> 1]. I don't think this is "objective" truth. I'm _interpreting_ media
> reports from the perspective of the "war party", as they represent their
> views and asking why they would want news that makes them look bad. If this
> news weren't coming from embeddeds, I would agree with Lou. E.g., Chris's
> analysis of the London papers makes sense for instance.
This raises an empirical question: is the people whom you are calling the 'war party' in -complete control- of everything under the jurisdiction of the - division commanders-? If indeed they ARE, and you can reason that 'if an embedded reporter writes it, and it is published, then you know that Donald Rumsfeld wanted it to be published that way' (all embedded reportage is "divinely inspired" in that sense), then you have a point and I have to start asking myself why Rumsfeld would want the readers of the Washington Post to read about the Nasiriyah 'turkey shoot'.
However, I don't believe they have that kind of control. I believe there are competing interests: between the generals and the chicken-hawk 'war party', and also among the generals - between the "fighting generals", who actually have to win the war in the field somehow, Wallace for example, and the "political generals", who are the loyal vassals of Rumsfeld and are in Qatar and Tampa talking about how "everything is going according to plan". At least that's the impression I'm getting.
Leaving aside the WPost reporter in Nasiriyah, what do you think about the current flap which is portrayed as a dispute between Wallace, griping in the field about the failings of the Master Plan, and Rumsfeld and Ari Fleischer grimly defending the administration's omniscience? Is THIS all just a scripted puppet show? Is Wallace just saying what the 'war party' wants him to say? I don't think that's plausible.
> talked about this split for years now). second, i'm correcting lou's
> assumption that he's getting "inside information" from an embedded report
> and, as such, he's seeing information leak through the cracks in the media.
>
> I think he may be right about the split in the admin, but to think that an
> embedded reporter's minder had directions on the field already to help in
> the effort of one wing of the admin fighting against the other... not likely.
To call it a 'split' may be too strong a term - we have to see. But I'm not necessarily talking about 'wings of the admin' if 'the admin' means civilian bureaucrats. In this case I'm talking about an apparent divergence in interests between the politicians who are saying 'We're winning the war, we're winning the war', and the generals on the ground, who are saying 'If we are really going to win this war and not get our asses kicked out here, you had better fix some of the holes in the plan, send us more troops, plan for a longer war, etc.', and would not be above letting a reporter send out an accurate picture of the problems in order to bolster this idea.
The real limitation of the Nasiriyah report is that it just has people saying 'things are bad here'. The implication they want to draw is 'things are bad, we need more help and better grand strategy'. They don't hint at "things are bad here, this war is bad, let's go home."
If you start talking about how I'm underestimating the Machiavellian cleverness of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and that in reality this is ALL part of The Matrix, the troops were MEANT to get shot up in Nasiriyah by Fedayeen in order to bolster the fighting will of the US, everything is just scripted, etc., then you are sliding into the camp of the people who say that 9/11 was just a CIA plot, they could have stopped the planes easy but they didn't, etc.
Furthermore I still think, though I'm less certain of this, that the WPost is a real bourgeois player, and not only has its own independent interests, but also has a 'function' in the system, and that -some- of this function is to convey somewhat accurate information to servants of the bourgeoisie in the Beltway and elsewhere who have a need-to-know what is actually going on in the world. This means that a WPost reporter might actually have a degree of independence that a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter wouldn't have (and that a Fox reporter would never dream of begging for).
Anyway, my whole original point was that the www.washingtonpost.com is worth looking at from time to time.
LP