Right Wing Nut House

There were several excellent things about my appearance on C-Span’s Washington Journal this morning that I would like to share with all of you.

First and foremost, we got to see most of downtown Chicago thanks to that marvel of the internet, Mapquest. It appears that the site is run by people who are the absolute worst drivers in Christendom. They are above all speeders in that invariably, any time frame they give you to reach your destination is off by a ratio that involves the inverse square directly being proportionate to how fast you are driving. Hence, if they are off by 15 minutes in their calculations, you should add 30 MPH to your driving speed in order to achieve the miraculous driving time achieved by Mapquest calculations.

Secondly, their drivers are blind. One would ordinarily think this an actual detriment to driving but not our intrepid Mapquest employees. Hence, when they tell you to turn the wrong way down a one way street in order to reach your objective, it is easier to forgive them if you remember they can’t see this kind of insignificant detail due to their minor handicap.

It’s a very good thing that downtown Chicago is a loop because no matter where you drive, you always seem to end up back where you started - especially if you’re lost. We got to within about 4 blocks of the studio where the live feed was going to be broadcast and dang it, we just couldn’t get any closer. Good thing we made it downtown 35 minutes early (no traffic thank goodness) because we spent the next 30 of those minutes driving around looking for a way to get to the one way street that the studio was on. Oh well…we managed to hit all the high spots: We went past the Sears Tower and the Wrigley building. We even got a glimpse of Lake Michigan. All in all, a fascinating tour.

After that, the TV appearance was anticlimactic. Everyone was so nice. The C-Span host Steve Scully was a doll. He picked out this bit I wrote about Helen Thomas:

First of all, referring to Helen Thomas as “indomitable” is like calling a pig in a dress a prom queen. Thomas may be a lot of things – loud, obnoxious, disrespectful, kooky – but “indomitable” as a descriptive should be reserved for battleships, cancer survivors, and some race horses; not doddering old reporters who waddle around the press room talking about the glory days when Jack Kennedy prowled the White House looking for his next sexual conquest in the steno pool.

For a moment, I was worried he was going to pull an Oprah on me and Helen Thomas would magically appear on the C-Span set furrowing her already furrowed brow in my direction and clucking her disapproval. Thankfully, no such “gotchya” moment occurred. But I wonder now what the hell he wanted me to say? It’s a pretty good turn of a phrase if I do say so myself. And since they didn’t do it to my lefty foil, the lovely and talented Taylor Marsh, one must assume that either my snark is so much better than Marsh’s (not so; she can be just as loony as me when the opportunity presents itself) or, someone at C-Span was trying to make a point about conservatives (much more likely).

Good thing they didn’t pull up that old post I did calling John Kerry a traitorous lout. Now that would have been embarrassing (for Kerry).

All in all, a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning. I got to see the city. I had a good time talking about issues I write about everyday. And I found out that Taylor Marsh was in the Miss America pageant as “Miss Missouri” not too many years ago. (Note to Republicans: Marsh is the kind of voter you are losing. She’s pro-defense, pro-gun, and from what I can gather, a JFK Democrat not a McGovernite. Can’t talk about a “permanent majority” unless voters like her even consider voting Republican once and a while).

I’ll put up a link to the show when C-Span has it.

Jill Carroll released a statement through her employer, the Christian Science Monitor, that proves, as Jim Gerghaty says, the efficacy of editors:

During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me they would let me go if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. I agreed.

Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not. The people who kidnapped me and murdered Alan Enwiya are criminals, at best. They robbed Alan of his life and devastated his family. They put me, my family and my friends–and all those around the world, who have prayed so fervently for my release–through a horrific experience. I was, and remain, deeply angry with the people who did this.

I also gave a TV interview to the Iraqi Islamic Party shortly after my release. The party had promised me the interview would never be aired on television, and broke their word. At any rate, fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn’t threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times.

Also, at least two false statements about me have been widely aired: That I refused to travel and cooperate with the US military and that I refused to discuss my captivity with US officials. Again, neither is true.

(HT: Michelle Malkin)

I will not name names nor link to bloggers who thought the worst of Miss Carroll. They and their readers know who they are and I trust they will be suitably chastised. And if they have an ounce of integrity, they will write a public apology.

But after the sack cloth has been worn and the ashes spread, it might be a good idea to step back and see what the hell is going on here.

