Thing In a Jar.

500 Years of Women 

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article of clothing

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Progressive Media USA – the David Brock-helmed group organized to be the main soft-money advertising vehicle for Democrats in the fall – is ditching its previously announced $40 million attack effort against John McCain,  after Barack Obama’s camp told supporters not to give money to independent expenditure groups.

That does not mean that McCain will not be attacked.  Rather, it means that such attacks will be coordinated through the DNC or Obama’s campaign infrastructure.

Open Left’s Chris Bowers wrote an important post last week about the way in which Obama’s campaign infrastructure was consolidating his power over the Democratic party.  However, a close reading of Bowers also lends itself to concluding that Obama’s campaign infrastructure is both independent from and likely an influence overarching the Democratic party if (as expected) he becomes the Democratic nominee.

The immediate capitulation of Brock’s Progg Media (which is likely indirectly tied to George Soros) is the first concrete sign of Obama’s increasing authoritah.  Those who were already inclined to see the Obama campaign as a cult of personality should take note.

The comments to my critique of Matt Bai’s New York Times Magazine profile of Sen. John McCain appear to have settled into a debate over the Vietnam service records of the candidates for the presidency in 2004.  This was perhaps to be expected, for reasons revealed below.  However, inasmuch as “The Big Picture(s)” and its follow-ups are conncerned with… the big picture, it might be useful to take a second look at the subject while removing the personalities.

Many people view the current conflict in Iraq — and perhaps the broader war against international terror movements like al-Qaeda — through the prism of Vietnam, to a greater or lesser degree.

Despite the probability of over-simplification, I will divide these people into two basic groups.

The first group learned from Vietnam that the US lost a war of insurgency and always will lose wars of insurgency.  They believe that the US cannot win “hearts and minds” and that it is impossible to win against an insurgency with any degree of popular support, because it is impossible to distinguish friend from foe.  Many in this group still believes that Walter Cronkite was corrrect in claiming that the Tet Offensive proved that the US was “mired in stalemate,”  even though the New York Times now concedes that Tet “was a military defeat for the Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese sponsors.”

The second group learned from Vietnam that the US largely defeated the Viet Cong, but ultimately lost the war because our larger geopolitical enemy was willing to support the proxy NVA, while the US cut off support to South Vietnam.  The second group believes that the US started their involvement in Vietnam with poor counter-insurgency doctrine, but that this changed under Gen. Creighton Abrams.  The second group recognizes that there have been may wars of insurgency throughout history, guerillas and insurgents are not invincible, most insurgencies fail (though they generally take time to fail) and that while Vietnam holds valuable lessons for counter-insurgency doctrine, the differences between Vietnam and Iraq may be as much or more important as any similarities.

The first group generally believes — most evidence to the contrary — that it has greater intellectual depth and nuance than the second.  Again, this is itself an over-generalization that ends up sounding overly snarky.  For example, some of the better-informed members of the first group might argue that South Vietnam was doomed to fail because of internal corruption (and then draw a parallel to the current Iraqi government). 

But Matt Bai — like virtually all of the establishment media –never gets that far in any treatment of these topics.  The media, despite the occasional concession, is in the first group and has little background or education by which to evaluate the argument of the second group.  Nor are they ideologically inclined to get that background or education.

The hackery in Matt Bai’s piece exists on several levels.  Bai raises the theme that the life experiences of those past and present Senators who fought in Vietnam affects how they view the conflict in Iraq, which likely is a nugget of truth.  However, Bai does not consider the degree to which the pre-Vietnam biographies of these people affected their views of Vietnam and Iraq.  Nor does he really consider the degree to which the post-Vietnam biographies affect their views.  Bai reports that McCain studied the Vietnam war and criticism of US counter-insurgency doctrine at the National War College, as well as McCain’s view of Vietnam.  But there is nothing in Bai’s piece suggesting that he attempted to evaluate McCain’s thesis before summarily dismissing it in favor of the convential narrative of the first group.

Bai’s apparent pre-existing ignorance thus precluded him from asking McCain any meaningful questions about how his study of Vietnam has affected his view of Iraq throughout the duration of the latter (including McCain’s criticisms of US tactics in the early part of the insurgency). 

Worse, Bai’s ignorance precluded him from asking tougher questions of McCain.  For example, given that McCain believes Vietnam was ultimately lost in the US (and particularly in the US Congress), Bai might have asked McCain whether he foresaw that an insurgency could emerge after the US toppled Saddam.  If he did (or when the insurgency appeared), did McCain understand that the degree to which that US public opinion was divided on the Iraq invasion in the first instance might determine the success of the mission?  Does he believe that the Bush Administration — or John McCain — did enough to educate the American people as to what a reasonable timeframe for defeating an insurgency might be?  Why did US counter-insurgency doctrine have to be given a major overhaul by Gen. Petraeus and others?  Was it all due to lessons learned in Iraq, or did the US military give insufficient attention to counter-insurgency doctrine after Vietnam?  These are questions that might have educated and informed readers, rather than inclining them to once again wallow in the quagmire of Boomer recriminations over who did what in Vietnam.

