The NYT's New Pro-War Propaganda Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 23:09:57 -0500 (CDT) Y'all may have noticed how rarely I find myself able to share an item from the New York Times -- Judith Miller's contributions to truth come to mind as good examples of misleading items, -- but today the "paper of record" thought fit to print some new pro-war propaganda. which caught the attention of Robert Parry. So here's Parry's analysis, followed by the complete NY-Times propaganda suggestion that the war is going well and that Iraq prosperity is just round the corner. M. ############## http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/073007.html The NYT's New Pro-War Propaganda By Robert Parry July 30, 2007 *Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. ########## No need to wait until September. It's already obvious how George W. Bush and his still-influential supporters in Washington will sell an open-ended U.S. military occupation of Iraq - just the way they always have: the war finally has turned the corner and withdrawal now would betray the troops by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. At one time, the Iraq story line was how many schoolrooms had been painted or how well the government security forces were doing. Now there are new silver linings being detected that will justify a positive progress report in September - and the U.S. news media is again ready to play its credulous part. President Bush signaled the happy-news judgment of his hand-picked commander, Gen. David Petraeus, in a round of confident public appearances over the past two weeks. With his effusive praise of "David," as Bush called the general at a White House news conference, the President acted like a smug student arriving for a test with the answers tucked in his pocket. Another key element of the coming propaganda campaign was previewed on the op-ed page of the New York Times on July 30 as Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution portrayed themselves as tough critics of the Bush administration who, after a visit to Iraq, now must face the facts: Bush's "surge" is working. "As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily `victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with," O'Hanlon and Pollack wrote in an article entitled "A War We Just Might Win." Yet the authors - and the New York Times - failed to tell readers the full story about these supposed skeptics: far from grizzled peaceniks, O'Hanlon and Pollack have been longtime cheerleaders for a larger U.S. military occupying force in Iraq. Indeed, Pollack, a former CIA analyst, was a leading advocate for invading Iraq in the first place. He published The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq in September 2002, just as the Bush administration was gearing up its marketing push for going to war. British journalist Robert Fisk called Pollack's book the "most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent [war] `debate' in the United States." (Meretricious, by the way, refers to something that is based on pretense, deception or insincerity.) NEOCON `FULL MONTE' Pollack's influential book offered the "full monte" neoconservative vision for remaking the Middle East, with the Iraq invasion as only the first step in the transformation. Ousting Saddam Hussein "would sever the `linkage' between the Iraq issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict," Pollack wrote. "It would remove an important source of anti-Americanism." But Pollack was wrong in his predictions. If anything, the Iraq War has deepened Arab-Israeli animosities while enflaming the region's anti-Americanism. Also, in Fisk's view, "Pollack's argument for war was breathtakingly amoral. War would be the right decision, it seemed, not because it was morally necessary but because we would win. War was now a viable and potentially successful policy option. "It would free up Washington's `foreign policy agenda,' presumably allowing it to invade another country or two where American vital interests would be discovered. [Pollack's] narrative - in essence an Israeli one - is quite simple: deprived of the support of one of the Arab world's most powerful nations, the Palestinians would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation." [See Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilization] After the U.S. invasion of Iraq failed to locate the promised weapons of mass destruction - and a stubborn Iraqi insurgency emerged - Pollack offered an apology for his high-profile role in promoting the war. In fall 2004, Pollack told an interviewer for the New York Times magazine, "I made a mistake based on faulty intelligence. Of course, I feel guilty about it. I feel awful. ... I'm sorry; I'm sorry!" [NYT Magazine, Oct. 24, 2004] But now Pollack - having re-positioned himself from war booster to war critic - can reinvent himself again as a grudging convert to the wisdom of Bush's war strategy, without either him or the Times editors alerting readers to this reverse metamorphosis. This idea of a critic reluctantly admitting the wisdom of a neoconservative strategy has long been one of the neocons' favorite propaganda tactics dating back to the Cold War days of the 1980s. Then, a common neocon refrain was that "even the liberal New Republic" supported the Nicaraguan contra rebels. That endorsement supposedly lent the contra cause greater weight because the New Republic had a historic reputation as a leftist magazine. In reality, however, the New Republic had been taken over by neocon Martin Peretz in the 1970s, and he had turned it into a home for neocon and right-wing pundits, such as Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes. Yet, if Americans didn't know those details, they could be influenced by an out-of-date impression, much as many people still recall Brookings as a "liberal" think tank, an image that Brookings has worked quietly to shed since it started moving rightward in the 1980s, bringing in more centrist, center-right and neoconservative analysts. SURGE BACKER In 2002-03, Pollack's Brookings colleague, O'Hanlon, was more skeptical about the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq