Borowitz Report: “IRAQ AGREES TO WEAPONS INSPECTIONS; CHENEY BEGS THEM TO RECONSIDER.” Choice quote: “‘The Vice President is an optimistic man,’ the aide said. ‘This is a bump in the road, but he is still hopeful that Saddam will change his mind and refuse to allow weapons inspectors to return to Iraq.'”
Enron and Thomas White, cont’d
Paul Krugman’s column for Tuesday takes former Enron honcho and current army secretary Thomas White to task, referring to Jason Leopold’s groundbreaking reporting in Salon about White’s dubious-at-best role in padding Enron’s profits at a critical time in the company’s downward spiral.
Choice quote:
| Mr. Cheney supposedly chose Thomas White for his business expertise. But when it became apparent that the Enron division he ran was a money-losing fraud, the story changed. We were told that Mr. White was an amiable guy who had no idea what was actually going on, that his colleagues referred to him behind his back as “Mr. Magoo.” Just the man to run the Army in a two-front Middle Eastern war, right? |
Or, as I put it in July, “Army secretary Thomas White is a former Enron official who either (A) knew what was happening at that company and therefore shares responsibility in its ignominy or (B) was completely in the dark about Enron’s escapades. A he’s a crook, B he’s a boob…”
Inspector or general?
Saddam Hussein has apparently told the U.N. that he will “unconditionally” accept weapons inspectors back into Iraq.
The Bush administration is already saying it will not take him at face value, which seems sensible given his track record. But meanwhile I’m sure the gears at the U.N. are turning. Either this inspection mission will happen (doubtful but possible) or the administration hawks who’ve warned that Saddam will just use new inspections to procrastinate and confuse the situations will be proven right. Either way, it’s an important and necessary development.
This entire sequence of events is one that, critics of the administration have long insisted, needed to happen before the U.S. begins any military action aimed at “regime change.” The Cheney/Rumsfeld “go it alone” axis seemed to balk at that need all summer. But they have not prevailed — as Josh Marshall keeps pointing out.
If we go to war, let it be in concert with a community of nations whom Saddam Hussein has collectively resisted, not in isolation as an act of imperial prerogative. Let it be a last resort of regrettable necessity, not a first resort of convenience.
Better yet, let’s achieve our goals without ever needing to launch an invasion or start another war. That’s what diplomacy is all about, and that’s why we have a United Nations. And it can happen — unless Bush and his team are so determined to have a war that they keep raising the goalposts.
Groom first, ask questions later
Did anyone else find this story about the U.S. military freaking out over soldiers growing beards in Afghanistan as strange as I did? I understand the armed forces require (literal) uniformity, but these are Special Forces troops who apparently have good reason to want to blend into the local population. It just seems that our leaders might have more pressing matters to focus on.
Exhibit 13
Bush and the U.N.: Course change or smart maneuver — or both?
President Bush gave a good speech at the U.N., and it now looks far more likely that the U.S. will not simply launch an invasion of Iraq but will work with and through the U.N., as it did during the Gulf War. I think that’s a positive step, and I applaud Bush for taking it.
From where I sit, it looks like Bush has chosen to take heed of the critics of the preemptive unilateralism espoused by the hawk wing of his administration. As Josh Marshall puts it, “The White House had one policy. They hit a brick wall. Now they’ve changed policies.” Go over to Andrew Sullivan’s blog and you find a different take: “Bush has essentially outmaneuvered his opponents…Bush has spectacularly called the U.N.’s bluff.”
We won’t know whether the U.N. speech represents a genuine shift toward multilateralism or a tactical feint until a few weeks have passed and we get a better sense of how seriously Bush intends to work with the U.N. He has a good example to follow from his father’s methodical building of a global alliance against Iraq. The effort to build such an alliance today will force the president to do what he has not yet done: Explain to the world exactly why Iraq is so much more immediate a threat today than it was two or four or eight years ago.
The debate over “Forbidden Thoughts”
Thanks at least in part, no doubt, to a link from the Instapundit himself, the comments on my posting about Damian Penny’s “I hope they go bankrupt” post, regarding Salon’s “Forbidden Thoughts” letters, now boast a monster debate.
First off, in an e-mail to me, Penny attributes his “bankrupt” comments to “a combination of dark humor and a bad mood,” and writes, “I disagree with much of what Salon publishes, but you also do some very good work, and I wouldn’t want to lose that.” Fair enough. Thanks for the clarification, Damian.
He reiterates that he feels, not that Salon has no right to publish the “Forbidden Thoughts,” but that it was in poor taste to do so on the 9/11 anniversary. Taste is, of course, notoriously subjective. From our regular readers, we received an outpouring of thanks, mixed in with a little criticism, for publishing these pieces. In the comments board for this blog, it’s more evenly mixed between people who agree with Salon’s decision and people who share Penny’s outrage at it. Of course, many of the visitors to this blog and the posters of comments aren’t Salon’s regular readers — they’ve come here from Glenn Reynolds’ link.
