Matt writes something that's true, but also weirdly specific, about the administration media management strategy:
If you think, as John McCain and George Bush and about 30 percent of Americans do, that an indefinite American military operation in Iraq is a good idea then you need to engage in a lot of propaganda operations. After all, realistically we are much more likely to leave Iraq because politicians representing the views of the 70 percent of the public who doesn't think that an indefinite American military operation in Iraq is a good idea than we are to be literally driven out by Iraqis who oppose the U.S. presence.This is just one of the ways in which a protracted Iraq-style engagement tends to undermine the small-d and small-r democratic and republican values on which the country was founded. You see this in the way that David Petraeus has become a key official administration spokesman and you see it in the Times story about semi-covert operations happening on our cable networks. During Vietnam, of course, we had the government's security apparatus spending time working against anti-war groups, and for all we know this sort of thing is why the Bush administration is so eager to wiretap people without warrants.
There's a weird tendency to diagnose a bunch of different aspects of war as being somehow unique to the sort of war we're fighting now. When I did that Bloggingheads debate with Glenn Greenwald, he kept speaking of torture as being an inevitable result of "aggressive war". But this is silly. War crimes are not a special characteristic of the invading side; we did lots of things in World War II that would now be recognized as war crimes (Dresden, Tokyo), as well as number of run-of-the-mill war crimes like shooting inconvenient POWs and desecrating bodies. Nor was Sherman's March to the Sea strictly within the Geneva Conventions. People who are trying to kill each other tend to get sloppy about the niceties of things like not slapping around your prisoners for information--whether they are the invader or the invadee.
Similarly, propaganda campaigns are a) a characteristic of any major government program and b) particularly characteristic of military operations; government control of the media during World War II was vastly more extensive than anything they even dare hint at now, though it perhaps loses out to Woodrow Wilson's administration in the creepy totalitarian sweepstakes.
We're not seeing the Bush administration trying to manage the media because of the kind of war this is--they were doing it back when the war was extremely popular, too. The administration is trying to manage the media because that's what politicians do, especially in the area of foreign policy, where there are few voters to bear eyewitness to their deception. You have to watch the bastards all the time, not just when they're doing something you don't like.
Glenn specific argument that torture is necessarily a result of 'aggressive war' is misguided, but his general point is correct: no country has ever occupied someone else's land without torturing, massacring, and destroying the occupied population. Moreover, no occupied population has ever passively accepted the occupying force--violence directed against the occupiers is a necessary result of occupation.
This is pretty obvious stuff to anyone who even gave a thought as to what it would be like to have a foreigner barge into your door and raid your house. War supporters, obviously, did not have the energy or will to empathize with the occupied.
Aren't government efforts to convince the public that their programs are effective a characteristic not only of wars but of all government programs generally?
Torture is an integral part of counterinsurgency wars, especially when the war is fought to occupy and colonize another country. In such wars, the occupying power needs to separate guerilla fighters from the population that supports and hides them. The resultant practices include torture to force combatants and non-combatants to reveal information about guerrilas; the use of concentration camps (known in the US-Vietnam War as Strategic Hamlets) to separate the population from the the unpoliced countryside, which is then opened as a free-firezone; and a tendency toward genocidal and near genocidal violence to eliminate the population or, in the famous words of Samuel Huntington, to bomb the society into a transformation, by which he meant turning rural Vietnam into an urban society by expelling people from a bombed out countryside.
War crimes are a part of war to be fought against by decent people. But some kinds of war produce greater numbers of specific kinds of war crimes, and that is why colonial occupation is a crime in itself. The US thought so in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, just like it thought water boarding was torture . . . .
"we did lots of things in World War II that would now be recognized as war crimes (Dresden, Tokyo), as well as number of run-of-the-mill war crimes like shooting inconvenient POWs and desecrating bodies. Nor was Sherman's March to the Sea strictly within the Geneva Conventions. People who are trying to kill each other tend to get sloppy about the niceties of things like not slapping around your prisoners for information--whether they are the invader or the invadee."
this, the above, is yet more agitprop/propaganda, all of your examples, filled with anachronisms, or not, can be construed as retalitory..
I'm surprised you're not, yet, howling for 'action' in Iran, or hasn't that check cleared?
J Mann,
I think that is what Megan wrote.