than Pollack was. For instance, O'Hanlon correctly doubted the evidence of links between Hussein's secular government and the Islamic extremists of al-Qaeda. But O'Hanlon carefully covered all his bases, arguing that "there is a case for overthrowing Mr. Hussein if we cannot re-establish and improve the inspections and disarmament process in Iraq. But it has more to do with the region's security than with any unlikely Hussein-al-Qaeda link." [Baltimore Sun, Sept. 26, 2002] Since the failure to find WMD stockpiles and the stumbling occupation, O'Hanlon and Pollack have constructed reputations as critics of Bush's war strategy not by objecting to its imperial impulses or the immorality of invading a country at peace but by hitting the administration for an inadequate commitment of troops and resources. In other words, they have fit themselves in with many Washington insiders who still maintain that the invasion was a fine and noble idea; the only problem was the incompetent occupation. Along those lines in early 2007, O'Hanlon emerged as a defender of Bush's plan to send more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq. On Jan. 14, he published a Washington Post op-ed entitled, "A Skeptic's Case For the Surge." O'Hanlon's chief pro-surge argument was to hoist Iraq War opponents on their own petard - their supposed complaint that Bush's failure was in not sending enough troops and not giving the military the necessary tools. "On the military surge itself, critics of the administration's Iraq policy have consistently argued that the United States never deployed enough soldiers and Marines to Iraq," O'Hanlon wrote. "Now Bush has essentially conceded his critics' point ... It would ... be counterintuitive for the president's critics to prevent him from carrying out the very policy they have collectively recommended." While perhaps a clever debating point, O'Hanlon's argument is disingenuous. It is not accurate to say that war critics "collectively" wanted Bush to invade with a larger army and then to throttle Iraq with a bigger occupation force. Many - indeed probably most - war critics opposed any invasion and any occupation, basing their objections on legal and moral grounds, noting that international law prohibits aggressive wars and that Iraq was not threatening the United States. It's also disingenuous today for O'Hanlon and Pollack to present themselves as harsh critics of Bush's Iraq War when, in fact, they either advocated the invasion (in Pollack's case) or eagerly promoted the surge (as O'Hanlon did). At minimum, they should have given a fuller accounting of their past positions. To read their op-ed in the New York Times, an unsuspecting reader would get the impression that these two hard-boiled anti-war skeptics have finally been won over to Bush's wisdom by the strength of the evidence. That simply isn't the case; they were predisposed to Bush's position to begin with. The reality appears to be that these two on-and-off war supporters were given an administration-sponsored tour of Iraq with the expectation that they would return to Washington with glowing reports about the war's progress, made all the more believable by them playing up - or puffing up - their credentials as war critics. IN THAT CASE, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. [For other examples of the U.S. press corps' misleading coverage of Iraq, see our new book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.] While one might yawn about the predictability of the Bush administration and its mouthpieces misleading the public once again, readers of the New York Times might reasonably expect that - given the newspaper's role aiding and abetting the march into this disastrous war five years ago - that the editors at least might insist on a more accurate ID for these two "experts." ########## http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html?_r=4&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin NY Times: July 30, 2007 A WAR WE JUST MIGHT WIN By MICHAEL E. OHANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK *Michael E. OHanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administrations critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place. Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administrations miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily victory but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with. After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work. Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference. Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done. In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups who were now competing to secure his friendship. In Baghdads Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived. We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark. But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq). In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Armys highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab. In the past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few jundis (soldiers) to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005. The additional American military formations brought in as part of the surge, General Petraeuss determination to hold areas until they are truly secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave. In war, sometimes its important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadrs Mahdi Army. These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor. Another surprise was how well the coalitions new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants. In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the war had known little about governance or business but were now ably immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a decent life. Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the creation of neutral security forces beyond their control. In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation or at least accommodation are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines. How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.