I don’t have time to do this justice, so consider this an extended “wire” post. Basically, violence is trending downward, but it’s unclear whether this is a result of U.S. strategy or other events on the ground, namely ethnic cleansing being mostly complete or pacts between competing Shiite factions. So, we’ve got good news and reassuring trends. This could mean good things or it could mean nothing. I’m hoping for the best.

Without any more commentary, here are the links:

• Obsidian Wings: Clearer signs of success, plenty of clouds in the forecast
• Balloon Juice: And If My Aunt Grows Balls
• TPMMuckraker: U.S. Reconciliation Chief Says Sunnis Could Return to Insurgency

Good reading, and all full of good links to even more.

I’ll let the video speak for itself.

Atrios links to a interview with Josh Rushing, the military press liaison who featured prominently in the film Control Room. Control Room, you might remember, is a documentary by some Al Jazeera reporters about the international perspective on the coverage of the war. The film was alright, but Josh Rushing’s part in it was among the more interesting pieces. The interview is pretty good and well worth reading for his take on how he was portrayed in the film, the type of liberties the filmmakers took, etc.

I do want to highlight one important piece of the interview, though:

Matthew Felling: On the issue of polarization, one of your quotes that got massively publicized was when you compared Fox News Channel to Al Jazeera. In your book, you mention a few anecdotes about how Fox was reporting on the war. How did you view their coverage?

Josh Rushing: When I would go out and give reasons why we were going to invade Iraq, having been given the messages from a Republican operative that was my boss, he would give me the theme of the day. Sometimes it would be “WMD,” others it would be “regime change” and others it would be “ties to terrorism.” I would go out to a Fox reporter and they would say “Are there any messages you want to get across before we get to the live interview?” And we would script the interview around the government messaging, and they would thank me for my service at the end of it. And out of fairness, that wasn’t just Fox. There were a number of American networks who did it. The reporters were in a position where there was no way their editorial leadership or their audience for that matter, wanted to see them be critical of a young troop in uniform.

But the devious part of that, is that the administration knew that and understood that and used young troops in uniform to sell the war in a way it knew couldn’t be questioned or criticized. If you look at MSNBC, they packaged their coverage with a banner that said “Our Hearts Are With You.” So when that banner is under my face and I’m giving the reasons why we need to go to war, is anyone going to ask me a critical question? Of course not, their hearts are with me. And there’s a danger in that.

The media’s purpose in a democracy is to be professionally skeptical of anything that anyone in a position of authority or power says. If they’re not, who is? Nobody, and then the people in authority and power can say and do anything they want. So I was disappointed in that.

(Italicized portions were bolded in the original piece, and the bolded sections above are my emphasis.)

He’s absolutely right, of course, but that won’t get our media to do the right thing here and think critically about the information they’re being given by government sources. When politics are involved, as they always are with the Bush administration (and in most issues in any administration), that critical filter has to be there. There are ways to respectfully ask critical questions and get at truth without having to disrespect a soldier in uniform or, well, anyone.

When history looks back at this period, I think that will be the largest theme of this era, the horrible Republicanization of the news media, where supposedly independent outlets acted as if they were just propaganda rags.

Webb was former Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, served in Vietnam, and covered war zones as a journalist in between. Oh, and he wrote an editorial warning about the consequences of invading Iraq BEFORE the war. Lieberman has no military background and has a political interest in his position.

Atrios linked approvingly to a clip of David Shuster interviewing Fouad Ajami about his bizarre op-ed in the WSJ defending Scooter Libby. The op-ed is from early June, but I didn’t comment on it then because, in addition to it’s abject hypocrisy, some were creating an inflated controversy about Ajami’s metaphor of Libby as a fallen soldier. I think the metaphor is weak, but I hate turning every issue into a question of patriotism or “supporting the troops,” a phrase that itself has become a metaphor, codeword, and partisan slogan all wrapped into one. There are legitimate cases of people not supporting soldiers (e.g. the fiasco at Walter Reed, medical care for wounded vets, etc.). This isn’t one of them.

This is, instead, a case of flawed thinking and hypocrisy. He demonstrates his own hypocrisy in the op-ed by making a clearly political case for the pardon of Scooter Libby. There is no legal principle offered, nor is there a case built on logic. Instead, he appeals to Bush’s sense of loyalty, and essentially opines that because the verdict could be interpreted by some as a verdict on the war, and Ajami feels the war is honorable, Bush should pardon him. He is, therefore, doing what he accuses opponents of the war of doing, substituting his opinion of the war for the justice before the law.

That’s the flawed thinking, and I’m quite frankly ashamed that Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS (I have an International Studies BA from Hopkins). The op-ed is riddled with poor logic and a fallacious metaphor. For example, Ajami uses the Soldier’s Creed as a way to describe the nobility of Libby’s crime, thus missing the point of the creed. The creed is noble because it represents real sacrifice on the part of soldiers. When soldiers refuse to leave a fallen comrade behind, they are risking their life to help one of their own. The fallen soldier, and all of our fighting men and women, are sacrificing time with their families, the comfort of home, and careers to do their duty.

What is Libby’s sacrifice? For Bush, who would be the one coming back for his fallen comrade, what is his sacrifice? Without that sacrifice, this metaphor is simply absurd.

More importantly, Ajami makes a simple error of logic. The leak, for which Ajami erroneously points at Armitage alone, was one issue, but the acts of perjury and obstruction were their own crimes. They stand on their own, as they did with Clinton. While I would agree that Clinton should’ve never had to answer questions about his personal sex life, the fact that he lied under oath was wrong and criminal.* Ajami glosses over the crime committed and tries to blur Libby’s act and the leak of Plame’s name into one crime. They are not.

