I get in these moods, they aren't fun, or particularly healthy, and I need reminders that the p.o.v. may be kicked toward unnecessary cynicism or despair etc.
Reminders that are getting hard to find.
Arkin seems to be acknowledging the long-held consensus amongst some of us that Feith et al drove the US into Iraq, though this has never been editorially clarified by the editors that sold the war like a brand-new car, not in a way the public could get to it; and even less clear, though far more crucial, is that it was all done by the media, especially including the Post, the NY and LA Times etc.William M. Arkin, in the Washington Post, on Michael Hayden
"this active duty general, this high ranking government official, this career intelligence officer, this nominee to be CIA director":"You'd think they were pretty bad people because that's what I was looking for and that's what I built up. That'd be very wrong, OK? That would be inaccurate. That would be misleading."How much influence Feith's shop ended up having is still an open question, but the process of demonization had a profound impact. Prey to a kind of celebrity gossip stream of intelligence and blind to any balanced picture that might suggest a different course of action, the administration convinced itself that containment was not sufficient with Iraq.
Far more importantly, post 9/11, the same mentality has been applied to al Qaeda. The Bush insiders have lapped up every piece of intelligence affirming a conclusion that terrorists threaten the American way of life, that they are only a hair away from obtaining WMD.
A more balanced assessment might be to conclude that there are only a few thousand terrorists out there, angry, motivated, evil, but not an army worthy of overstatement. We could create a self-perpetuating intelligence stream that reinforces the notion that we are in a fight to the finish against an implacable America-destroying enemy. But a more balanced view is that these extremists can be contained and ultimately undermined through a more low key effort, through less rhetoric and more strategy, through less war and more clandestine work, through a quieter, slower, less bombastic effort that doesn't itself serve as the stimuli for recruitment and expansion of the enemy.
Bush was elected by the media, legally or not as far as the actual voting went, his presidency was handed to him by the media like a crown. CNN and FOX elected Bush.
Arkin's points are sensible and cogent, and it could almost be heartening to read a major columnist separating out from the heretofore dominant view, but the missing pieces are condemning.
The spin is Bush did it himself, and that's nonsense. Or the more sophisticated version, that Feith did it.
Whatever the token's name, the larger cloud of intrigue stays unexamined.
Who is Feith? What does he represent?
What some of us predicted - that Bush would eventually function as a cut-out, a disposable figurehead; that once the actual goal was accomplished - destruction of Iraq as a military presence in the Middle East, erection of a permanent architecture of social control in the US - the highly flexible cabal behind it would replace its puppetry with other, seemingly diametric opposites.
So now we should be seeing and hearing an almost universal scorn for the visible Bush administration figureheads from the very people whose praise and support put them there, and a slow careful placement of the next batch of puppets into the mediated public eye.
While the edifice of unlimited, and ungoverned, power built on the fear of terror remains, and grows.
Time for the anti-Bush.