Conversely, Bai’s unthinking acceptance of the conventional narrative of Vietnam allows that narrative to escape scrutiny for what it portends in the broader war against international terror networks (and ultimately the danger of homegrown terror cells).  If the US cannot win a war of counter-insurgency, is the US similarly unable to defeat other forms of asymmetrical warfare like terrorism?  If the US simply lacks the patience necessary to win asymmetrical warfare, won’t our enemies be emboldened to wage it more theaters, ultimately in the US?  In a few decades, will the domestic security of the US resemble that of Israel?  Some on the Left may well have thoughtful responses to those questions, but the debate over such questions never moves forward as long as political and journalistic hacks remain stuck in their own ideological narrative.

Here.  Which is why I know that the spittle-flecked uber-douchebag will be happy to set an example.  More on Keith’s very special comment.

In “The Big Picture(s)” — an extended analysis of the establishment media’s coverage of the conflict in Iraq — one theme which emerged was that the media frequently invoked Vietnam as an analogy, even before the emergence of the Sunni insurgency.  Moreover, the establishment media evoked a particular narrative of the Vietnam War which ignored the ongoing historical debate over the course that conflict ultimately took.  The news consuming public was thus treated to the spectacle of a media which reported thousands of stories invoking the Vietnam analogy hysterically and hypocritically condemning President Bush for invoking Vietnam analogies of his own.

The upcoming issue of The New York Times Magazine contains a profile of Sen. John McCain by Matt Bai that fits confortably into this genre. Comparing McCain’s support for the mission in Iraq to the opposition of Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and the Democrats John Kerry and Jim Webb — as well as former Democratic colleagues like Bob Kerrey, Max Cleland and Chuck Robb — Bai writes:

There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

Not all of McCain’s fellow veterans subscribe to the theory that the singularity of his war experience has anything to do with his intransigence on Iraq. (Bob Kerrey, for one, told me that while he was aware of this argument, he has never believed it.) But some suspect that whatever lesson McCain took away from his time in Vietnam, it was not the one that stayed with his colleagues who were “in country” during those years — that some wars simply can’t be won on the battlefield, no matter how long you fight them, no matter how many soldiers you send there to die.

That is the narrative of the safely anonymous “some” who misunderstand or choose to misrepresent McCain’s actual position on Iraq, as set forth in his speech at the Virginia Military Institute in April 2007:

We all agree a military solution alone will not solve the problems of Iraq. There must be a political agreement among Iraqis that allows all groups to participate in the building of their nation, to share in its resources and to live in peace with each other. But without greater security imposed by the United States military and the Iraqi Army, there can be no political solution. As Americans and Iraqis sacrifice to provide that security, Iraq’s leaders must do the hard work of political reconciliation. We can help them get there, but we cannot assume their responsibilities. Unless they accept their own obligations to all Iraqis, we will all fail, and America, Iraq and the world will have to live with the terrible consequences. We are giving Iraq’s leaders and people the chance to have a better future, but they must seize it.

It is thus obvious that McCain understands that the war will not ultimately be won on the battlefield.  It is worth noting, however, that since McCain gave that speech, civilian casualties have plummeted and the Iraqi government has been taking steps toward political reconciliation.  It is of particular note that Prime Minister al-Maliki’s military crackdown on the Mahdi Army in Basra promoted political reconciliation, because Bai invokes a “Vietnamization” analogy to suggest that Basra was a failure — even though the New York Times itself has acknowledged the successes of that operation. 

The establishment media’s early coverage of the Basra offensive was much like its coverage of the Tet offensive: dead wrong and militarily ignorant.  Bai is still clinging to that bad old reportage because about 1,000 Iraqi soldiers deserted early on (mostly green troops from a newly formed brigade), ignoring that the New York Times pegged this at only four percent of the total Iraqi forces involved in the battle of Basra.

More broadly, Bai’s anonymous “some” are imposing their personal perspectives of Vietnam onto the conflict in Iraq, regardless of the myriad differences between the two conflicts.  It is the narrative of people whose personal experiences have helped lead them to uncritically accept myths about invincible guerrillas and insurgents — myths that US Naval War College Professor Donald Stoker argues are a direct result of America’s collective misunderstanding of its defeat in South Vietnam.  As I wrote of the media in “The Big Picture(s)”:

Moreover, as Prof. Stoker noted in the January 2007 issue of Foreign Policy, history shows that insurgents rarely win, though victory over an insurgency usually requires a decade, on average.  A Dupuy Institute study for the DoD showed that even post-World War II insurgencies lost 60% of the time. Of course, each conflict is unique, and the differences are as important as the similarities.  Yet this only underscores the problem of the establishment media perpetuating the single case of Vietnam to frame its “big picture” of the conflict in Iraq.

