Iran and Net Neutrality

I tend not to follow the details of internet governance too closely, and leave it to friends and colleagues like Sascha Meinrath (his blog is Public Ponderings) and Paul Riismandel (the Media Geek). Policy discussions move too fast for me, or, I always know that I'm only on the skin of the onion. From the surface, of course, things are never what they seem.

I have no idea how relaxing the expectations for net neutrality would affect the overall shape of the public sphere. If it's a matter of creating a more expensive tier for video on demand, it might not have any direct effect at all. And what should I care about video on demand, other than it might be a nice way for me to watch baseball late at night?

My question is more along the lines of this: What sort of internet regime would make it harder for the pres-o-dent to launch a military strike against Iran?

Yesterday I lectured at the University of Bergen on the decline and fall of journalism's authority beginning in the late twentieth century--take the 1983 invasion of Grenada as a benchmark moment. One of my hosts asked me about the likelihood of a US attack on Iran. I said the media reports that I rely on don't make it clear that any kind of threat is posed that would justify an attack, and that the Bush administration now has little credibility when it makes accusations about weapons programs, but they'd probably do it anyway. He asked me then whether the US would really use a nuclear weapon in such an attack. Oh yeah, I said, the military strategists are dying to try one of those things. They want to break a taboo. Then another one of my hosts began singing Randy Newman's song. Let's drop the big one, and see what happens.

It does take you back to Grenada, a far simpler day. The Reagan administration launched that attack for obvious political reasons--it was ordered immediately after a truck bomb demolished the marine barracks in Beirut, killing over 200 soldiers. The media were false-footed, but after the fact exposed a series of lies and manipulations. But, with the government still operating under cold-war consensus, no Congressional blowback followed, and, although the news media complained about restrictions on the flow of information, no public outrage supported them. Instead, the news media commenced a long and still ongoing period of self-examination, trying to figger out where their credibility has gone, and generally confusing their credibility with their popularity.

There was no internet to speak of then. Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, information and criticism flows more quickly. Today the news media respond, after a demure pause, to what circulates on the web. As a result, we have far more vigorous media exposure of the failures in Iraq than we ever did of the failures in Vietnam, though the news media are still very reluctant to push the atrocity button. This criticism doesn't seem to deflect policymakers, however. They know something about the toothlessness of the chattering classes.

So I'd give up my video on demand baseball to prevent an attack on Iran. Is net neutrality part of that equation? Or am I asking the wrong question?

Iran and unpublished thinking.

Discourses are like onions, in that there always seems to be a deeper layer but you never reach a core. (A bad metaphor--I think it was the one William James used to describe a colleague's personality--because it doesn't do justice to the onion, which does have a sweet and tangy core, though it's similar to the rest of the onion--unlike say a peach pit.)

There's always a deeper layer beyond the one you've hooked into. In anything. In previous posts, I've pondered this fact in regard to the war in Iraq, where, obviously, the mot public discourse, the "confirmation in the form of a mushroom cloud" one, was at least two discourses removed from the discourse that mattered, which was in turn a field of encounter between several other discourses. So beyond the line peddled to the rubes (sadly, in Cincinnati, where Bush delivered his major address), there was another played to the reporters by, say, Scooter Libby, and then another played against that grain by other sources to other reporters like, say, Sy Hersh. And then beyond that there was the Oval office and 10 Downing Street, locations we now have learned something about through leaked memoes and court filings. And beyond that? No core. An ever receding landscape of privileged discourses, all contesting in the Oval office and elsewhere.

So why did we go to war in Iraq? Was there a real reason? Probably not. Probably we went to war in Iraq because it was an option made available by the overlap of a series of privleged discourses. The Oil discourse, the Stability discourse, the Democracy discourse, the Israel discourse. That, plus the will to do it--resident in the Oval office for longer than George Bush--and the realization in the US and elsewhere that the sanctions regime had failed.

And of course the other nations of the world had something to do with this too, though many of them now deny it. Germany officially opposed the war but shared intelligence. Other nations joined the coalition of the willing but now claim they were snookered. Some nations kept a hand in, like Norway, without really signing on. But by and large they authorized it.

