As I have argued many many times now (and please forgive the repetition, if such a thing bothers you), the nature of the Iraq war has been consistently misunderstood as a "blunder," a misadventure, a manifestation of high incompetence. I argued instead, the war was and is a deliberate fiasco -- the creative use of chaos and anarchy by a very sick man. And I am not referring to his heart condition. Anyway, as we move on to Iran, once again the press is adding to the confusion by completely misunderstanding how this administration works. The error of the press lies in their thinking that cause and effect concerns the Decider and He Who Decides What The Decider Will Decide...
Take, for example, the following passage from a NYT article entitled "Why Accuse Iran of Meddling Now?"
Faced with stepped-up attacks, military officials said they began to carry out raids to try to disrupt efforts to train and equip Shiite militants with the weapon. That led to the detention of Iranian officials — and questions from the Iraqi government, the public and the press about why the American military was capturing and detaining Iranians, including some officials who said they were diplomats.
American officials assert that the raids produced additional evidence implicating a branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as the Quds Force, in supplying the devices, a charge Iran has denied.
Let me see if I can clearly explain why this kind of reporting is so disastrously wrong, and will march us to the Iranian war, despite their attempts to often give us countering "facts." (pace Pace, if you will).
It is the administration's SOP to portray itself as reactive when it fact its modus operendi is, as we know from the whole "reality-based community" put-down of a few years ago, not based on action-reaction models of action, but on the ideological construction of reality itself. Narratives like the one above, and they are everywhere these days in the press when it comes to events in Iraq and Iran, paint the administration as sitting in DC, watching the news and getting field reports, and then responding to those data streams.
That presumes this is an empirical government; but it is an imperial one, and that is all the difference.
I find it ironic that the press would continue to buy in to the notion that the administration operats by the principle of a "judicious study of discernible reality" (from the original article by Ron Suskind)and then calibrates and recalibrates its actions in response to that judicious study.
What the administration does it calibrate and recalibrate its propoganda, not its policy. The policy is already in place and in effect; what are constantly being tweaked are the lines and rationales and pantomimes of "judiciously studying reality" that are then fed as pure propaganda to the press.
Which the press then repeats, and augments with its own judicious study, like a desparate child trying to hold on to the belief that Daddy is not a raging drunk and that if we only hug him long enough, and reason with him, he will stop being who he is.
But this administration is not empirical, it is imperial.
Whatever this administration is going to do with Iran, it decided 6 (or 7? 8? 9?) years ago. What it then feeds us, and indulges us in, is the facade that it functions as a deliberative entity, that studies reality and adjusts to it. But its own officials have said that is not how it works!
Neither Iraq, nor now Iran, is a "cause" in the world of Cheney. Or rather, their causal influence in the world of the Cheney administration ceased to function years ago, when the Decision was made. Now, everything that is happening in Iraq, and soon Iran, is mere effect.
For this administration "policy" is not an empirical concept, but an imperial and ideological one. Policy does not "react"; it forms. It is not caused; it causes. This is called naked power; might not only makes right, it makes reality.
But yet the press will continue on with its demand that power operate as a responsive entity, that it function within the logic of an empirical regimen of reality-testing and proof-finding. They think that raising the point that the administration's case for X, or Y, or Z, has some weak points makes any goddam difference.
The press does not know how to narrate about power. And as that institution that is to speak truth to power, this is a disability of most dire consequences. It serves the interests of a cloaked administration that wishes to not have its philosophy of power be scrutinized, and it also serves the policies they thus cloaked implement.
Because as Goebbels said, it is very easy to lead a people into war... You simply have to propagandize that the government has been also led, and that it was of course not the policy all along.
Have a Nice Day
TimetoGovern