"Bush was Set on War."

The New York Times caught up with the British press and the blogosphere today by reporting definitively on a British memo that details a meeting between Blair and Bush on the eve of the war, with Bush apparently riffing ways to finesse the absence of a casus belli. My favorite passage:

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's plan.

And this five days before Colin Powell was sent in to the Security Council to deliver his laughable dossier, his slam-dunk case. The Times continues to dismiss this as simply filling in details on "what was known at the time" about the pres-o-dent's sent-o-ments. But let's be clear. It's proof that he was lying, that Powell was lying, and that Blair et al. knew they were lying, and many more people must have known as well.

The thing to be explained now is why no authority in the States, or in Britain for that matter, is putting these men (and women--let's not forget Condi) in jail. And why the authoritative press treats those who call for such treatment as nutcases.

iraq and information control.

Last night Oliviero Bergamini, a telegiornalist and professor of journalism, spoke about US political discourse and the war in Iraq to a small house at the Societa Letteraria here in Verona. He made an interesting argument about the difficulty of controlling information in Iraq. Compared with Vietnam, there are many more channels and sources of information for the US media system. And he's right. A dedicated citizen can find a breadth and depth of information about Iraq that far exceeds what was available in Vietnam. Bergamini cited the usual suspects--24-hour news channels and the web--in arguing that information was far more readily available.

He's right. What we know about the War in Iraq far exceeds what was known about Vietnam at this point in that exercise. We already have the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers and the MyLai incident in the form of reporting about the absence of wmd, leaks about the debates leading up to the war, the Abu Ghraib photos, and any number of reports about US military abuses. And much of this has come through nonprofessional sources. Abu Ghraib came from the digital cameras of US military personnel. for instance.

A story that Seymour Hersh tells illustrates the differences between the two wars. Hersh, who published the story that began the My Lai saga, got a phone call (this was well over a year ago) from a US serviceman telling him about a massacre some weeks before. The serviceman had witnessed a company going berserk on a village after coming under fire; dozens (if I remember correctly) were killed, and the serviceman, who was having trouble sleeping at night, either e-mailed Hersh or called him on a cell phone, expecting Hersh to give it the full My Lai. But no dice. Hersh says he understands exactly what happened in that case, and it wasn't at all like My Lai. Some scared kids overreacted, which is way different from My Lai, which was part of a systematic campaign to pacify the countryside through blood and terror.

In Vietnam, it was possible for the military to delay, postpone, and usually kill negative news, at least until the steady production of corpses had turned the public against the war. There were obvious bottlenecks at which the Pentagon could exert some control over the flow of information.

Now one cannot any more control the flow of information. But that doesn't mean it's difficult to control the flow of discourse. Even if disconfirming information is saturating the system, the forces of the right still seem to control the discourse, and journalists seem to help them. No amount of information seems capable of dislodging the discourse.

And that's what we need to explain--how the free flow of information helps support discursive control. Anyone? How can you explain why all the disturbing informaiton--and Abu Ghraib sums it up for me--hasn't changed the dominant account?

The US warning.

Today the front pages of Italy's newspapers were dominated by reports about yesterday's alert to US citizens to avoid Italian election rallies. Opposition leader Romano Prodi pointed out that this State Department warning was highly unusual, responded to Italian government reports, and seemed designed to help Berlusconi's re-election campaign. Berlusconi denied, then denied some more, and said it wasn't Prodi's place to do anything as extraordinary as calling the US ambassador to ask about it.

The US warning came as a big surprise to me, as I noted in an earlier post. Although a poll reported in today's Repubblica notes a high level of criticism of the US among the center left, still this criticism is directed at the US government and not at individual citizens, and I've seen no evidence of hostility toward US citizens per se on the streets, in the press, spray-painted on walls, or printed in leaflets. Who says US citizens need to avoid rallies? Berlusconi. It's as simple as that.

The State Department is wildly inconsistent with this warning. It doesn't warn US citizens to avoid, for example, France, where hostility is more evident and passions are inflamed ahead of a national strike. And it didn't issues warnings during recent elections in Germany and Poland. The "terrorism alert" stratagem has been one of the Bush administration's favorites, though, and Berlusconi tries very hard to emulate the pres-o-dent.