"Propaganda" is news put out supporting programs you dislike, while it is "useful information" for those you do like.
"War supporters, obviously, did not have the energy or will to empathize with the occupied."
If you were an Iraqi living in Iraq under Saddam, would you have been for or against the US coming in? Would you prefer to have been trapped indefinitely under first Saddam and then his sick sons Uday and Qusay? Even given all of the difficulties so far, if it was me, I'd prefer to have a chance at building a real life.
When you talk about empathizing with the occupied, do you honestly mean that anyone that cared for or even thought about the Iraqi people would want to see them held hostage forever by brutal, repressive thugs? How far does your 'empathy' take you?
Ann, unlike you, I'm not going to trivialize the lives of Iraqi's.
My point is that those war supporters who did not forsee a serious and violent backlash to the US presence in Iraq and throughout the Arab world did so because they failed to empathize with how an Iraqi would respond to any and all horrid actions committed by the US presence.
"If you were an Iraqi living in Iraq under Saddam, would you have been for or against the US coming in? Would you prefer to have been trapped indefinitely under first Saddam and then his sick sons Uday and Qusay?"--Ann
yeah, that's what Colin Powell was briefing the UN on, that's the 'mushroon cloud' alluded to by Condi & Rumsfeld, sure
that's the lamest response from the pro-war, for other people, crowd..
My point is that those war supporters who did not forsee a serious and violent backlash to the US presence in Iraq and throughout the Arab world did so because they failed to empathize with how an Iraqi would respond to any and all horrid actions committed by the US presence.
Or, maybe they underestimated the amount of opportunity that would be taken by criminal elements in Iran and Syria to try and destabilize Iraq at the expense of Iraqis for the sake of generating anti-American propganda. Interestingly, Iraq's own neighbors are fairly indifferent to Iraqi lives if given the chance to strike a blow for...well, it ain't freedom they're after, anyway.
We do have a Ministry of Propaganda. It's quite large and elaborate
and it's paid for by money taken from taxpayers. But I don't think the
White House has any control of it.
Our public schools and our universities are our true Ministry of
Propaganda. The idea that the White House somehow dominates our public
discourse is laughable.
We have a religion, a social movement, that does run that Ministry of
Propaganda. With a few exceptions it's the same at every university
and high school. Politicians, don't direct this Ministry, on the contrary
influence mostly runs the other way.
Ironically, Matthew Yglesias seems to a willing collaborator with
this Ministry of Propaganda. I don't think he's paid for it. But
most of his ideas and messages are very much the sort of thing our
Ministry of Propaganda approves of.
"Ann, unlike you, I'm not going to trivialize the lives of Iraqi's."
How was I doing that? The people of Iraq were trapped by a brutal dictator. You say that I am trivializing their lives by considering the situation that they actually faced at the time, while you avoid discussing what would have happened to them if the US had left Saddam alone.
MEH - there were many reasons to go into Iraq, including WMDs (which, given the information available at the time, were a valid concern). I can remember the Bush administration, before the invasion, trying to explain all of the many reasons, but all that reporters and the anti-war crowd wanted to discuss was WMDs.
aMouseforallSeasons -
Good point about outside interference!
I'm not sure anyone thinks that an indefinite occupation is a "good idea." A lot of people believe that we should stay until Iraq is stable and can take care of itself. We were in Europe for a long time and are still in Germany. We are still in Japan. We are still in South Korea.
I have yet to hear mass demands that we pull out of the quagmire that is Germany. Once Iraq is stable and the terrorists and foreign fighters have been suppressed, we probably should maintain bases in Iraq to provide our forces with a safe haven in the region.
What is wrong with letting the people in the know do the thinking for us?
It's not good to have everyone doing thinking.
That is mob rule!
Per Sherman:
Sherman's march to the sea wasn't an orgy of raping and pillaging, Gone With the Wind aside. Sherman wanted to destroy Georgia's capacity to support CSA armies, and in doing so he burned all the barns, houses, ... he could find, and freed every slave he could. His guys didn't do anything nasty to any civilians beyond destroying their property, and he left enough so they wouldn't starve, again Gone With the Wind is a novel, but not enough to send any surplus off to Bobby Lee.
Sherman wasn't Genghis Khan, no matter what the Southern legend says.