The speed and ferocity with which people piled on Miss Carroll for not immediately disavowing her propaganda statement as well as her first statements to the press which seemed to give her brutal captors a pass reminded me of the jaw-dropping way the left pounced on the Administration in the immediate - and by immediate I mean that lefty bloggers were screaming “incompetence” less than 24 hours after hurricane winds had died down in New Orleans - aftermath of Katrina. The point isn’t to bash the left here but to highlight a problem with blogs that seems to be presenting itself with alarming regularity.

In people’s haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us - including myself - have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.

Scalp hunting has become the national pastime of blogs. Both lefty and righty lodgepoles have some pretty impressive trophies hanging on them; Dan Rather, Mary Mapes (twice), Eason Jordon, Trent Lott, Ben Domenech, to name a few more noteworthy ones.

But is this what we are? Is this what we are becoming? Are we nothing more than a pack of digital yellow journalists writing pixelated scab sheets vying to see who we can lay low next? If this be the way to fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I truly fear that, like television, the last great technological breakthrough that promised to change the world, we will degenerate into a mindless, bottomless pit of muck and mudslinging, dragging down the culture and trivializing even the most important issues.

This is no idle concern that can be dismissed as the nature of the beast or the way of the world. This kind of thing has to be stopped, an admitted impossibility with 29 million blogs out there. Maybe it’s enough that we are aware of it and that people of good faith and good intentions will, in the end, marginalize the muckrakers and come out on top.

Don’t count on it.

Meanwhile, less than 24 hours after being released from a captivity in which she endured unspeakable fear and hardship for 87 long days, Jill Carroll was forced to come out and issue a press release stating the obvious; someone had a gun to her head threatening to kill her if she didn’t say nice things about the brutes who held her captive. The reason she was forced to issue the statement was largely a result of questions raised by the 24 hour news nets about her captivity - questions that originated on blogs. And in the ever more symbiotic relationship between the great, gaping maw that is cable news and the content rich medium of blogs that feeds the beast, questions raised if left unanswered fester like an open wound until an answer is forthcoming.

Jill Carroll was twice a victim - once of jihadist terrorists who kidnapped her and once of a culture that sought to exploit her tragedy to satisfy personal ambition and ego.

Shame on us all for allowing this to happen.

UPDATE

More Geraghty:

Permit me a Derbian moment of gloom. Carroll issues a coerced statement before she’s released, and some corners of the blogosphere erupt with a torrent of scathing hatred, declaring that Carroll “may as well just come right out and say she was a willing participant”, that she’s a “spoiled brat America-hater” and “she was anti-America when she went over there and I say the kidnapping was a put up deal from the get go.”

This is what we’ve got a blogosphere for? For these kind of (pardon my French) pissing contests? The citizenry around the globe has the greatest mass communications tool in the history of the world, and this is what it’s led to?

My question is what will the blogosphere look like 5 years from now? If things continue the way they are, we’ll be just another cog in the great mass communications bordeom killing machine, titillating and entertaining our readers with our own snarky takes on the dirt dished by the MSM while our blogs are festooned with ads for everything from cold cream to the latest super-absorbent manifestation of Depends.

So much for citizen-journalists…

UPDATE II

Ed Morrissey links here and makes a point that everyone - including me - seems to forget:

Finally, for those who blamed her for being in Iraq in the first place, let me remind you that we have continually harped on the media for being balcony reporters — for not getting outside of the Green Zone and trying to get the true stories of Iraq. Well, that’s what Jill Carroll tried to do, and she got unlucky enough to get kidnapped for her efforts. We need reporters to take those kind of chances, and we should have been more supportive of her all along. Now that she’s home, let’s hope we remember that with the next reporter unfortunate enough to find themselves the victim of violence and not victimize them a second time when they cooperate enough to be set free.

If you haven’t read this gut wrenching column by David Ignatius on how hard it is to cover the situation in Iraq, please do so. It reinforces what Ed was saying.

And Don Surber has chastised me in the comments for not linking to the bloggers who jumped on Jill Carroll so soon after her release.

As I explained to Mr. Surber in an email, I did not link because I did not want to start the petty back-and-forth between bloggers who criticize one another known as a “Blog War.” They’re silly. They’re a waste of time. And I had no intention of getting embroiled in one.