If the State Department is, well, insincere, Berlusconi is much much worse. On the one hand he defends the State Department warning, arguing that political rallies are indeed a cause for anxiety. On the other, he argues that governments in cities like Padova and Verona should not bar the neofascists from rallying. Why is it reasonable to fear violence from the left, which is really quite placid, but unreasonable to fear violence from the right, which is pretty violent by any standard?

Permanent Bases and Permanent Untruths.

In his recent press conference, Pres-o-dent Bush remarked offhand that the US military presence in Iraq would continue past his pres-o-dency. This may have been the only true thing he said. In his reply to Helen Thomas, which has been getting much attention in the blogosphere, he repeated the whole series of lies with which he sold this war, even though they've been shown false over and over again. The litany began with the ritual invocation of 9/11, of course.

Tactically, nothing about establishing a permanent presence in Iraq would seem to promote national security, especially if by national security you mean protection from 9/11 style attacks. But the Bush administration doesn't seem to believe this itself. So today, for instance, the State Department warned US citizens in Italy (egad!) to be on alert for a 9/11 style attack. (We are also warned to stay away from political rallies, which can turn violent, injuring as many as one person. Oh, those demons of the left.)

Bush has authorized the topic, and by coincidence the Associated Press that same day published a good long article on the construction of US bases. The AP quotes US military personnel and Iraqi civilians as saying that the evidence on the ground points to a permanent presence. Now during the pres-o-denshul campaign, John Kerry brought this up in one of the debates. There was no followup. Will we have some followup now?

That would depend on the Dem-o-crats. The press in our fallen age just will not go on attack without a centrist sponsor, more or less--without authorized politicians giving them "news" on a regular basis. Dennis Kucinich, for some reason, doesn't count.

But the more interesting thing is how little followup there is to the trail of falsehoods justifying the War. Other bloggers have noted that Russ Feingold's attempt to censure Bush for the clear illegality of the wiretapping program has received only "is it a smart tactic" coverage from the press. Now here they have an authorized politician, and as a result there's some coverage, but only through the so-called "game schema," so that news is framed as a tactical move in a political contest, pushing the truth of the matter to the margins. But we don't get even that about lying the nation into a war. What will that take?

Well, the history of the news media does suggest an answer. It will take five years of significant production of dead US soldiers. That's what it took in Vietnam.

My Lai Time.

The Italian dailies all note this story from Time Magazine:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1174649,00.html

about a US military investigation into civilian deaths at Haditha. Google News shows the world talking about it more than the US is, perhaps because the US media are somewhat reluctant to yield so readily to Vietnamishness. Surely this is not really My Lai time, but hey, that was after about eight years of the Vietnam War, and there's still plenty of time, since, as Bush said at his news conference yesterday, we cannot expect to disengage during his lifetime, er, pres-o-dency. More thoughts on that remarkable press conference later, as it niftily confirms some points I tried to make in this morning's post about the justifications for the war.

The Big Conundrum.

It's been over three years, and no one has explained to my satisfaction why I should believe that US planners ever really believed that there were actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Follow my reasoning.

First, wmd are not useful as offensive weapons. They are intended as defensive and deterrent weapons. This is because, absent technology far more advanced than Iraq could command, there is no reliable way to direct the destruction against the enemy. On the battlefield, chemical and biological weapons afflict soldiers on both sides, and moreover kill innocent civilians. They're a weapon of last resort.

US policy makers and planners were of course aware of this. While saying publicly that Saddam pursued his weapons programs because he was a madman seeking empire, all serious parties knew that, if he had a wmd program, it was to deter invasions. This was hardly a crazy notion, as Iraq had been bombed by Israel in the early 1980s, considered itself menaced continually by Iran, and had been invaded in the first Gulf War. It was sensible for him to think that wmd would be a deterrent.

But here's the beauty of a deterrent. It's the idea of the weapon and not the weapon itself that does the work. The US and the Soviet Union didn't go to war during the Cold War because their nuclear weaponry deterred them from doing so. The weapons themselves were never actually used, though; it was the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction that prevented hot war--or at least so the strategists believed.

Which is why the strategists should have (and I believe did) understand that Saddam was blowing smoke up their asses. We know now--everyone knows now--that he intentionally misled the world into thinking that he had wmd capacity in order to forestall an invasion. The Big Question is when did our intelligence community and their allies overseas figure this out?

