Boston Globe that speaks to other matters, but it has some relevance to the Clark furor.

The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

The problem with a lifetime of honorable service in the military, intensified by experience as a POW, is that it can produce a mindset that elevates that military. McCain's membership in today's Republican party and everything he has said so far on the Iraq war suggest that he shares this mindset, part of the militarization of our society.

So I'm joining others in the blogosphere in saying that Wesley Clark said nothing wrong. In fact, what he said could be a beginning of disentangling American security from mindless militarism.

Others commenting:

Ezra Klein

Kevin Drum

Jason Sigger

Cernig

Ron Beasley

Libby

Layers Upon Layers

by CKR

James made a nice observation about American exceptionalism last week that I expanded on at Washington Monthly.

What I didn’t say in the detail I was thinking it was that our American blinders eliminate far too much of what’s going on in the world. That goes for liberals as well as conservatives, Obama or Clinton supporters.

Here’s an example that bothers me every time it comes up in Doonesbury: Central Asia.

Central Asia is probably as far away from us as it’s possible to get, maybe with the exception of some of northern Siberia. That’s not just in miles, but culture as well. It’s further than Africa because Europe colonized Africa and layered onto it governmental and social practices we can recognize. It’s further than Antarctica because environmental organizations don’t sponsor luxury cruises there.

So Duke and company supervise a radio interview of Trff Bmzklfrpz, dictator of Berzerkistan, anti-semite and genocidaire.

Yes, I know, Doonesbury is satire. And there are indeed both corruption and despotism in Central Asia. But I wonder how much good this is doing for our understanding of what’s happening there. (And isn’t this a repeat? I think I read somewhere that Garry Trudeau is taking a leave of absence?)

Start with the dictator’s name. Yes, I know that Central Asian names are not usually Smith or Jones. But getting names right is a fundamental mark of respect. And then there’s the name of his country, which implies that its citizens share his, er, issues.

Turkmenistan is most likely Garry Trudeau’s model for Bezerkistan. Its former leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, insitituted a cult of personality that makes Stalin look like a small-town sheriff. Gold statues of himself, renaming the months and days for his family, all that. But he died in 2006 and was succeeded by Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov. (C’mon, you can sound that out!) It was hard to know how Berdymukhammedov would rule; what a person does when working for someone like Niyazov does not reveal his opinions and preferences.

Deborah Howell Discovers Old White Men - On the WaPo Opinion Page

by CKR

The ombudsman for the Washington Post, Deborah Howell, today gives us the stats, and they are unambiguous: old white men write most of the Post's opinion pieces and are most of the people employed by the Post to do so.

I vaguely recall a time, a few years back, when one of their opinion page editors, a woman, asked for women bloggers to make themselves known to her. WhirledView was new, and we seized the opportunity. I think there was some response, but the interaction quickly died.

I've written a couple of e-mails to Deborah Howell, but the most I ever got back was an automated response saying she would be on vacation for six months or something equally encouraging.

I may be obsessed with business models lately, but I find it strange that Howell seems to expect that the answer to diversifying the Post's op-ed page is that somehow, mysteriously, women will submit more op-eds to the Post. Most organizations interested in increasing diversity have recognized that they have to be a bit more proactive in finding those diverse people.

Answering e-mails would seem to be a minimal beginning in that direction.

Be Very Afraid, David Ignatius!

by CKR

I’ve read this three times now, and I don’t think I’m missing anything.

My best scenario is that there’s a lot of laughing at the National Counterterrorism Center this morning.

“And then I told him (gasp, gasp, hiccup), I told him that my doomsday scenario was that everybody goes around stabbing everyone else! It’s right there in the article!”

Coffee spurts from explosively-opened lips. Some in the background roll their eyes.

Been there, done that. Someone asks enough stupid questions with enough stupid assumptions behind them (like that the Muslim world is collectively deranged), and you go very serious and tell them yes indeed, your worst fears are true.

Imagination (at least David Ignatius’s) has declined a lot since the end of the Cold War. Maybe it’s been frittered away on horror movies or just subject to the bureaucratic least common denominator. Here’s what we used to think of as a doomsday scenario.