So, while I don’t like the Hardball format, or Shuster’s odd (mis?)statement that Ajami should declare he’s using a metaphor in his piece, he was right to challenge Ajami’s editorial. After all, let’s be honest here. Ajami used this particular metaphor and wrote this piece to place Libby in a noble light for the public. It was a cheap emotional trick in a piece empty of specific claim or any evidence for why Libby was wrongly prosecuted.

If he was simply doing his job, he shouldn’t have lied, just as Armitage, Rove, and others had managed to do. It’s really that simple. Tell the truth. Follow the law. There’s nobility in that, and folks like Libby and Mr. Ajami would be good to remember it.

* Yes, I think it was criminal. Did it rise to “high crimes and misdemeanors?” No. Censure, sure, impeachment, no. As I said yesterday, he would’ve probably been given a very light sentence had he been a regular official and not President and actually gone to trial.

The guy is so caught up in his own self-importance that he doesn’t even stop to understand what he, himself, is saying. This is a man who broke every promise he made to Democrats in CT during the last election. He has not taken one action to shorten the length of the war and has gone as far as spreading Republican propaganda from this administration about “progress” in Iraq. Now, he’s calling for bombing Iran which is fundamentally nuts.

It’s a crazy, crazy proposition, what Sen. Lieberman is calling for. Historical parallels abound. For example, when we were helping the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, what would a Soviet bombing run on our bases in Europe have accomplished? It would’ve made Americans more determined to defeat the Soviets and more likely to participate in the local conflict. A bombing run like that didn’t happen because the consequences and subsequent escalation would’ve outstripped it’s utility.

Sen. Lieberman is making these wild claims because he believes there won’t be any negative consequences of bombing Iranian bases in Iranian sovereign territory. Whether this is out of some macho appreciation of our military strength or a failure to recognize basic geopolitical reality is unclear, but it’s clear his judgement is flawed. He has no mention of the cost, and his appreciation of the consequences is weak at best:

“So what I’m saying is, if we knock out a base of theirs, if we have to do that, at which they’re training these terrorists, yes, they may respond. But look, they’re already on the move against us, and they’re killing people as a result of it. I hope this is not necessary.”

All of these comes at a time when the Iranian economy may be killing itself anyway, and where the repressive regime is beginning to further crack down on the local populace. These things could be used to drive a wedge in Iranian internal politics, to help boost the voices of those sympathetic with the interests of peace in the region. All Liebermans brash, uninformed, and fundamentally ignorant comments do is strengthen the position of the hard liners in the Iranian government.

There’s also this. When you’re on the side of Dick Cheney instead of Condoleezza Rice on any debate, you’re in the wrong, especially when it comes to a consideration of using force. What about Cheney’s demonstrated judgement in the last 6 years would leave you with any confidence? For that matter, what of Lieberman’s demonstrated judgement would inspire confidence at all?

What else can you say about someone who wants to open up a third front in the Middle East. It’s not like we’re handling Afghanistan and Iraq well. This cartoon pretty much sums up Joe Lieberman:

That’s from Bob Englehart’s blog post today. Found via My Left Nutmeg, which has other reaction to Joe Lieberman’s comments.

You may have heard the “big” news today: NBC is now calling the situation in Iraq a “civil war.” This is apparently big news. Of course, not everyone is doing so. The Washington Post isn’t calling it a civil war, for example. The reason they’re not? They say it’s because the Iraqi gov’t doesn’t use the term.

NBC said more or less the same thing this morning when they announced their change in policy, claiming that the White House’s reluctance to call it a civil war was a key reason they hesitated to make the change. I get that, but at the same time, I’m confused why it matters.

At some point we’ve become a press and a society that requires the government stamp on things to make them “true” or “real.” I’m not really sure why this is, as we should be able to look at something and call it what it is. If a news organization feels like the situation in Iraq has become a civil war, why does it matter that the White House doesn’t endorse that view?

It’s just weird to me. I don’t need them to simply repeat what the White House says, but to provide an intelligent analysis and reporting on top of whatever the government is saying. Highlighting meaningful contradictions between official policy/pronouncements and what their own reporting is saying is pretty much their core function, isn’t it?

Of course, I think it’s telling that the only two articles on MSNBC.com (the web site for the Today Show and NBC News, not just MSNBC) about this new policy from NBC are from Reuters. After all, how much original reporting actually happens in ABC, NBC, or CBS these days?

Update: This isn’t to say that there isn’t something worth debating in whether it’s a civil war or not. More on the subtleties of the debate at TPM. For what it’s worth, I’m with Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings: This is a civil war, albeit an unconventional one.

I linked to a video yesterday that described the level of violence in Iraq. Atrios and Hilzoy both link to this video from CNN where reporter Michael Ware describes what he’s seeing in Baghdad and why there’s no choice but to call it a civil war.

He doesn’t mince words, does he?

Just go read this post. It references this article in Vanity Fair which is built around an interview with two of the original advocates of going to war with Iraq. They are the original neoconservatives before it became a catch-all term for the hard right fools in the White House. The money quote:

Adelman tells Rose that when he wrote in 2002 that “liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” he “just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”

Of course, these guys didn’t stand up BEFORE the election in 2004. Of course, after watching Hacking Democracy, I’m not sure the actual votes mattered in all cases.