That Stoker is a professor at the Naval War College is serendipitous to the fact that when McCain returned home from Vietnam, he chose to study counter-insurgency — including criticism of US tactics in Vietnam — at the prestigious National War College.  That study — which neither Bai nor his anonymous “some” appear to have undertaken — led McCain to conclude (as military historians like Lewis Sorley have) that the counter-insurgency strategy pursued by Gen. Creighton Abrams starting in 1968 was largely successful but ultimately undercut by the continually shrinking domestic political support for the war in the US (again recognizing the political component of counter-insurgency).  Bai’s derogatory reference to “Vietnamization” suggests he disagrees, though he never provides evidence or argument to back his dismissive attitude.

Sadly, this is no surprise.  Bai gets away with tossing around facile Vietnam analogies, armchair psychoanalysis and skewed characterizations of the Basra offensive because it is of a piece with what his comrades in the establishment media have done since before the invasion of Iraq.  All it requires is ignorance, laziness, arrogance and a progressive bias against US military actions – qualities found in abundance within the establishment media.

(h/t Ed Morrissey, who notes that Bai also manages to exaggerate Max Cleland’s service record.)

Update: I have posted an addendum in response to the general thrust of the comments to this post.

I was kidding yesterday, but apparently Luis Salgado did not appreciate the deadpan tone:

Salgado, 28, owner of the Ill Skillz (4948 N. 5th) tattoo parlor just got a portrait of Clinton inked on his leg at a tattoo convention in Baltimore.

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…Salgado’s new ink is featured in Tattoo Review. The mag’s publisher Carey Exton says he thinks many tattooed people are for Clinton because she “tells it like it is.”

Excitable Andy was gobsmacked/nauseated/heartsick, natch.

… puts film firmly back in the role it should play in society:

Penn said it was impossible to separate film from politics, and promised that the winning film would be a reflection of the current climate.

“One way or another, when we select the Palme d’Or winner, I think we are going to feel very confident that the film-maker who made the film is very aware of the times in which he or she lives.”

Somewhere, V.I. Lenin smiles.

From Attack Machine:

The Australian:

There is a certain familiarity to the concomitant series of actions and reactions when disaster strikes in the world. The US stands ready, willing and able to offer assistance. It is often the first country to send in millions of dollars, navy strike groups loaded with food and medical supplies, and transport planes, helicopters and floating hospitals to help those devastated by natural disaster.

Then, just as swift and with equal predictability, those wedded to the Great Satan view of the US begin to carp, drawing on a potent mixture of cynicism and conspiracy theories to criticise the last remaining superpower. When the US keeps doing so much of the heavy lifting to alleviate suffering, you’d figure that the anti-Americans might eventually revise their view of the US. But they never do. And coming under constant attack even when helping others, you’d figure that Americans would eventually draw the curtains on world crises. But they haven’t. At least not yet.

So it was last week. The US stood ready to help the cyclone-ravaged Burmese people.

Why so? Because the Navy was nearby training for disaster relief efforts. We’re such imperialists, we all should be ashamed.

It did not matter that Burma’s ruling junta was no friend of the Americans. With more than 100,000 people feared dead and many more hundreds of thousands left destitute, US Air Force cargo planes loaded with supplies and personnel started arriving in nearby Thailand to begin humanitarian operations in Burma.

A US Navy strike group in the Gulf of Thailand sent helicopters ashore, ready to arrive in Burma within hours. Alas, Burma’s military leaders left their people to die for 10 days before finally accepting help from the evil empire. Even if the Yanks are allowed to boost their assistance to Burma, they can expect a groundswell of criticism.

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The need to paint Americans as a greedy, selfish, war-mongering superpower cannot be disturbed by facts. It matters not that, in the year before the tsunami, the US provided $2.4 billion in humanitarian relief: 40per cent of all the relief aid given to the world in 2003. Never mind that development and emergency relief rose from $10 billion during the last year of Bill Clinton’s administration to $24 billion under George W. Bush in 2003. Or that, according to a German study, Americans contribute to charities nearly seven times as much a head as Germans do. Or that, adjusted for population, American philanthropy is more than two-thirds more than British giving.

There is a teenaged immaturity about the rest of the world’s relationship with the US. Whenever a serious crisis erupts somewhere, our dependence on the US becomes obvious, and many hate the US because of it. That the hatred is irrational is beside the point.

For he’s a jolly good Satan, for he’s a jolly good Satan, for he’s a jolly good Satan . . . and so say all of us!

Mostly unrelated: premise for best disaster movie evah!

Another cool idea for a disaster!

Great resource for encountering new music, through other people’s online mixes.

The Art of Manliness suggests one hundred must-read books for men. For the most part, I approve, though I have to say that non-English authors are sadly underrepresented. What I mean to say is, almost all of these are well worth the reading, IMO.

And don’t miss the review section, “Priapus.”

UPDATE: How manly do I like my literature to be? I prefer masculine rhyme.

Double-Dactyl

Higgledy-Piggledy
Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs
(Masculine rhyme):
One sentence (two stanzas)
Hexasyllabically
Challenges poets who
Don’t have the time.

There is nothing remotely humorous about this tragedy, and anyone who finds it at all so is a terrible person:

A 52-year-old Cohoctah Township man died Saturday after his 94-year-old mother accidentally ran him over with an all-terrain vehicle, police said.

Feminist Science by Spies, Brigands and Pirates’ Markov chain program:

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