Well before the war, I'm sure. Here's why. First, they knew that their intelligence was weak because it had repeatedly failed to check out. The UN weapons inspectors proved this. This is why US intelligence was slow to release information to them--they desperately wanted their information not publicly proved false before the invasion. Second, they must have begun to understand that their sources in Iraq were being manipulated to present a more damning picture of the wmd situation than was in fact true. Saddam was simply not capable enough to bluff without being sussed out; our intelligence people--the ones in the trenches, not the politicoes--aren't that stupid. But finally, and here's the big part of the big question, if they HAD believed in the wmd myth, they would have been committing a monstrous crime against humanity by actually invading. If, as our propagandists asserted at the outset of the invasion, Saddam had given orders to use chemical and biological weaponry when the invasion was within 50 miles of Baghdad, the result would have been genocidal. Untold thousands of civilians would have been killed or maimed. And I don't believe our military or politicians at the highest levels would have committed such an act.
I've spent three years looking for an answer to this big question, and haven't yet been enlightened. Anyone out there have a solution?
No, I think we have to conclude that at the highest levels it was well known that the wmd rationale was bullshit. Then we have to wonder what this has to teach us. I mean about the system of public discourse, which was clearly unable to actually determine this at the time.

Italian politics and the ancestral village.

The presidential campaign here is reaching a climax. Polls in today's papers show the center-left coalition widening its advantage over the past two weeks, reversing what had been a slight recovery by Berlusconi and the center right. Remarkable about this is the slightness of the change, considering how dramatic the events have been. A week ago Berlusconi melted down on an interview show and walked out of the studio; a few days later he was clearly bested in his first face-to-face debate with Romano Prodi; and then Friday he cancelled a speaking appearance before Confindustria, the Italian equivalent of the National Association of Manufacturers, and then appeared on Saturday and made a kind of spectacle of himself. After all this, the movement in the polls seems very slight.

But then, as in most campaigns, there are really two stories to tell. One is the slow and very stable knitting together of electoral chunks, and they change very little. Not that many people who've been watching Berlusconi for years will find his performance over the last week or so surprising, and commentators insist that it's part of a grand strategy to simply keep his face and name in the news. Individual voters make up and change their minds very slowly, and they are what the polls measure.

The second campaign is the mediated dramatization of the first campaign. Because it's mediated it needs to have a more rapid tempo, and the various news organizations manage to work with remarkable harmony to find the same events to dramatize each day. The center and left newspapers have remarkably similar front pages, as do the four free-circulation dailies that I pick up every morning here. The right press gives a different spin to these events, but they're the same events. It's similar in the US, of course, but the press there is much less diverse; you sort of expect a homogenized version of events. Here one might expect the different wings of the press to produce fundamentally different narratives of the campaign, but no--same narrative, different white hats.

It's tempting to say that the first campaign, the slow one, is the real campaign, and that the second one is just a spectacle. But in fact the second one, even if it doesn't do much to change vote tallies, does a lot to change policy formation. It's the second campaign that tells the elected officials what it is that the campaign was all about; it says what it was that voters meant when they voted. The second campaign has the capacity to falsify the first campaign. It has the ability to say that a majority voted for a war when really they voted for security, or that they voted for tax cuts when really they voted against gay sex. So it's very important. But it's not the same thing.

The Italian media are more important to politics than the US media. They aren't really more important to the first campaign, and I think many of the commentators on Italian politics misunderstand this. Berlusconi will get at least 45% of the vote because of the slow knitting together of an electoral base, not because he runs Mediaset. But the Italian media do more to represent the political system than the US media do. US politicians use advertising to carpet bomb the electorate; in Italy advertising is relatively unimportant. But talk shows on television are incredibly important in creating a sphere of individual actors with personalities and positions. They draw far larger audiences than their US parallels also, and they're better entertainment. And the newspaper discourse helps drive the telejournalism and the talk shows.

Last week we visited southern Italy, and I found myself in the birth home of my grandfather, who was dead long before I was born. This stolid old stone house in a street of old stone houses, all sharing walls, is still in the family. When we visited, there was fresh snow in the street. The house is heated by wood fires; one was lit in the second floor kitchen, and we sat around it and chatted for a little while, watching a fashion show on television. Yes, this is a stone house with wood for heat and satellite television. Not an unusual combination. Can I make it a metaphor for the current age of politics?

