> btw, I have to say that your recent assessment of Wpost lack that great
> media critical edge of the other day.! They are reporting difficulties for
> a reason. Psyops, baybee, psyops. Ya gotta be just as cynical about news
> that you "like" as you are with news that your "don't like".
[Note: Kelley is referring to this note by me on another list: "The Washington Post is actually producing a lot of good reportage now, despite being a hard-line pro-war paper. I suppose they just want it "done right" and are impatient with incompetence."]
Yeah, but I wasn't speculating about motives. I only said they were printing some good reportage, which is to say that it seems truthful, informative, and useful to our side. (Really the point was to suggest that it's useful to look at the WPost website from time to time.)
That means that (a) they have some intelligent and relatively honest and hard-working people doing the writing, and that (b) for some reason, at this point in time, management is allowing the writing to get through. Furthermore, as you point out:
> These reports are coming from _embedded_ reporters. [That's true of the
Nasiriyah story; there are of course reports from Qatar and also from DC for
that matter] Everything they get and everything they write is approved
beforehand.
So in the case of the embedded reporters the officers of the units they are with (at what level does the stuff get approved? Company? Division? Qatar?) are also letting it through.
> Now, this doesn't mean things aren't going badly (relatively speaking). It
> only means that they are presenting the information that it's going badly
> for a reason. And it ain't in the interest of Truth, Just Us, and the
> American Waitress.
Well, I wasn't talking about motives. I will say, though, that in the case of the Washington Post, which actually is read by policymakers, there is an argument that it has a different role than the Chicago Tribune or the New York Post, whose function is to confuse and fool people. The bourgeoisie does not necessarily want its own policymakers to be duped by the propaganda. That would explain why you you sometimes get truthful stuff in the New York Times, the Wall St. Journal (not on the editorial page), and the Washington Post.
But furthermore, you get truth at a time when there are divisions among the powers that be and they start using it as a weapon to beat each other up with. Now in the case of the Nasiriyah turkey shoot story, here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39022-2003Mar27.html
I can readily imagine the commander on the scene, who is trying to get his trucks down the road and thinks that the situation is royally screwed and that it is the fault of That Madman Rumsfeld, has a motive for turning to the embedded reporter and saying "write this up straight."
> Of course, my position--my reading of the war party faction is that they
> expected and needed this war to be a little more tough than "normal."
I think I disagree with you here. If that were the case then they wouldn't have been presenting this as a 'cakewalk' from the beginning. They would have been emphasizing the difficulties in their PR before the attack. I can't see how it would be to the advantage of anyone in the "war party faction" to portray themselves as having been blindsided by the wily Saddam.
Actually, backtracking a bit, I think it's inaccurate to talk about the PNAC bloc as the "war party faction" (certainly you wouldn't call everyone else in the Pentagon and the Admin the "peace party faction"). I would say that the "ordinary" bourgeoisie, the CIA, and the Pentagon generals are certainly in favor of wars of conquest. What distinguishes the PNAC bloc is that they are fanatic visionaries of fast, global, triumphant, righteous wars of conquest, as distinguished from more cautious and reality-oriented factions. The sentiment behind airing the Nasiriyah story and all these stories about Rumsfeld's bad planning, him and Bush dissing the CIA, etc., is of course not that they don't want the war on Iraq - they do - but they want the leadership purged so that they won't screw up the war any more, and in the interest of that end they are willing to tell tales on them. We can and will however use the data that get revealed that way for our own subversive purposes.
LP