State of the Union: Catastrophic

By James Carroll
The Boston Globe

STATE OF the Union, state of war: They have a nice ring. When George W. Bush goes before the Congress and the nation tonight, he will present himself (again) as a war president. Personally and politically, the identity defines him. Instead of the callow leader he was in the beginning of his presidency, he will conduct himself as a man of sharp determination, with defiance born of the impression that his fight is to the death. He will justify all of his policies, including the illegal ones, by citing his responsibilities -- and privileges -- as wartime commander in chief. He will not have to remind the men and women in front of him that twice (just after 9/11 and just before Iraq), they voted to license his use of ''all necessary and appropriate force" -- enabling acts by which most of them still stand. The United States became a nation at war with congressional collusion.

But did it? Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes -- but do we have war? We have war dead, but the question remains. With young US soldiers being blown up almost daily, it can seem an absurd question, an offensive one. With thousands of Iraqis killed by American firepower, it can seem a heartless question, as if the dead care whether strict definitions of "war" are fulfilled. There can be no question that Iraq is in a state of war, and that, whatever its elements of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, the warfare is being driven from the Pentagon.

But, regarding the Iraq conflict as it involves the United States, something essential is lacking that would make it a war -- and that is an enemy.

The so-called "insurgents", who wreak such havoc, are not America's enemy. They are not our rivals for territory. They are not our ideological antagonists. Abstracting from the present confrontation, they have no reason to wish us ill.

Americans who bother to imagine the situation from the Iraqi point of view -- a massive foreign invasion, launched on false pretenses; a brutal occupation, with control of local oil reserves surely part of the motivation; the heartbreaking deaths of brothers, cousins, children, parents -- naturally understand that an "insurgency" is the appropriate response. Its goal is simply to force the invaders and occupiers to leave. Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds have intrinsic reasons to regard each other as enemies, from competition over land and oil, to ethnic hatreds, to unsettled scores. No equivalent sources of inbuilt contempt exist among these people toward America. Taken as a whole, or in its parts, Iraq is not an enemy.

President Bush would say Iraq is only one front in the so-called war on terrorism. Surely, in that realm, where the antagonist has a name and a face, the US is authentically at war. If Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are not an enemy, what is? True enough. But the war on terrorism is not real war either, since the Pentagon has proven itself incapable of actually engaging Al Qaeda. That, of course, is because Al Qaeda is a free floating nihilism, not a nation, or even a network. Al Qaeda is a rejectionist idea to which deracinated miscreants are drawn, like filings to a magnet, but that drawing power is generated in Washington. Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until George W. Bush designated him America's equal by defining 9/11 as an act of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party simply did not show up. Which is, of course, why we are blasting a substitute Iraq to smithereens.

Iraq is not a war, because, though we have savage assault, we have no enemy. The war on terrorism is not a war because, though we have an enemy, the muscle-bound Pentagon offers no authentic means of assault.

In each case, Bush is presiding over a self-serving delusion, in concert with a self-emasculating Congress, his partners as would-be war profiteers. Anticipating his speech tonight, one could say Bush will, on this question, be lying to the American people again. But that would presume he is not first lying to himself. State of war? No. State of the Union? Catastrophe, pure and simple.

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

The future of print news

BEING in the newspaper business for over two decades, both on the field as a reporter and now in the management cubicle as an editor, it has dawned upon me that the print business is a shrinking hunting ground for adbucks.

As technology improves, we have less and less time to spend reading printed news. Rising costs of newsprint and the increased need for information on the fly will nail the growth of print news. With the wide availability of the internet access - the primary conduit for news - and improved web-centered devices (specifically WiFi, MMS and GPRS) such as PDAs, Smartphones, etc., it will come a day that we many no longer need printed newspapers. Even then, for wrapping fish, someone would have developed a shrink-wrap so easy to use and biodegradable.

Newspaper readership is shrinking, too. Your print news readers who used to buy your paperw while commuting to work are now probably in their 50s. Their fathers who bought your papers would have been long gone.

It will come a day that even when commuting you may not need a newspaper to keep yourself occupied. I forsee trains and buses with LCDs broadcasting news and other entertainment programmes as it takes you to work. Some advanced ones would have WiFi access points to allow you to access emails or your company servers to check messages from your boss.

If print publishers have ignored information technology and the internet, perhaps a cursory look around the office will enlighten them a bit. How many of your staff Google for websites, splitting windows and multitasking as they write that very story that you hope to sell your papers?