People going around stabbing each other is a police problem, David Ignatius! If someone did that at the mall, the mall might be shut down for a while. Not Doomsday!

Ignatius tries to make his article sound serious. “Let’s start with the nature of the threat.” But he never clearly enunciates the threat, much less comes up with appropriate responses.

My doomsday scenario is that they’re passing around the article at the National Counterterrorism Center and saying, quite seriously, “Good job, David!”

To fly - or not to fly - with Condi: That is the Question

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Yesterday, I came upon an insightful post by The Washington Times State Department correspondent Nick Kralev on his blog Nick Kralev on Diplomacy about his latest trip to Israel, Palestine and London with Condi Rice.

What intrigued me most about “Flying with Miss Rice” was Kralev’s comment – almost in passing - that he was one of only nine reporters sent by their news organizations to cover Rice’s trip. As he explained, the media has to weigh whether the stories produced by such a trip are worth the expenditures when deciding whether to send a reporter along or not. Most organizations, clearly, decided in this case not.

In some senses, the nay-saying editors were right: there would be no break-throughs in Israeli-Palestinian talks whether Rice came calling or not. For my money, there will not be until after W departs from the scene. Why pay the money, therefore, to send a reporter along to report a non-event or a series of non-events when it's clear the event or events is/are not going to happen anyway? So why send along a content provider, previously known as a reporter or correspondent.

And if there had been a break-through it would have been picked up and reported instantly by the local media organizations and even, horror-of-horrors, citizen journalists aka bloggers in-situ. Headlines are what consitute 30 second sound bites - no context and little content needed thank you very much.

As Kralev also pointed out in his post, stories related to policy do not get the hits – or the readers – that non-policy stories do. So editors have to decide whether an expensive foreign trip has enough "public interest value" to make it worth it. In my view, most of our commercial media – dependent on ad revenues and needing to meet the bottom line plus some obscene profit margin for their continued existence – continue to cut back on substance in favor of fluff, fluff and more fluff which unfortunately is far the more attractive to the mass audience - as I suppose it always has been.

Have times changed

But wait a minute. When I was press attaché in Helsinki at the end of the Cold War and the Secretary came through, anywhere between 25 and 50 reporters straggled off the back of the Secretary’s plane and onto the waiting press bus. This was nothing compared to the media that came along on a Presidential visit. Regardless, there were enough reporters with the Secretary that we set up and staffed round-tbe-clock press (filing) centers where I saw major US media personalities in action or inaction.

What does this lack of State Department media attention that Kralev reports now mean? That Rice and the State Department are superfluous?

That the media climate is so changed that it is no longer necessary to send reporters along with the Secretary to get a story when transcripts are posted almost immediately on State’s webpage anyway?

That the American public is so poorly educated and uninterested in US foreign policy or what the administration is doing abroad to warrant the expense?

That State’s charges to the media organizations are out of line (after all a $60 passport now costs $100 and one has to wonder how much of that goes to a private contractor with a head office in the Netherlands and a manufacturing plant in Thailand that provides insecure RFID chips)?

How much, by the way, does one seat on Rice’s plane cost and what does it pay for?

Or is there that intangeable added value – which Kralev also describes – to the personal touch: Real time proximity to the Secretary and others one meets (like the UN Secretary General) as a result of being there, to on-the-plane briefings which are reported, at least first, by those reporters who did go along, or to the inevitable un-reportable chatter that helps reporters key into future stories and put them in better context than they could otherwise?

Only Two Weeks? I Count Ten

by CKR

David Broder is concerned about the state of discourse in the campaign.

Indiana and North Carolina were doubly irrelevant this year, because the "issues" that Clinton and Obama discussed in the two weeks before those states' primaries were some of the phoniest of this entire election cycle.

Obama was all but obliterated for that time by the huge media-fanned controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright's inflammatory comments were obnoxious, but they bore no resemblance to the rhetoric and the record of the Illinois senator. I'd like to know what kind of people Obama would bring into his White House and where he would turn for a Cabinet, because there is so much uncertainty about his actual policies at home and abroad.

Wright would clearly not be anywhere in that administration, so why waste a full fortnight on him?

And of course Broder has been absolutely, completely responsible and has asked the kind of questions he'd like to hear and never fanned the Wright controversy. Right?

