"They"
The enemy cannot defeat us on the battlefield, but what they can do is put horrible images on our TV screens. --George Bush, Philadelphia Congressional Dinner, May 24, 2006
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Field Of Dreams
With the arrival of Memorial Day weekend, the MSM is offering a range of stories on war and soldiering. The NYT has a piece today summarizing where things stand in Afghanistan. The gist of the report is that the situation is slowly getting away from Western forces. Just one...
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Acting Lessons
What's wrong with this picture (besides my little tweak to it)? And why is Bush getting mostly a free pass for his praise of the new Iraqi government? It's not an exact analogy, but try this on...
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The Zarqawi Bloopers: Leaving It To The Professionals
I've been wondering about the military strategy behind the Zarqawi outtakes -- especially since the collected footage became popularly known as the "Zarqawi Blooper Video." It seems the obvious audience for this material is the Iraqi people -- and, especially, potential terrorist recruits. Given its presentation at a Defense Department...
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Undertaking A New Strategy?
"Jest" a little free association from The BAG: 1. If White House shake-up was supposed to ease conformity, think again. 2. Administration looking a little down these days? 3. Maybe that's what happens after years of getting your back up. 4. Hubbard's folder lends interesting twist.... The economic picture: black and white and...
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VIETNAM
Surely, informed analysts could go on endlessly over how the Iraq campaign differs from the Vietnam experience. Still, as the present engagement continues to deteriorate, there must be a threshold upon which the comparison commands greater relevance. Maybe we're near that point.
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TV With The Sound Off
I was thinking about my good friend Digby's comment that "politics is TV with the sound turned off." With that in mind, I was wondering if CNN and Paula Zahn thought they drew blood in Zahn's attempted harassment of CIA analyst Ray McGovern. If you missed it, McGovern is the...
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Me Thinks They Doth Protest … Not At All
Me Thinks They Doth Underreport Too Much Although not widely noted in the American press, Last Sunday, an incident took place at Camp Habbaniya in Iraq -- the base where the U.S. is training new Iraqi military officers -- suggesting that ethnic and religious tensions may now threaten the...
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Staging A War
As soon as I saw the first image (a NYT photo from "Lohengrin," the production currently playing at the Metropolitan Opera), it reminded me of the second. The second image -- which has been all over cyberspace -- was shot in the holy city of Mashhad and distributed by Mehr,...
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Your Turn: Camelflage
It's just one simple article, but this plaintive story about a group of U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan seems to reveal the true futility of whatever it was Bush/Rumsfeld originally had in mind.... It's the accompanying article that about the stymied efforts of an American , expresses in a...
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Another Read On "The Man"
This shot -- featuring U.S. general H.R. McMaster -- has a random, if underhanded, visual twist to it. As elaborated in last week's in-depth New Yorker article by George Packer on U.S. military strategy in Iraq, General McMaster employs an approach to counterinsurgency which pays significant respect to Iraqi...
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Registering My Dis-chord
Why does the MSM refuse to make any connection between the complete f--k up in Iraq, and those in the administration that were, are, and continue to be responsible for it? This fawning piece about Condi Rice's love affair with the piano leading Saturday's newyorktimes.com is just beyond comprehension. As...
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Couching It Diplomatically
Given her unsurpassed political instincts and deft negotiating skills, Condi descended on Baghdad last week aiming to break the stalemate over who would next lead Iraq. With British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in tow, Rice (and U.S. Ambassador/Enforcer Khalilzad) held two important meetings. In one, they met with outgoing Iraqi...
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Losing Reception
If GDub thinks he's having trouble with Iraqi images on U.S. TV, he seems to overlook the bigger issue of what the Iraqi's are watching. With our military superiority largely mitigated by political turmoil, we have become enveloped in a massive perceptual battle -- on radically unfamiliar and increasingly adversarial...
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The Invasion Two-Step
Leave it to the White House, and the preponderance of more dramatic news (U.S. getting dragged into Iraq civil war; Washington immigration fight bringing people into the streets) to water this down, but the news of the British war memo is a real bombshell. The NYT has disclosed a memo,...
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Behind The Mask
I don't understand how the NYT can run this photo four columns wide on Saturday's front page, and then crop it on the web with no option to enlarge. As the prisoner standing on the box, is is really unusual to see this image of Ali Shalal Qaissi.
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Condi Update: "Honey, I Lost The Mid-East!"
What are the chances anyone will look back at the Condi years at the State Department and refer to "The Rice Doctrine." When convention calls for "making nice" in posed shots with heads of state, what could possibly lead to scenes of hectoring and debate? Besides the Mubarak pictures, I...
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Zal Watch: All Hail Breaking Loose
Well, there's one thing the Sunnis and Shiites agreed on today. Both Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi, a spokesman for the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, and Shiite leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim said U.S. Ambassador Khalilzad bore some responsibility for the mosque bombing in Samarra on Wednesday. When you look at factors that elevated the...
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