Now Iran. Can the same thing happen? Sure. The overlapping consensus in favor of a military strike exists in some protean form, and the world is beginning to appear willing enough. The blogosphere is arguing today whether the will exists in the Oval office. Sure it does. That button is begging to be pushed. What doesn't exist is the capacity for an invasion.

Would a military strike be a bad idea? Yes. It always is. Should an opposition form to try to stop it? Yes, most certainly. Is there political capital to be made by opposing a military strike? No. Not at all.

Italy's Elections.

Having left Italy (we're now living in Norway), it was not as easy as I had expected to find out what was going on in the elections yesterday. Had I been on the ground in Italy, I probably would have kept one of the Mediaset tv stations on and stayed up til it was all over. Here in Norway I alternated between three web sites--Repubblica's, Corriere's, and Rai's. But with web news you really don't get the rhythm of events the way you do with broadcast news. I went to sleep with the election still in doubt.

And woke up to find Prodi winning the Camera, and now the Senate.

It's all so American, no insult intended. First, the misleading exit polls, which we've seen plenty of in the States lately. Then the elongated uncertainty. Then the promise of an extended post-election. In 2000, I went to bed thinking Bush had won, then woke up to realize that Gore was still running, then learned with the rest of the non-delusional nation that Gore had actually won, then endured a month of seeing the election stolen. The Italian case may work out the same, in that Berlusconi hasn't yet conceded, and promises to challenge the results, which include a half million spoiled ballots. It would not surprise me if a large plurality of those are from Berlusconi supporters.

But for now let's say addio to Berlusconi il Presidente. He'll stick around. He's the Ross Perot of Italy, and is fortunate enough to inhabit a system where controlling 20-23 % of the vote is enough to win power. He'll stick around, and continue to peddle his interests and protect his own celebrity, and he will make Italian politics exotic and fun for people elsewhere to follow. He is the world's premier retailer of populismo mediatico, as Eco puts it.

More on Cooked Intelligence.

Or rather cooked reporting. Today's NYTimes has another front page story on Scooter's leak of the NIE on Iraqi wmd. The nut:

A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a "key judgment" by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability.

Mr. Libby said he drew on that report, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, when he spoke with the reporter. However, the conclusions about Mr. Hussein's search for uranium appear to have been buried deeper in the report in part because of doubts about their reliability.

So there's not much the blogosphere hadn't already sussed out here, is there? Libby et al. leaked cooked intelligence to cover up the fact that they were using cooked intelligence. But the story is interesting anyway. Not because of what it tells us about the way the Bush administration uses intelligence, but about the way the press covers this story.

First about Judith Miller, and haven't we heard enough about her already? A leak from Scooter outweighed all the counternews that was available to a reporter in her position. Of course, the ideology of the journalist-as-watchdog would suggest that the counternews would be given supreme value. Journalists are there to even the playing field, and have a natural suspicion of the powerful, and look for stories of conflict in governing institutions, and so forth. And that's the truth for a journalist like say, Sy Hersh, who was producing exactly those kinds of stories about the Iraq intelligence at the time.

Sy Hersh is the pretext for journalism as usual. If he didn't exist, it would be necessary for the news media to invent him. Probably Rupert Murdoch would see to this personally. How could you justify the false populism of the whole enterprise if you didn't occasionally give a Pulitzer to the Sy Hersh's of the world?

But meanwhile the top pros do exactly what Judith Miller did. They tuck their noses up the cracks of the highest placed available sources, and replay the exclusives they're granted. Most of them exercise a little more restraint than Miller, I'm sure.

Which brings us to the second interesting thing about today's story. It appears long after the blogosphere new all the news in it, and long after its real relevance would have warranted publication, because an appropriate institution manufactured it as a news story. It appears today because Patrick Fitzgerald's court filing makes it news.

So that's what it takes. That's also what it took during Watergate. And Vietnam. That plus the bodybags.

The story burning up the blogosphere today involves Scooter and the leaked NIE--he apparently claims that the pres-o-dent personally authorized him to leak it to Judith Miller. This tells us what we always knew, which is that a coverup was organized at the highest levels of government. What they were covering up we also always knew, namely that they had lied about the state of the intelligence. How long will it take for the players to begin to care? The answer is probably measurable in body bags.