During the Bush and Fox News reign of war, I welcomed the anti-war monologues delivered by the verbose Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown. When last has this Obama lackey said something about the lives the new war president has squandered? I don’t need a repeat of Olbermann’s Bush-era, interminable, self-aggrandizing soliloquies, but a word about Obama’s failure to bring the troops home would not go unnoticed. Moreover, how ridiculous is Olbermann’s signature sigh-off—“so and so days since the declaration of mission accomplished in Iraq”—given the failure of his man Obama to change the status quo.
The administration has stated that Fox New is the organ of the Republican Party. This is true about many of the networks operatives. But what then is MSNBC, and especially Rachel Maddow and Olbermann? The two are uncritical slaves to the ship of state just as long as the pirates at the helm are Democrats.
A contrast to those two clowns is Andrew J. Bacevich, a military man as well as a man of the mind whose lovely son was killed in Iraq. Bacevich has provided consistent, principled commentary throughout. This via Daily Kos (I’m afraid):
Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how the British, Russians, or others have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.
Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around. Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in early 2007 when President Bush launched his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy.
Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues. Pretending that the surge has redeemed the Iraq war is akin to claiming that when Andy Jackson “caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” he thereby enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the War of 1812. Such a judgment works well as folklore but ignores an abundance of contrary evidence.
More than six years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago, General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for another five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.
Update (Oct. 22): COULTER ON KEITH, “The Grating Communicator”:
“I don’t blame Keith personally for this blatant distortion: He gets all his research material from Markos Moulitsas and other left-wing bloggers, so he can’t be held responsible for the content of his show. Keith’s principle contribution to the program is his nightly display of self-congratulation and pompous douche-baggery.
“Remember, Keith, like his MSNBC colleague Contessa Brewer, majored in “communications” in college, not a research-related field, such as political science. In his coursework, he learned such skills as: Dramatically Turning to Camera, Hysterical Self-Righteousness, Pausing Portentously and Gravely Demanding Apologies/Resignations From Various Public Figures.
Given this background, it’s understandable that Keith will make errors. As viewers witnessed recently, he can’t even pronounce the name of prominent American economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell. (Although he did spend three weeks at a Berlitz course in Arabic honing his pronunciation of ‘Abu Ghraib’ to razor-sharp prissiness.)
The bloggers and Keith bring different skill sets to the game. They provide the tendentious half-truths, phony opinion polls and spurious social science, while Keith provides his booming baritone, gigantic ‘Guys and Dolls’ suits and gift for ridiculous, fustian grandiloquence. Keith is far better equipped than, say, the pint-sized, girly-voiced, Frito Bandito-accented Markos Moulitsas to deliver the party line.
Again, in fairness to Keith, he’s never been a ‘content guy.’ He was a communications major. (The agriculture school Keith attended offered a degree in this field.) He lifts the material for his show from liberal blogs, overwrites it, and throws in his trademark smirking and snorts. But that’s all he does because, again, he was a communications major.”