That's it. That's the frame. They fucked up and they need oversight.
Listen to the drip, drip, drip that will fill the MSM bucket during the fall talk show circuit...
The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (Hardcover)
by Frank Rich
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Hardcover)
by Michael Isikoff, David Corn
The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power (Hardcover)
by James Moore, Wayne Slater
Add to that the resonance of:
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Hardcover)
by Thomas E. Ricks
The One Percent Doctrine (Hardcover)
by Ron Suskind
and the MSM will be singing that tune come early November...
More below...
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Hardcover)
by Michael Isikoff, David Corn
Filled with new revelations, Hubris is a gripping narrative of intrigue that connects the dots between George W. Bush's expletive-laden outbursts at Saddam Hussein, the bitter battles between the CIA and the White House, the fights within the intelligence community over Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, the startling influence of an obscure academic on top government officials, the real reason Valerie Plame was outed, and a top reporter's ties to wily Iraqi exiles trying to start a war. Written by veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, this is the inside story of how President Bush took the nation to war using faulty and fraudulent intelligence. It is a news-making account of conspiracy, backstabbing, bureaucratic ineptitude, journalistic malfeasance, and, especially, arrogance.
About the Author
Michael Isikoff is an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek, a frequent guest on MSNBC and other cable news networks, and the author of the bestselling Uncovering Clinton.
David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and a Fox News Channel contributor. He's the author of the bestselling The Lies of George W. Bush, the novel Deep Background, and the biography Blond Ghost.
The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (Hardcover)
by Frank Rich
Starred Review. This blistering j'accuse has vitriol to spare for George Bush--calling him a "spoiled brat" and "blowhard"--and his policies, but its main target is the PR machinery that promoted those policies to the American people. New York Times columnist Rich revisits nearly every Bush administration publicity gambit, including Iraqi WMD claims, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" triumph, the Swift-boating of John Kerry and the writing of fake prowar letters-to-the-editor from soldiers. He uncovers nothing new, but his meticulously researched recap-cum-debunking--complete with appended 80-page time line comparing administration spin to actual events--builds a comprehensive picture of a White House propaganda campaign to bamboozle the public, smear critics, camouflage policy disasters and win the 2002 and 2004 elections through trumped-up security anxieties. Along the way, he pillories a sycophantic media (Bob Woodward gets spanked hard), spineless Democrats and an infotainment culture that happily accommodates the Bush administration's erasure of the line between reality and fiction. Sometimes Rich's critique of Republican politics as cynical image-manipulation goes overboard, as in his "wag the dog" theory of the Iraq war as a Karl Rove electoral maneuver; more often, though, it's on target. The result is a caustic, hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration, timed to make a splash in the upcoming election campaign.
The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power (Hardcover)
by James Moore, Wayne Slater
This bold follow-up to journalists Moore and Slater's bestseller, Bush's Brain, takes a provocative look at how Karl Rove used George Bush's various campaigns and presidency to engineer nothing less than the assertion of a long-term Republican hegemony and the complete dismantling of the Democratic Party. To make their case, they draw on a wide range of materials, including interviews and reportage done by other journalists to demonstrate how Rove mobilized his party's base, forging an unlikely alliance between religious and economic conservatives, while mounting targeted assaults on gays and lesbians, trial lawyers and labor unions. Yet in this narrative, his bid for a complete realignment of American politics begins to derail with the failure of Bush's Social Security reform plan, the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and, most significantly, the implication of Rove in the leak of CIA employee Valerie Plame's identity. In this damning but scattered account, Rove remains an elusive, almost inhuman figure, despite short digressions about his relationship with his gay stepfather and his weekly brunches with members of the White House and RNC teams during the reelection campaign. The result is a compulsive page-turner that's bound to be divisive.
That's the "They fucked up" part...
As for the oversight...
We need to point out the continued stupidity of the Administrations poition on Iraq... witness Matt Yglesias...
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/...