Universal Health Care, or Socialized Medicine

Kevin Drum has been on target on this issue, and argues in the past couple of days that the liberal blogosphere is pretty well unanimous too. He wonders why it hasn't been a bigger issue, and asks for a reason why democratic pols shy away from it:

I can't think of one. And while I'm not naive about the recent history of national healthcare plans, it still strikes me as a bit mysterious that virtually no major Democratic politician supports full-on, unapologetic universal healthcare. If there's any single big progressive policy that I think the blogosphere is a genuine bellwether for, this is probably it.

Bottom line: Surely it's time for someone to step up to the plate and stake their reputation on a simple, comprehensive, common sense plan to implement national healthcare? And if financing is the problem, just take a page out of the Bush playbook and ignore it: "If I'm elected president, I'll work with Congress to devise a fair and sensible revenue plan." How hard is that?

Kevin is right, of course. There's no visible reason for this. SO let's look for an invisible one. Let's call it power.

But wait, is it really all that invisible? Health care costs in the US account for about 15% of the economy, and almost all of that runs through privately owned and controlled insurance companies. One of every six dollars spent in the US economy comes from or goes to an insurance company. When the serious policy discussions take place, and when the candidates and elected officials decide to take a position on health care issues, then, there is always a lot of money in the room. Now even if candidates and elected officials were convinced that voters would favor universal health care, the wonks are there to convince them otherwise, or to convince them that legislation just isn't doable, and of course politics is the art of the doable.

So there is that kind of simple direct influence--all the money and power leaning on the women and men in the political system.

But then there is all the indirect influence too. The entire system of public intelligence, with professional journalism and policy think tanks at its heart, works to convince the phantom public that health care reform is a bad idea. The one memory of the 1993 fiasco that remains fresh is the "Harry and Louise" ad campaign, for which the health insurance industry paid $30 million, a very affordable price for 15% of the economy, I'd say. The ad campaign worked not so much because it convinced people that reform was a bad idea--though it seemed effective that way--but because it convinced public officials that people COULD be convinced that it was a bad idea, and that's all it took, because of all the direct influence in the way.

One reason why Harry and Louise worked was that professional journalism had already done its task. Reporters had gone to Canada and looked for stories. In their usual way, they went to the most dysfunctional places--the poorest hospitals in the biggest cities--and found shortages and delays, and even when they noted that similar US hospitals were also dysfunctional, they nevertheless consistently sent the message that reform was a fool's dream. They backed up this anecdotal negative reporting with the usual even-handed expert opinions--choosing one from think-tank A to say that reform would be good and one from think tank NOT A to say that it would be a disaster. Then it left it to readers to decide.

Now many US voters, but not most, know something about the Canadian system, so I thought it would be a nice natural test of the system of public intelligence to see how this worked out. It was possible for any resident of Florida, for instance, to track down a Canadian at Dunkin Donuts and ask if they'd prefer the US system. When they all said No, wouldn't that overpower the media impression? Clearly not. I have the good fortune of knowing many Canadians, and have taken the opportunity to ask just about all of them whether they'd prefer the US system, and only one said yes, and he was just posturing because he was a market fundamentalist. If you also point out that health care overall costs the Canadian economy a little over half what it costs the US, you'd expect that common sense would congeal in a dramatic fashion. If, that is, there's a working system of public intelligence.

There is not, apparently, at least on an issue like this. Instead, public opinion is systematically distorted and politics becomes a marketplace.

The one thing that Kevin Drum doesn't face up to in his thinking on this is that reform necessarily means downsizing. At first blush, this should make it a happy issue for Democrats, who really have been trying to sound "new" about policy--more business-like. Doesn't downsizing mean a kind of rationing? Now try to convince the great public that rationing is ok when it's NOT done by the market.

Now if we want to get really wild, can someone tell me why we shouldn't nationalize the entire insurance industry? It's all about shared risk, it's all run on careful mathematical formulas, and it really is one of those areas where centalization would lead to greater efficiency. So is there any reason other than an irrational fear of bureaucracy and the sheer power of private wealth that no one ever thinks of making this a political issue?