Megan: I agree with much of what you say. However, Matt's substantial point is right: when the national security structure gets behind a war that the people reject then this is asking for trouble.
There is something especially corrosive about this war, including the vast amount of self-deception we have all practised in order to avoid the guilt of what we have done.
As you and many people have been saying, the key insight of the Nuremberg tribunals was that using war as a policy tool is the master war crime that exceeds all others, because it leads inexorably to all the others.
Matt and Glen are surely right: this war is deeply unhealthy for the democracy and the Republic.
I'll respond to one point of joe schmoe's--we are not, at any level from National down to platoon, fighting a war to "colonize" either Iraq or Afghanistan. Disagree with the war if you must, but at least disagree with what we are doing, not some bogeyman.
Chris Dorman:
This is probably one of the most meaningless things that I've seen in online debates, at that says a lot. There's no such thing as a war that's not a "policy tool"--to include the Civil War and World War II.
War is, plain and simple, one extension of policy. If anything, losing sight of that fact is responsible for most of the issues we're having now in Iraq.
Once Iraq is stable and the terrorists and foreign fighters have been suppressed, we probably should maintain bases in Iraq to provide our forces with a safe haven in the region.
Also ponies. Don't forget the ponies.
Aggressive wars probably entail more torture, because they generate more resistance from civilians and (other things being equal) more effective opposition from opposing forces than do wars fought for defensive or preemptive (not the same as preventive) purposes. Also, they tend to be dedicated to more amorphous goals than defensive wars, and this too makes torture more likely. Intensity of force is substituted for clarity of goals and therefore precision of means.
It's not the Ministry of Propaganda, it's the Ministry of Truth. See the article
http://tinyurl.com/4dn8c4
...there were many reasons to go into Iraq, including WMDs (which, given the information available at the time, were a valid concern). I can remember the Bush administration, before the invasion, trying to explain all of the many reasons, but all that reporters and the anti-war crowd wanted to discuss was WMDs.
How does it feel to be so controlled and lead by this administration -- through fear and your own ignorance -- that you've completely surrendered your ability to apply logic and reason to an argument.
You were lied to. You were lied to because the people who lied to you had an agenda they couldn't sell honestly. Unlike many of us, who were able to see through the gaps in logic and the fear-based propaganda, you've just become another one of the lemmings.
Hitler, through the guise of a depression, was able to sell many of the Germans on the idea that the Jews were responsible for their misfortunes. Would you have been one of the gullible people who would have fallen for those lies as well?
Yancy, thanks, and D'oh!
(I should make a resolution to re-read posts before commenting on them; I have a bad habit of skimming on first reading).
Hansel, you're being arrogant, condescending, irrational, and inaccurate all in three paragraphs.
The Bush administration did have more of a case to make for war in Iraq than simply WMDs. Among other things, they included Saddam's repeated defiance of UN resolutions, and his abuses of human rights.
Furthermore, application of this logic you tout so highly suggests that if you want to reduce the level of terrorism in the world, you don't just go after the one group that poked you in the eye today; you go after the ones fomenting more terrorism, too.
To then set yourself apart as the enlightened elite who could "see through the gaps in logic" while the rest of us were so many blinkered "lemmings" is condescending and arrogant. We aren't stupid or blind. There is a there, there. To dismiss it as something akin to Hitlerian propaganda makes you look dumb.
Furthermore, application of this logic you tout so highly suggests that if you want to reduce the level of terrorism in the world, you don't just go after the one group that poked you in the eye today; you go after the ones fomenting more terrorism, too.
Why stop with Iraq? You are so sure that Iraq would be a threat to you in the future (without a solid case) that you'd condone this war (lets put aside the garbage about "more of a case". The administration spent countless months building a case for the public and the world that it was Saddam's WMD program that was an immediate threat - a threat so immediate he couldn't even wait for a second vote in the UN. If he had made a case on everything else, we wouldn't be in there, justifiably so).
What about Iran, if you're so bold? Or North Korea? If you think the answer to our security is in pummelling every country we suspect of doing us harm in the future, that is not only the recipe for a failed campaign and a depleted US, but irrational and the mindset of someone who is truly, completely frightened - beyond being embarrassingly simplistic and void of any understanding of the complexities of other countries, their own sense of Nationalism and their allegiences.