Talk of a unified Qaeda/Iran/Hezbollah/Syria menace is nonsense as a casual scan of actual Sunni jihadist views will make clear. As Fred Kaplan notes, if Churchill and FDR had operated with the Bush mentality, "they might not have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union (out of a refusal to negotiate with evil Communists), and they might have therefore lost the war."
It's worse than that, though -- they might have proposed attacking the Soviet Union in the middle of the war because Bolshevism and Nazism were both species of Eurofascism.
-- Matthew Yglesias
And as we consider the best Iraq policy going forward, consider the effects of Occupation upon our military readiness for a possible war in Iran or elsewhere. This story about the impact of long term occupation duties upon the IDF is sobering. Before we buy into the notion that "we have to see the mission through," we should ask whether that is actually counter-productive to our long term strategic interests.
See below...
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/...
(August 21, 2006 -- 08:51 PM EDT // link)
I've been waiting for someone to say this, someone who can say it not with the guide of history and logical inference but with actual knowledge of the IDF. And here it is.
In the Israeli daily Ha'aretz tonight, military affairs writer Ze'ev Schiff says that the main conclusion that will be drawn from the IDF's disappointing performance in the Lebanon war will be that the army's fighting capacity and edge has been blunted by years of policing duties in the territories.
Writes Schiff ...
Most units, in their training and operations, followed fighting doctrines of police forces and not of standing armies. Hezbollah trains, fights and is equiped as an army, utilizing some of the most advanced anti-tank missiles and other weapons.
The character of the IDF - known for its blitzkrieg methods, encircling movements deep inside enemy territory, and the ability to bring about a quick and decisive conclusion to the fighting - has been spoiled by years of involvement in operations that tied it down, emotionally and politically.
A couple weeks into this war, long enough that it seemed clear that things weren't going exactly according to plan for the Israelis, TPM Reader EF wrote in and put the matter more acidly but I think correctly ...
The IDF's troubles are the bitter legacy of the endless occupation. Armies engaged primarily in harassing civilians tend to perform poorly in combat. The Argentine army, which had been engaged in a dirty war against its own people, mostly powerless to fight back, suddenly found itself in a real fight in the Falklands. The British soldiers and Marines did not arrive strapped to tables with electrodes attached to their genitals, so the Argentines didn't know how to handle them. They lost pretty quickly. Nor is this because the whole Argentine military were simply bullies and cowards; the Argentine air force, which had not been involved in rounding up and torturing helpless people, put up a good show against the Royal Navy. Occupation duty is always bad for combat units. The American units in Korea in 1950 and those sent to Korea from occupation duty in Japan to stop the North Korean offensive performed poorly by most measures. It would take months to get them back into fighting trim, and non-occupation troops, brought in from the States, would do most of the heavy lifting in driving the North Koreans back from Pusan and Inchon.
I don't want to get sidetracked on to the question of equivalence between the Argentine military regime and modern day Israel. I certainly don't think they're remotely equivalent.
But that question is irrelevant to the point EF is making.
Occupation degrades a fighting force -- a reality the Israelis need to confront right now and we Americans need to come to grips with as well. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is something Israel really cannot afford now as it becomes more clear that she is in renewed need of a very potent fighting army.
But, of course, this goes beyond the military sphere. Or rather the military sphere is revealing a deeper reality. The occupation itself is corrupting Israeli society just as it seems to have corrupted (remember that in its original and deep meaning, 'corruption' means 'decay', 'rot') the IDF. And here too, can we not see the echoes for ourselves?
As Amos Oz, the great Israeli novelist, wrote just after the Six Day War, in his first foray into public letters. "Even unavoidable occupation is a corrupting occupation."
The occupation has become Israel's weakness, not its strength. True friends of Israel realize this.
-- Josh Marshall
Whenever someone says that "We have to see the mission through," ask them "What good is the mission if it destroys our military in the process?" and then steer them to Josh's post.
Like I said...
They fucked up and they need oversight.