Broder mentions Wright in every column all the way back to March 23.

May 1: A Pastor's Influence

April 24: The Democrats' Worst Nightmare

April 20: Democrats' Damaging Brawl

April 17: What Pennsylvania Voters Are Saying

March 23: The Real Value Of Obama's Speech

Admittedly, in some of these columns, Wright is mentioned only incidentally. And I suppose Broder would say that Wright was part of the news, he had to mention him.

But I count ten weeks plus, not just the two before Indiana and North Carolina.

Missing E-Mails: Partly Solved

by CKR

A month ago, I asked for help in tracking down e-mails gone missing in Northern New Mexico. I have found part of the problem.

Last summer, I gave my old laptop to a young relative, four years old to be exact. My intention was for him to have a game box of his own so that his mother could use her computer for other things. The old laptop became the living-room computer for the family.

I had deleted my word-processor files and other potentially incriminating evidence, but I neglected to delete my e-mail account. So when the new owner's parents tried to use e-mail on what was now the living-room computer, they would receive my e-mails.

I sent them instructions on how to delete my account, and I haven't missed an e-mail that I'm aware of for a week or so now.

But that doesn't account for the e-mails I sent that were lost or the e-mails between two other parties. I think it's most of my problem, though.

Many thanks to those who sent me suggestions.

Bush on the Syrian Incident - Updated 5/1/08

by CKR

Two stories reported as news today aren’t particularly new. President Bush was simply repeating the talking points.

Michael Abramowitz in the Washington Post – Bush: Revealing Reactor Was Meant to Pressure N. Korea

Steven Lee Myers in the New York Times - Bush Says Syria Nuclear Disclosure Intended to Prod North Korea and Iran

Abramowitz:

President Bush said yesterday that his administration's disclosure of secret information last week about suspected North Korean assistance for a Syrian nuclear reactor was designed to pressure Pyongyang to come clean on its nuclear activities.

At a Rose Garden news conference, Bush also said he wanted to send a message to Iran to cooperate with international efforts to limit proliferation, and to Syria to help stabilize Iraq and Lebanon….

Bush said the disclosures last week should make it "abundantly clear" to North Korea that "we may know more about you than you think, and therefore it's essential that you have a complete disclosure on not only your plutonium activities, but proliferation, as well as enrichment activities."

Myers:

President Bush said Tuesday that last week’s disclosure of what senior American officials called evidence of a nearly completed nuclear reactor in Syria was intended to warn North Korea and Iran about the dangers of spreading nuclear weapons….

Making the first remarks in public about the Israeli attack by any American official, Mr. Bush said that his administration maintained a cloak of secrecy to avoid the risk of further military conflict in the region, including possible Syrian retaliation against Israel. He said that risk of conflict “was reduced” now….

“We also wanted to advance certain policy objectives through the disclosures, and one would be to the North Koreans to make it abundantly clear that we, we may know more about you than you think,” Mr. Bush said at a White House news conference….

Mr. Bush said that the disclosure of a covert Syrian reactor, which Syria has denied, should persuade other countries to support United Nations Security Council resolutions intended to keep Iran and other countries from developing nuclear arms.

“We have an interest in sending a message to Iran and the world for that matter about just how destabilizing a nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East,” he said.

All he’s doing is repeating the talking points from the press briefing the other day.

We were concerned that if knowledge of the existence and then destruction of the reactor became public and was confirmed by sources that the information would spread quickly and Syria would feel great pressure to retaliate…

We are at the point in the Six-Party talks where we believe going public will strengthen our negotiators as they try to get an accurate accounting of North Korea’s nuclear programs. We believe and hope that it will encourage North Korea to acknowledge its proliferation activity, but also to provide a more complete and accurate disclosure of their plutonium activities and their enrichment activities as well.

With respect to Iran, the Syrian episode reminds us of the ability of states to obtain nuclear capability covertly and how destabilizing the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would be. And obviously everyone is concerned about that with respect to Iran, and we hope that disclosure will underscore that the international community needs to rededicate itself to ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities, and needs to take further steps to ensure that Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons. And countries can start by the full implementation of the U.N. Security Council resolutions already dealing with Iranian nuclear activities, which are not being implemented as aggressively and fully as they should.