The only one looking dumb today are those who are so scared of their own shadow they still prop up this abomination of a President.
Condescending? You bet I am -- since it's idiots like you who voted this monster in office for two terms and bear some responsibility for the damage he's wrought.
You're compounding your own error now. You really have no clue whatsoever how I and others feel about this, so you commit the error of resorting to a lazy argument - that we're idiots.
Start with the assumption that we're not idiots, and try to come up with a better narrative. Really try. Watch me, for example: people who oppose the war, do so for a variety of reasons, including: they feel diplomatic options were still available; they felt that a classic casus belli should have been necessary first, and none occurred; they felt (mistakenly, IMO, I repeat) that the premise of WMDs was flawed, and therefore the war was illegal. While I disagree with these viewpoints, I have little trouble imagining a perfectly rational mind believing them, as well as others.
If instead you so zealously insist that Bush is a monster and that we're all idiots, then I know I really don't want your influence on world politics, as you'd clearly have priority problems.
Idiots after the fact. You may be a smart person, but you've not acted smart when you voted.
And I'm not saying you didn't have your own set of reasons for voting this abomination in office -- it's just that your set of reasons were flawed.
You feel entitled to this argument that there really was an immediate WMD threat in Iraq. Not only was there not, but your own President admitted that there were no WMD's there. Facts and evidence have weight, believe it or not. Just because you may believe that these weapons were spirited away to Syria or buried deep underground doesn't mean anything. No facts. No evidence -- and certainly not a good enough rationale for initiating a war.
Look, you've spent the good part of 8 years believing a man who has not proven credible on more things than any of us can name. I am not so naive as to believe that a man and his administration - who have fouled up everything in their path with, maybe, one smart move (actually going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan) - is a secret genius. He's proven in his life before this office that he was a short-sighted failure. Nothing has proven different here. He doesn't deserve your support.
I don't feel entitled to an argument that there was an immediate WMD threat in Iraq. I never did. I will say that it seemed awfully darn plausible at the time, but now that it doesn't, it doesn't matter, because that wasn't the main reason I favored the war. I favored it - and still do - because of Saddam's full-throated support of international terrorism. If we didn't do anything about it, it wouldn't have mattered whether we caught Osama or not. It's like those kids in the playground who all decide to pick on one. Only one of them actually hits him at a time, so that's the only one he can retaliate against, while the rest take turns setting up to keep hitting him from behind. It was never going to stop. The kid knows that, but the playground authorities don't, because this is all happening below their radar.
So the whole WMD thing strikes me as a manufactured bone of contention. Several people in the Bush administration probably knew that wouldn't sell all by itself, as much as it needed to. Bush probably knew it too. And of course you and everyone else obsesses on the WMD thing. I knew which way this was going to play out ever since media outlets started pushing around the "Seventeen Words" meme. They, and you, aren't looking at the bigger picture.
Meanwhile, while I'm being taken to the woodshed for defending Bush's actions, no viable alternative is offered. What was I supposed to do in 2004? Vote for Kerry?? I'm sure this is going to be another debate here, but while I didn't think Bush was perfect, he sure as well looked like a better option to me than Kerry. And still does.
As a voter and taxpayer finding himself in an international crisis, I'm much, much more interested in making the best out of what I've got, while you seem to be nagging me because I won't spend enough time at the Better Business Bureau of Presidents demanding a higher quality product. In the process, you make posts here that sound as if you see nothing more serious at stake than your ability to play the role of conscience.
I'll admit, Kerry was a miserable choice. It amazes me that every 4 years we can generate a new crop of Olympic athletes that are at least as good as the last crop, yet we can't find a few good candidates for President.
Still in all, I would have taken a chance on Kerry just knowing the damage this current President was game to cause - and to some degree did.
As far as your schoolyard argument, it still doesn't wash. Like a good chess player, you can't simply charge across the board and expect to win. Your moves need to be planned out smartly. All our unnecessary aggression and international lying has done is create more groups who want to do us harm, diminish the respect (and cooperation we get from that respect) we received around the world, and put us in a corner where we are exhausting our finances, military and options. Not the outcome of a sharp government. And I blame this administration for their simplistic, short-sighted, delusional approach to just about everything that falls in their path.
Yes, Kerry was a shlub, but he would have been a better shlub that the shrub.