All of that is fine by me. We made our editorial choice, we knew it could be controversial, we’ve got some support and some resistance. My challenge to Penny — which he has courteously responded to — was to rethink the “I disagree with them, therefore I hope they go out of business” line. I disagree with tons of publications out there, but I’m not going to wish them off the face of the earth. Salon takes lumps from our more left-leaning readers for publishing Andrew Sullivan, and we’ll take our lumps from the right for publishing “Forbidden Thoughts.” Fortunately there’s a large, and growing, group of smart, intellectually adventurous readers who understand that Salon is interested in airing a wide range of views, and challenging a broad range of orthodoxies. We’ll keep doing that, I think.
Couple of other points from the comments to respond to:
Some question my statement that “one good role of journalism is to puncture orthodoxies.” Note that I said “one good role” — it’s not the only role. “I don’t recall ever hearing, reading or seeing the ‘puncturing’ of ‘orthodoxies’ as a major function of journalism in my mass media classes,” writes one commenter. Well, I never took classes in “mass media,” but I’ve been a journalist for 20 years, and “puncturing orthodoxies” — challenging received wisdom, testing generally agreed notions against fact, and so forth — has definitely been part of the role of every journalist and every journalistic institution I admire.
Another comment suggests that I am supposedly out of touch with Blogland because I have not encountered Damian Perry’s blog before, and it has been “prominent on Instapundit’s list for a year.” It’s true, I have not religiously explored Instapundit’s blogroll. On the other hand, I was reading (and writing about) weblogs for many years before Instapundit existed, and before the whole phenomenon of “war bloggers” and those who rose to prominence around and after 9/11. I think Glenn Reynolds runs a great blog but, hey, I’m not going to spend all my blog-reading time among any one crowd. I like to read technically oriented blogs, media oriented blogs, personal blogs. I try to devote extra time to reading these here Salon Blogs because they’re written by people who have pitched their virtual tents on Salon’s ground. Life is too short to read everyone.
POSTCRIPT: I originally misspelled Damian Penny’s last name in this post. Apologies to him. I’ve spent too many hours in meetings today and I think it has affected my short-term memory.
What the hell were we thinking?
I do not know who Damian Penny is, but (as linked by Instapundit) I notice that he is wishing that we here at Salon go bankrupt, because he is very upset that we chose to publish our readers’ responses to Damien Cave’s piece on “Forbidden Thoughts on 9/11,” and that we published it on the anniversary of 9/11. “What… the… Hell… were… they… thinking?!?” asks Mr. Penny.
We were thinking precisely this: That an orthodoxy has coalesced around 9/11, and that one good role of journalism is to puncture orthodoxies. That the range of human response to 9/11 was a lot wider than that reflected in the media orgy of 9/11 retrospectives. And that it’s probably a lot healthier to air such responses than to pretend that they don’t exist.
We published a lot of stories on the anniversary of 9/11 (there’s a list of about two dozen here). This was just one of them. Irreverent? Sure. You don’t call them “forbidden thoughts” for nothing. We’ve also published our share of serious remembrances, of sensitive looks back, and of articles that fully respect the enormity of the crimes committed on that day. That we chose not to drape our entire issue of 9/11 in a sanctimonious, monotone blanket of enforced “respect” seems to have riled some people and cheered others. I guess we’re used to that. In the piece I linked to below, Simon Schama talked about the “pious hush” the administration is using to “bestow on its adventurism the odour of sanctity.” Breaking that hush seems to me to be valuable, even patriotic.
Sorry you disagree, Mr. Penny. That’s what democracy is all about. We’re free to publish stuff you don’t like and you’re entirely free not to like it — and as an editor I’m certainly interested in why you don’t like it.
But before you wish that Salon goes bankrupt, may I ask how you pay your bills, and how you’d feel if someone wished the same on the source of your livelihood? When did political disagreement turn into a license to wish that your opponents lose their jobs, or worse (cf. Ann Coulter’s comment, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building”)? Good night.
Iraq invasion timing, redux
OK, there’s been a great discussion in this blog’s comments over my post about the apparent contradiction between the urgency of the Iraqi threat, as painted by Cheney et al., and the administration’s willingness to let the whole project slide in August because it’s a bad time to “market a new product” and Bush was on vacation. Here, and over on Instapundit, I’m hearing the suggestion that the delay was really about weather — the hot summer is a bad time to go on the offensive in the desert.
Could well be. But if that’s the case, it’s been a pretty big secret from the American people. I mean, why doesn’t the administration just say so? “The president has decided that we’re going after Iraq but he’s going to do it at the best time, strategically.” But that’s not what the administration said this summer. The president said nothing and his lieutenants said contradictory things — and that, as I wrote in this piece, it left a total vacuum in the public debate.
Must read
Simon Schama — the writer/historian whose lectures remain one of my most vivid memories from college days — writes in the Guardian about 9/11 one year on. Choice quote:
| Apparently, the dead are owed another war. But they are not. What they are owed is a good, stand-up, bruising row over the fate of America; just who determines it and for what end? The first and greatest weapon a democracy has for its own defence is the assumption of common equity; of shared sacrifice. That was what got us through the Blitz. It is, however, otherwise in oligarchic America. Those who are most eager to put young American lives on the line happen to be precisely those who have been greediest for the spoils. |
Postscript: I see Joe Conason has also chosen to link to this today (hadn’t read his column before I posted). But hey, he chose a different passage to excerpt.