Netroots Nation 2008 has done something invaluable for me. It brought the senselessness and the travesty of the Iraq War back to the forefront. It was a potent reminder of why we're even here--the single most significant factor behind the rise of the netroots.
From the IGNT/Mojo Friday care packages for the troops, Pastor Dan's moving service this morning, and the remarks of every key note speaker, Iraq is bubbling up again to become the first issue we will expect our new President to address. Donna Edwards was particularly strong in her keynote Saturday night, running through the litany of challenges we face in our failing economy, and the salient fact that not a single one of them can be solved until we are our to Iraq.
The withdrawal from Iraq also featured largely in the panel that I participated in Saturday, "War Pundits," along with Mark Danner, Samantha Power, Greg Mitchell, and moderated by Ari Melber.
Spencer Ackerman attended the panel, and has a great live blog of the panel. I've got a lot of thoughts still emanating from the discussion that I'll be drawing upon in the coming months as the discussion about how we approach the withdrawal. But for now, my remarks from yesterday are below the fold.
I'm honored to be here in such illustrious company. While on the issue of Iraq, we're all dirty hippies by virtue of being among those who got it right, I'm pleased to be the blogger representative, the dirtiest f'ing hippie of all the DFHs.
While it’s a given now in blog discourse that the media failed miserably in the run-up to and the continuation of the Iraq War, it’s worth reflecting a bit on how we got to what Mark has called "the vaguely depressing spectacle of a great many very intelligent people struggling very hard to make themselves stupid." (And that quote is from three years ago, when we had been subjected to just a few years of the stupid.)
I think figuring out how we got here is critical to figuring out how we break the hold the stupid has on our foreign policy debates. [Friday's] panel with Digby, Rick Perlstein, Paul Krugman and Duncan Black on how the media "learned to bend over backward to please the right" was a fantastic opening for this panel, and I hope people had a chance to see it yesterday or make a point to catch it now on video.
Prof. Krugman was particularly good in discussing the devastating effectiveness the vast right wing conspiracy has had in establishing and perpetuating the idea that the right is always right when it comes to national security and foreign policy issues. And, as an aside here, note that foreign policy discourse in our punditocracy is almost always couched in terms of national security--every other issue among the myriad of issues of our foreign relations is subsumed by the existence--real and imagined--of the looming threat of attacks against us or our shrinking cadre of allies.
That's largely because, as Krugman pointed out, the right has had a monopoly on message setting on foreign policy for decades. They've developed the think tanks, they've infilitrated our colleges and universities and--critically--our government and have emerged as the dominant voice. So, they've acquired the monopoly on so-called foreign policy expertise to become the "serious" voices in our public discourse.
The right, thus, has been able to set the narrative on foreign policy debates. And, as Krugman pointed out, they've diligently enforced that narrative in a concerted campaign to silence dissident voices in the media. They use outlets like the National Review Online, which has a permanent program of "truth-squadding" Krugman and others, committed solely to attacking their work.
They let loose the Michelle Malkins and the Bill O'Reillys of the world, who in turn egg their readers and listeners into harassment campaigns against opposing pundits.
They engage in smear campaigns against progressive media voices and through a systematic effort at intimidation, can often been quite effective. Because every journalist has an editor and publisher who are likely even more sensitive to criticism that can ultimately hurt the bottom line.
What this can do is not only silence dissident voices, but create a chilling effect over the whole profession. After all, who having seen what happens to a dissident colleague, wants to bring that kind of reaction down upon themselves?
So we have the narrative on foreign policy set, we have the dominant "expert voices" on foreign policy issues reinforcing that narrative, and we have a punditocracy that has slipped into the habit of going along to get along to push that narrative.
That's compounded by the fact that most of these war pundits are a part of, as Digby calls it, "the Village" of Washington insiders, the cocktail party crowd of pundits that hobnob with those very experts and government officials who set the narrative.
For The Villagers, the Bush administration brought the return of "their people," the long-known faces who had dominated the establishment—and particularly foreign policy—since the Nixon administration.
