Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion
Posted on 11/14/2012 by Juan Cole
Journalist Michael Hastings asks some quick, sharp questions about press deference to power.
Hastings is the author of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan
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Excellent moment in the newscycle.
Because he felated the ChimpCo regime with an awesome oped and the Army needed a fall guy.
There’s the Narrative (that so many buy into, because, not surprisingly given the effort expended to create it, it fits so comfortably and neatly with the Exceptionalist, jingoist world view) and there’s the reality. Which is so wonderfully inconsistent with the Narrative, when fortuity lifts little corners of the Big Sand and Spinach Tarp and exposes how it’s really being done, in our names and with our money.
And no, all “Arabs” and “Iranians” and all the other folks that some of us are so charmed as to identify as “Unlawful Enemas” are not nice people. But it sure seems that the way the Game is being played simply amplifies the badness, here, there, and everywhere. Of course there are so many dark corners where rats and roaches can do their business that it’s impossible to keep it all illuminated so we who are sponsoring the Pretty Narrative can at least see the Actual Reality parts, not the images displayed like Pat Tillman and pre-Pecker-Problems Petraeus and All-Wise McChrystal and Unknown-Unknowns Rummy and Dick the Lesser Cheney, and have half a chance at getting to ask, and even maybe weigh in on the decisions, whether what all those jackals and sneaky-petes and Foggy-Bottomists and Pentagrammers make any sense in our increasingly mutually vulnerable world.
On the other hand, suspension of disbelief is so, ah, comforting. Along with the reassurance that Competent Expert People are “in charge here.”
“My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.” Plauger, P. J. (Apparently inapplicable to Foreign Policy and Military Doctrine Experts, who are generally personally immune to the hard consequences of their policies and doctrines. Getting canned for getting caught with your pants down, and maybe other unspecified but wonderfully speculatable-about misdemeanors and felonies, is not a hard consequence.)
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.”
Niels Bohr
Read more at link to brainyquote.com
(Some of our War Leaders seem to be approaching that limit, but the boundary on the right side of the graph is quite asymptotic… Good thing for them — and more so for the rest of us — that so far, there’s been enough resilience in our living system to spare us from any really hugely mortal consequences and outcomes.)
Any careful examination of the record shows that Petreaus’ surge in Iraq didn’t actually succeed in achieving its stated objectives. However, it did allow the U.S. to save face and avoid a humiliating precipitous withdrawal from the country. This was paramount for the Washington establishment and the reason he’s been lionized.
The press is a lap-dog, so why it doesa anything depends on whose “lap” is active.
Why he WAS ousted? I dunno. The government must be filled, FILLED, with people (mostly men?) having affairs. So why him? Is having an affair a sort of pre-signed letter of resignation? If so, who put the “letter” into effect?
Why Petraeus should have been ousted? Because he fomented war with Iran (per USA’s neocons and Israel’s government).
Ray McGovern says: “MCGOVERN: Well, if you look at Afghanistan alone, you know, he kept saying, there’s progress, there’s great progress. But it’s fragile and it’s reversible. So, you know, if I’m no longer commanding the forces there, it could become reversible. Okay? He comes back and heads up the CIA. And then what do you see him doing? Supporting his favorite war in Afghanistan, and even more, trying to gin up more opposition to Iran by creating the kind of “intelligence” (in quotes) that Dick Cheney and George Tenet used to create.
I remember it was just a couple of years ago he was in Iraq at the time, maybe five years ago, and Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came and announced to the press Petraeus has found a whole cache of Iranian-supplied, freshly supplied weaponry right outside Baghdad here, and in just ten days he’s going to have—bring you out there and show you. Guess what? Nothing happened. They cancelled the press conference because there were no Iranian freshly supplied weapons. Petraeus likes to make stuff up, okay? And that’s really not what you should be doing, either as a general or as the head of the CIA. * * *
MCGOVERN: That is very unusual, and it’s guesswork on my part. But I think it’s true he probably went to Jim Clapper, who is the director of national intelligence, who says, you know, I’ve got this problem, okay. Maybe I should resign. And my notion of what Clapper said: I think that’s probably a good idea under the circumstances. Now they’re glad to get rid of him. They want to have a rapprochement or at least some direct contacts with Iran, without these neocons represented by Petraeus backbiting behind him. They want to—.”
For all those Really Smart People who know all there is to know about Afghanistan now and in the future if only the pet policies and institutions they apologize for are carried out and carried along (at great and growing expense), here’s maybe one tiny piece of a niggling bit of a smidgen of doubt about Our Allies Who Are Running/Stealing The Country: