On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, Chris Doss wrote:
> In all honesty (maybe just cause I've been living in a foreign country
> and have seen the world through non-US media for so long) I fine the
> Nation to be butt-dull.
I think the feature article in the current issue is a good example of the Nation being considerably duller than it needs to be for reasons that are simple and technical and could theoretically be fixed (although it could be that their ultimate foundation makes that harder than it looks):
URL: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest
The Nation
FEATURE STORY | September 2, 2002
The Men From JINSA and CSP
by JASON VEST
To start with this, that title. The only reason I looked at this article at all is because it was repacked by Alternews as "Coming Soon: Total War in the Middle East." That's grabby, and it's not an exaggeration; it's a perfectly good synopsis of the story. Whatever instincts induced the Nation to come up with their title instead are profoundly flawed, IMHO.
But that's only the beginning of the problem. As the alternate title makes clear, there's an explosive story buried in here. But my eyes literally began to close a few pages into this article, it is so boringly written. And so badly organized that it undercuts its own case. And there's no reason for it. You can easily see the article that should have been written that is buried in this sludge. But nobody took it out. The answer seems to be pure and simply terrible editing.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying every article in the Nation is sludgy. Our list-couple always writes well. But they seem to be good examples of exceptions that prove the rule: people who obviously turn in clean copy that don't need any editing; and people who sound a lot more interesting when they publish anywhere else but the Nation. It's the editing and editorial values that seems to be the problem.
The weird thing is that I could swear that 20-25 years ago, the Nation's editing was a value adding process -- that people usually appeared better in the Nation than they appeared elsewhere. I have several very concrete anecdotes to back up this point of view. But I realize that they might be overwhelmed by the fact that then I was 20 and now I'm over 40, which has drastically reduced the number of facts in the world that count as news, never mind as revelatory.
Still the bottom line is, the editing at the Nation stinks and many of their boring articles could be great articles if they were edited better.
Back to the Jason Vest article. He has two arguments interlocking arguments that explain three puzzles: (1) Why is this goon squad so hung up on Iraq? (2) Why aren't they afraid, as the military is, that this could get terribly out of hand? and (e) Why do so many strategic analysts (i.e., the same goon squad) identify the strategic interests of Israel and the US? Except that he fucks up the last one -- he runs into the answer, which is fraught with connotational difficulties, and *completely* ensnares himself, making that part of the article slightly painful to read. But a good editor could have rescued him from his difficulties.
He also has a great hook -- which, for inexplicable reasons, is buried in parentheses in paragraph four. Remember that infamous Pentagon hearing last month that labelled Saudi Arabia as an enemy, and said we should give them an ultimatum and seize their oilfields. According to the Vest, that was literally wasn't the half of it. He says the text on the last slide in that presentation
<quote>
proposed that "Grand Strategy for the Middle East" should concentrate on "Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot [and] Egypt as the prize."
<unquote>
Thus his story is that most of the big names in laying out the administration's worldview -- Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumseld -- have been part of a group that has been working on a plan quite openly for years to overthrow every government in the Middle East by force. They have chiefly been talking about it in two groups I've never heard about called JINSA (the Jewish Institute Security Affairs) and CSP (The Center for Security Policy).
So the reason they have been so obsessed with Iraq is simple: they see it as their golden opportunity to get things started, the one place where their mad vision overlaps with normal people's. And they idea that they might let it slip away drives them to frenzy.
The reason they are not afraid of setting off a negative chain reaction throughout the middle east is that that's exactly what they are aiming at.
And the reason they always ironly weld the interests of Israel to those of the US is the same as the reason they care about Iraq: because it sells. Vest, as I said, bobbles this ball by never making this point clearly. He simply details the Jewish money that support these guys, and the two closest points left for the reader to connect is that they push this line because they're corrupted or duped by Jewish money. Icch. But the simpler and more persuasive argument is sitting there nearby. Perle and Wolfowitz are mad, but they're not simple. Nobody dupes them but themselves. But playing up the Israel angle serves their purposes perfectly -- it gives them ready made, professionally mustered and deeply committed domestic support. And there's duplicity involved between the two sides -- they really do have a confluence of interests. But it's not the interests of the US and Israel -- its the interest of this mad group of ambitious policy makers and an equally mad group of policy makers in Israel.
Lastly, he lays out the other underlying reason for policy inertia: billions of dollars of military contracts that grow like baracle concrete around any long-standing alliance.