The Mesopotamian:

The situation in Baghdad is deteriorating from day to day. I have warned about this long ago. The “insurrection” is lead by the Baathists, without any doubt, and they are converging on Baghdad and seriously bent on taking over. They are creating havoc in in the capital. Very soon, if this situation continues like this the city is going to be brought to a complete standstill and paralysis. The confusion and conflict between the Americans, the army and the Ministry of interior is producing a situation where the citizens don’t know anymore whether the security personel in the street are friends, enemies, terrorists or simply criminals and thieves. Everybody is wearing the same uniforms. Whole sections of the city have virtually fallen to gangs and terrorists, and this is sepecially true for the “Sunni” dominated neighborhoods. People and businesses are being robbed and the employees kidnapped en mass in broad daylight and with complete ease as though security forces are non-existent, although we see them everwhere.

I don’t know anymore what can be done to rescue the situation. At least, those who are supposed to be in positions of responsibility should stop lying and painting a false picture. It has to be admitted that the city is under siege and has become the front battle line. Emergency measures have to be put in place immediately, otherwise as everbody in Baghdad knows, the whole city is going to fall soon. I regret sounding so pessimistic, but the alarm must be sounded with the loudest volume possible, since what is happening is Baghdad is something really awful.

The reports I’ve seen from StrategyPage and other Iraqi bloggers suggest a situation that is rapidly spiraling out of control.

This is not a pleasant prospect to contemplate but it is better to face facts and try to decide what we can do about it rather than fall back on the same, tired mantras mouthed by some of our more clueless war boosters like “the press isn’t reporting the good news out of Iraq” or “things aren’t really that bad” or even “there is no civil war.”

At the moment there is no good news coming out Iraq to report, things really are that bad, and there is a de-facto civil war raging as I write this with tit-for-tat revenge killings that now number in the hundreds - perhaps more than a thousand. They’re not fighting in the streets at the moment - but that’s only because the Sunnis are running for their lives. The Washington Post:

Sectarian violence has displaced more than 25,000 Iraqis since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine, a U.N.-affiliated agency said Tuesday, and shelters and tent cities are springing up across central and southern Iraq to house homeless Sunni and Shiite families.

The flight is continuing, according to the International Organization for Migration, which works closely with the United Nations and other groups. The result has been a population exchange as Sunni and Shiite families flee mixed communities for the safety of areas where their own sects predominate.

Two weeks ago, I believed that there was very little the United States military could do in a combat capacity to affect the situation, that it was now up to the Iraqis. What I didn’t count on was the apparent resistance of the Interior Ministry (headed up by former Badr Brigade commander Bayan Jabr) to the attempted purging of radical police elements by the Iraqi government who are under the influence (direction?) of Iran and the lengths to which radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr would go to maintain whatever influence he wields in the councils of state. The Iraqis are under enormous pressure from American Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to clean out the nest of intrigue and possible traitors at Interior while at the same time reigning in the Shia militias.

The reports of both Muqtada al-Sadr’s black clad Mehdi Militiamen and uniformed police working together to haul away innocent Sunnis and suspected insurgents who then disappear and are later found brutally murdered have become too numerous to ignore as simply “anecdotal evidence.” Al-Sadr’s militiamen have infiltrated the police and are apparently working together to fan the flames of violence to God knows what end. It could be a power play from al-Sadr whose hand-picked Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari is under pressure by Ambassador Khalilzad to withdraw his name from consideration when the new Parliament meets, a political development that would do much to calm the situation but which is being stalled by the recalcitrance of Shi’ite negotiators who bitterly resent American interference. Or al-Sadr has lost control of his men and the numerous killings are random revenge murders with no overall plan being followed. Either scenario is extremely troubling for the future.

As for Alaa’s claim that there will be an attempt by insurgents to actually seize control of Baghdad that may be an exaggeration. A more likely occurrence is what our military commanders have been expecting for months; an effort by the insurgency to inflict a Tet-like public relations disaster on the American military by infiltrating the fortified Green Zone and slaughtering foreigners.

Just two weeks ago it was revealed that a plot by people in the Defense Ministry to carry out such an attack was foiled when it was uncovered by the authorities just in time. And then yesterday, we had this curious bit of news from the group that was holding journalist Jill Carroll hostage:

Shortly before her release, her captors - who refer to themselves as the Revenge Brigade - also told her they had infiltrated the US diplomatic compound in Baghdad, and she would be killed if she went there or cooperated with the American authorities. It was a threat she took seriously in her first few hours of freedom.