And if you have called your marketing department recently, how about requesting this month's sale and compare it with the same of say five years ago when internet use is not so widespread? And how many of your staff now own Smartphones which are equipped to download news from Telcos at the press of the button?

Just consider that and you will see that print days are numbered. An arrogant pro-print newsvendor will fast become the casuality on the information superhighway, knocked down by his ignorance of the power of information technology.

Is there hope for print? Yes. But that will be another blog.

We've Been Here Before

What was the cause, the point, the strategy? Suddenly many Americans started to realize that there was no good answer.

By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek (Oct. 31, 2005 issue)

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a tapering wall of black granite cut into the grass of Constitution Gardens. Maya Lin envisioned a scar when she designed it, a scar on this land, which is exactly right. Maybe someday his security detail could drive George W. Bush over to take a look. He'll be able to see himself in the reflective surface.

The list of names etched into the wall begins with a soldier who died in 1959 and ends with one who died in 1975. Nearly 60,000 dead are commemorated here. It is the most personal of war memorials. You can touch the cold names with your warm fingers.

The president never wanted the war in Iraq to be personal. His people forbade photographs of coffins arriving home. They refused to keep track of how many Iraqis had been killed and wounded. When "Nightline" devoted a show to the faces of soldiers who had died, one conservative broadcast outlet even pulled the program from its lineup.

The president wanted this to be about policy, not about people. Even that did not go well. The policy became a moving target. First there were weapons of mass destruction that were not there and direct links to the terrorists who attacked on September 11 that didn't exist. The removal of Saddam Hussein was given as the greatest good; it has been done. Then it became the amorphous goal of bringing freedom to the Iraqi people, as though liberty were flowers and we were FTD. The elections, the constitution, the rubble, the dead. Once again we were destroying the village in order to save it.

This all took an unfortunate turn for the administration during the president's vacation in August, when Cindy Sheehan showed up at his ranch. Say what you would about her politics or tactics, there was no doubt that she was a mother whose soldier son was now dead, and who wanted to know why. What was the cause, the point, the strategy? And suddenly many Americans started to realize that there was no good answer.

The Vietnam Memorial stands, in part, as a monument to blind incrementalism, to men who refused to stop, not because of wisdom but because of ego, because of the fear of looking weak. Not enough troops, not enough planning, no real understanding of the people or the power of the insurgency, dwindling public support. The war in Iraq is a disaster in the image and likeness of its predecessor.

During each election cycle, we ponder the question of whether character matters. Of course it does. Does anyone doubt that the continued prosecution of this war has to do with the personality of the commander in chief, a man who is stubborn and calls it strength, who wears blinders and calls it vision? When he vowed to invade Iraq, the advisers he heeded were those who, like him, had never seen combat. The one who had was marginalized and is now gone. The investigation of who leaked what to whom, of what the reporter knew and how she knew it, may be about national security and journalistic ethics, but at its base it is about something more important: the Nixonian lengths to which these people will go to shore up a bankrupt policy and destroy those who cross them on it.

The most unattractive trait of the American empire is American arrogance, which the president embodies and which this war elevated. It is not simply that we have a good system. It is the system everyone else should have. It is the best system, and we are the best people. We can mend rivalries so ancient that they not only predate our nation but the birth of Christ. We will install the leaders we like in a country we scarcely understand, leaders who will either be seen as puppets by their people or who will eventually turn against us. We have been here before.

"In Vietnam we didn't have the lessons of Vietnam to guide us," says David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of that war. "In Iraq we did have those lessons. The tragedy is that we didn't pay attention to them." Or maybe only our leaders did not. The polls show the American people have turned on this war much more quickly than they did on the war in Vietnam. Of course, they are the ones who pay the price.

Perhaps the leaders of the Democratic Party should take time off from their fund-raisers and visit the Vietnam Memorial, too. They should remember one of the most powerful men the party ever produced, Lyndon B. Johnson, and how he was destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam and bested by those brave enough to speak against it.

At least Johnson had the good sense to be heartbroken by the body bags. Bush appears merely peevish at being criticized. Someone with a trumpet should play taps outside the White House for the edification of a president who has not attended a single funeral for the Iraqi war dead. As I am writing this, the number of American soldiers killed is 1,992. By the time you read it, it may have topped 2,000. Will I be writing these same things when the number is 3,000, 5,000, 10,000? If we are such a great nation, why are we utterly incapable of learning from our mistakes? America's sons and daughters are dying to protect the egos of those whose own children are safe at home. Again.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.