…Disclosure of Syria’s nuclear activities, we hope, will help us in convincing other nations to join us in pressuring Syria to change its policies.

Not much difference, even in the wording.

I’ll send a link to this post to the two reporters. Seems to me that they might have mentioned somewhere in their accounts that Bush's words were pretty much identical to those in the press briefing.

Update (5/1/08): Michael Abramowitz provides a response of sorts. The second question (Santa Fe, NM) is mine. He seems to be tolerant of the blogosphere, or at least not ready to condemn us out of hand. Also check out his response to the next-to-last question. But he's not asking the hard questions of President Bush and others.

Israel Has Nuclear Weapons - Updated 4/24/08

by CKR

That is the sentence that cannot be uttered in international relations. The silence distorts much, perhaps most, of our discussion about the Middle East.

That distortion is in today’s news three times over.

Another Nuclear Spy for Israel
A man in New Jersey has been charged with selling US nuclear secrets to Israel in the 1980s. His handler was the same person who got nuclear information from Jonathan Pollard. At the time of Pollard’s arrest and trial, Israel told the United States that there had been no other spies. In Israel, it is being suggested that the arrest is being used to “to loosen support for Israel as the two countries enter a tenacious period of negotiations.”

Ben-Ami Kadish says he shared the information to “protect Israel.” At the time Kadish provided that “protection,” Israel had a nuclear arsenal.

Update (4/24/08): The Israelis respond. Still no mention of their nukes. Emptywheel speculates on how they found Mr. Kadish and his activities.

Clinton Promises to Nuke Iran
Hillary Clinton this week brandished the US’s nuclear arsenal at Iran for a hypothetical attack on Israel with nuclear weapons.

…what our policy should be is to make it very clear to the Iranians that they would be risking massive retaliation were they to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.…their use of nuclear weapons against Israel would provoke a nuclear response from the United States…

“Massive retaliation” was the description of what the United States would do if Russia attacked with nuclear-tipped missiles. Or vice versa. She made that explicit in her later words. She also proposed that the United States offer a “nuclear umbrella” to other states in the Middle East that might feel intimidated by an Iranian nuclear arsenal.

Radio Free What?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In her April 22 column in The Washington Post, Anne Applebaum laments the lack of support in Congress and the Bush administration for Radio Free Europe (RFE) which she erroneously claims was the “only source of independent information in Eastern Europe” during the Cold War.

Now I’m not either a proponent or opponent of Radio Free Europe or its Russian language counterpart Radio Liberty. Both were surrogate radio stations operated first by the Central Intelligence Agency then when their covers were blown around 1970 - openly by the U.S. government. Their task was to broadcast information in local languages to Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union not available because of Communist government censorship so that the peoples “behind the Iron Curtain” could hear the unvarnished news of what was happening in their own countries in their own languages.

That few Americans knew – or today know – of RFE’s existence let alone support its continued existence does not surprise me.

Its name, by the way, is RFE/RL, a post-Cold War amalgamation of the once-upon-a-time two separate services.

RFE/RL operates under the restrictions of the little known Smith-Mundt Act which supposedly restricts the US government from propagandizing its own citizens. This means a special Congressional dispensation is required for Americans to have access to US government media products produced by and directed at foreigners. This Act, enacted in 1948 and strengthened in 1972, was, I suppose, fine in its day. But with the Internet, satellite broadcasting and the rise of medium wave stations, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and today’s Europeanization of much of Eastern Europe, Smith-Mundt has now become a 12 inch soft plastic barrier to the American public’s right to know what its government is saying abroad but, as Mountain Runner suggests, it's like the elephant under the table, no one wants to deal with it.

An aside: I was looking at data on Amazon’s Alexa Internet rankings a couple of weeks ago and discovered that the State Department’s newly launched America.gov, an Internet page of indeterminate quality and usefulness aimed at the world outside the US, had a readership that was about 20 percent American. But quiet please, don’t tell anyone in Congress or America.gov’s State Department bosses. America.gov comes under Smith-Mundt and Americans aren’t supposed to know about it or have access to its contents despite the fact our tax dollars fund it along with other entities like RFE/RL.