If the insurgents were ever going to try and emulate the Viet Cong’s effort to prove to the American people that victory was impossible, they couldn’t pick a better time to do it.

Bush’s job approval numbers are horrible. Support for the war is fading. Republicans are getting more and more nervous about November. Democrats smell victory. An attack inside the Green Zone that killed hundreds could very well be the tipping point that would cause a public outcry, finally galvanize the anti-war movement, start Republican lawmakers running for cover, and embolden the Democrats even further in calling for immediate withdrawal.

In short, unmitigated disaster.

Is there anything that can be done to retrieve the situation - and retrieve it in a hurry? Greg Djerejian quoting Tom Friedman: “It’s five minutes to midnight.”

Fire Donald Rumsfeld, and replace him with John Warner or Richard Armitage or someone else qualified soonest. Bulk up our troop presence in Baghdad asap, even if it means rotating some troops out of places like Anbar (especially in locations where we are still more in whack-a-mole posture than clear, build, hold). Let’s have a major show of strength, including large amounts of U.S. troops, in the most problematic neighborhoods (US troops are critical, as confidence in the integrity of Iraqi Army units as impartial arbitrers or plausible peacekeepers simply doesn’t exist yet among much of the Iraqi public. This is why under-informed blather about the Iraqi Army being “solid”, or the militias being simply “pesky”, is just crap, and it’s quite sad prominent right wing bloggers link to such hokum as offering soi disant serious perspective).

Order. Order. Order. It’s desperately needed in the capital, the very linchpin of a stable Iraq, if we mean for the country to remain a unitary state. So we need someone at the Pentagon who, at the very least, definitively comprehends said order doesn’t exist today, alas, and that the battle-space in places like Sadr City is most definitively not under control by non-militia infested forces (as Rumsfeld disingenuously claimed a couple weeks back). Nothing is more important at this hour than beating back the cycle of sectarian violence, as Friedman well explains in the context of his Beirut experience (read his whole op-ed, Times Select subscribers), especially given that a situation already fraught with such immense danger is even more so, with formation of a cohesive national government still elusive.

The prospects of chaos are obviously enhanced by such a vacuum, so all efforts to stave off further sectarian mayhem must be pursued with maximum drive. Stabilizing the situation will require, not only a real show of force on the streets, to provide for enhanced ground up security, but also more efforts from the top-down, where Ambassador Khalilzhad’s interventions to form a government need to become even more urgent. (This might include, if necessary, calibrated series of higher-level interventions by the Secretary of State, President (he’s made such calls in the past) and other very senior Administration officials, perhaps even other interested Foreign Ministers from major powers. Unfortunately, the Arab League continues to wallow in irrelevance, more worried about rising Iranian influence than doing anything even remotely helpful, which is painfully pitiable but woefully predictable, of course).

Is Greg overstating the need for American forces to step in and take the lead in securing the streets? How about this announcement from the Ministry of Defense:

“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or the police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

This message has been scrolling across the bottom of every TV channel in Iraq for days. In short, even the Iraqi military doesn’t trust its own people.

American casualties have dropped significantly in recent months for two reasons; the military is under orders not to take too many chances and our people have moved out of the cities, away from the ambushes and IED’s that accounted for most of our casualties, and into the countryside in order to ferret out insurgent strongholds in rural areas. It seems pretty clear that this has got to change and that we need to redeploy back to Baghdad.

Bold action in the streets coupled with bold action at the conference table are the only things that can stabilize the situation and give the Iraqi government a chance. And we must lower our sights on what would constitute a victory in Iraq. Instead of staying until a stable, peaceful, democratic government is achieved, it may be time to look at a scenario where violence would be continuing at some reduced level but the situation could be handled by Iraqi security forces. Any stable government that would meet the State Department or The Freedom House definition of “Partly Free” would be a significant improvement over Saddam Hussein’s rule and would still have the potential for reform.

If, as Mr. Friedman says we are at “Five minutes to Midnight” then perhaps it is time for all of us to start assessing what’s going on in Iraq in a realistic manner rather than engaging in wishful thinking. The United States is fast approaching a point in Iraq where the law of diminishing returns makes our commitment ever more problematic. Are we coming to a point where the cost of our staying there outweighs any possible gain to our security or our national interest?

We’re not there yet. But revisit this site in another month or two and that may change.