There was a familiarity to this team, and with the familiarity of the team, the familiarity of ways of thinking about and reporting about foreign policy and about war. As the cold warriors morphed into the neocons, they brought with them the bipolar, good and evil, east vs. west paradigms that had shaped (often disastrously) five decades of American foreign policy thinking. As "islamofascism" slipped into the place that "communism" had occupied in the thinking of these policy-shapers, it provided an easy narrative for the war pundits and Villagers to adapt without having to take too much into consideration the vast complexities of our newly and highly globalized world.
These were people they trusted, if for no other reason than they had known them for so long, and they were presenting a narrative that could be trusted, or at least easily understood because it has been reinforced for so long. The other edge to that long relationship was the importance of staying on the inside of it—not endangering the all important access to the halls of power by asking too many questions or challenging too many assumptions. Staying on the inside seems to have gained even more importance for the Villagers in this notoriously secretive and vindictive administration.
So when the few dissident voices that were heard on a national stage rose up, they were easily dismissed. After all, who in the punditocracy wanted to believe that the Bush administration, their old friends, would lie to them about something as important as a war? And when it became increasingly clear that they, along with our Congress and the rest of the nation who lived inside the Beltway or voted Republican, was duped into going into war, it became increasingly important to not admit that.
Which, I believe, is one of the reasons that the bombshell New York Times expose on the military/media propaganda machine was greeted by the rest of the media (and particularly The Villagers) with nothing more than a resounding yawn. What should have been a game-changing revelation about the war, the administration, and the media was little more than another blip of inconvenient information to be swept away along with inconvenient truths of the non-existence of WMD in Iraq or Saddam's ties to al Qaeda. It’s inconvenient proof of the complicity of the media in perpetuating the administration’s lies, and in the continuation of this war, one Friedman Unit at a time.
The problems of the war punditry and the media are easy to lay out; the solutions, the other part of Ari’s challenge to us, much more difficult. We saw a bit of positive movement in the 2006 elections, when Ned Lamont and the new media helped change the narrative politically on Democrats and the war. Unfortunately, the Democratic majority in the 110th Congress has lost much of the edge it gained in that election by failing to substantially change anything on Iraq.
This is where our team, our Democratic leaders, come in. We are as unfortunately likely to hear a message emanating from a Democratic representative that reinforces the right's narrative on war and national security as we are from a Broder or Ignatius or O'Hanlon.
Unfortunately, this has some times included even our presumptive nominee. Consider this from April, 2007 when debate was raging on the Hill over the Iraq war supplemental, and Democratic leaders were hopelessly trying to enforce some sort of timetable on withdrawal.
On a Sunday show while the negotiations over the withdrawal timelines were supposedly moving forward, Senator Obama said that, if Bush vetoed a bill with timelines, Democrats in Congress would quickly will provide a "clean" funding bill because no lawmaker "wants to play chicken with our troops."
Which immediately led to this statement from John McCain:
"I hope Democrats in Congress will heed the advice of one of their leading candidates for President, Senator Obama, and immediately pass a new bill to provide support to our troops in Iraq without substituting their partisan interests for those of our troops and our country."
The narrative on the supplemental was set. Support our troops, or abandon them.
Message matters. When a Democratic nominee for president allows speculation that he might appoint a Republican to a key defense position in his administration, it sends a message. When a critical civil liberties issue is dismissed in the name of "national security," it sends a message.
It reinforces the same old narrative that Democrats and progressives are weak on national security, that the right has a monopoly on being right on the issue, despite the fact they have been proven disastrously wrong, time and time again.
The netroots and the progressive press have shown some small ability to counter that narrative, as we saw in the 2006 election, but our work on that front has just begun.
We have to continue to provide a strong and principled critique of the Right's narrative at every opportunity. That includes pushing Democrats in a position to shape a new narrative to do the same. We can help them do that the way we helped General Clark a few weeks ago when he was swarmed by the Right for daring to suggest being shot down in battle wasn't sufficient qualification for being chief executive of the United States. We helped him fight back and blunted that attack. We need to be prepared to do that every time. We need our Democrats to know that we'll have their backs when they are courageous enough to tell the truth.
We also need to keep doing what the Right's activists have done in countering the war pundits bullshit--send those e-mails, participate in the online chats, post comments to their bad stories and make them answerable for them.
Remind them that they're barely more popular than our Congress, and that there's a good reason for that. They need to know that their audience has changed, and that they are as answerable to the truth as they are to the Right.