‘Twas the Blogger’s Night Before Christmas

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‘TWAS THE BLOGGER’S NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the ”˜sphere
Bloggers were glad to see Christmas draw near.
Their PCs were turned off and all put away
The bloggers were swearing to take off the day.

Their children were nestled all snug in their beds
While visions of extra time danced in their heads
With a father or mom not distracted by writing
No posts to compose, and no links to be citing.

But we all know that vows were just meant to be broken
And the vows of a blogger can be just a token.
There’s always a chance that some sort of temptation
Will rise up to make them of fleeting duration.

For instance, there might be found, under the tree
An Apple; well, what better sight could there be?
And who could neglect it and wait the whole day?
It has to be tried out, one just can’t delay.

Or maybe somewhere there’s a fast-breaking story
Important, and complex, and covered with glory.
It can’t be ignored, there’s really no choice,
So add to the din every blogger’s small voice.

And then there are some who may just like to rhyme
(I’m one who at times must confess to this crime),
And it’s been quite a while since Clement Clarke Moore
Wrote his opus (though authorship’s been claimed by Gore)””

So it seems about time it be newly updated
And here’s my grand effort””aren’t you glad you all waited?
Forgive if it sounds a bit awkward to read.
Writing, I set a new record for speed.

I had to get under the wire and compose it
Before Christmas Day. Now it’s time that I close it.
But let me exclaim (or, rather, to write)
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!

Christmas in New York City

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I drove down to New York to spend Christmas at my brother’s. This involves no hardship whatsoever, except perhaps for the tedious drive itself. There’s a bunch of parties, a great deal of fabulous food (each day spent there is good for a net gain of approximately two pounds), and much conversation. Oh, and probably a couple of presents as well, but that’s exceedingly secondary.

I’ve written before about the fact that I’m “in transition”–thinkng about moving–and that I don’t really have a single city that I consider home. You’d think that New York, the place I grew up, would fit the bill. But it doesn’t. Oh, it’s familiar, all right. But even when I was a child and teenager here (I left at seventeen, never to return except for visits), it didn’t feel all that “homey” to me. Too overwhelming, too uncaring, so huge that to traverse it took hours. No. I always knew I’d leave as soon as I got the chance. And I did.

But still, but still…when I drive in on a clear night, as I did yesterday, and see that skyline suddenly loom in the distance to the right of me (I come in over the Bronx-Whitestone bridge and then onto the Brookly Queens Expressway), it’s not only an impressive sight, it’s an iconic one, as well.

Somehow New York has become the American city. That feeling has only been accentuated, post-9/11. It’s the biggest, the best, the everythingest, “if I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere.” LA may be a great big freeway (I’ve lived there, too, and I can attest to that), but New York is just great and big.

And beautiful. In recent decades New York has lit itself far more colorfully than it ever did in my youth, the tops of the skyscrapers (particularly the Empire State building) sporting seasonal red and green lights, makng the skyline look from far away (as I saw it last night) like a string of sparkling jewels, diamonds and emeralds and rubies. New York at Christmastime was always a very special place, anyway, with the tree at Rockefeller Center, and the skaters, and the elaborate store windows, and the tempting smell of roasting chestnuts.

The temperature was in the mid-50s yesterday and the same today, however; not so very Christmasy. In fact, we’ve only had one or two days of cold so far this winter. So I feel a bit as though I’ve been transported to the Carolinas or thereabouts rather than New York City. That’s better, though, than the Christmases I spent in Los Angeles, where the holiday decorations always looked oddly out of place no matter how elaborate they might be.

In contrast, where I live it usually looks like a Currier and Ives print around this time. Although the lack of snow this year makes it a little less perfect, visually, it’s still the qunitessential Christmas scene (wish I’d had the prescience to have taken some photos to post here, but I didn’t, and a search didn’t reveal any of the sort I’m seeking). In New England the most popular type of house decoration is minimalist: a single candle (electric, for safety’s sake) in each window–classic and simple, and lovely in an old colonial home or antique cape.

And now I’m going to be out enjoying this beautiful day–and the first party. I hope you do the same, wherever you are, whatever the weather and whatever the scene.

Revising history: Vietnam (yes, again)

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Dean Esmay has linked to my second post on Cronkite and Tet, and a commenter there named “mikeca” called what I had to say “revisionist history.”

His comment was identical to one he posted on this blog as well, which I now reproduce here in full:

This is conservative revisionist history and rationalization.

According to the new history, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese were defeated in Tet and we had the war won. Only the media, and Walter Cronkite snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Totally wrong. Before Tet the US government was saying that the war was winding down. Tet showed that the enemy was far from defeated. In fact it was clear that if the US had not had 500,000 men in Vietnam, the South would have been overrun. More than half of the Americans killed in Vietnam came after the Tet offensive was over.

What Tet showed was that it took 500,000 American service men in Vietnam to keep the South Vietnamese government in power, because the South Vietnamese people did not really believe in their government. The fact that the South Vietnamese military and government collapsed like a house of cards as soon as the US left, shows just that. The US was just propping up a corrupt and incompetent government.

Cronkite talked with lots of government and military officials off the record. Many of them told him of their doubts about the situation in Vietnam. The US government knew the South Vietnamese government was probably a hopeless cause. The US could keep the South Vietnamese government in power by keeping 500,000 men there forever, but that effectively made South Vietnam a US colony. The American people eventually realized that while the US could keep the South Vietnamese government in power forever, we could not make the South Vietnamese people support that government.

You can rationalize all you want. Try to blame the Democrats in congress, try to blame the media. The facts are there are limits to what can be accomplished with military power, even overwhelming military power. If you fail to learn that lesson from Vietnam, perhaps you will learn it in Iraq.

The following is based on a reply I posted on Dean’s World. I decided to highlight it here-and expand on it–because I think mikeca’s comment is an excellent example of the sort of argument often mounted when there’s an attempt to portray the Vietnam War in a way that contradicts the original MSM version of the truth.

First I want to say that rationalization is most assuredly not my motive. In fact, if I were trying to rationalize, I actually would have a vested interest in holding onto the original viewpoint of the war that mikeca expresses. After all, I protested that war, and was relieved when we pulled out and it was over. If I were going to rationalize my own role in things, I’d be with mikeca all the way (and see this for a lengthy discussion of how those who were against the war tend to use rationalization when they decline to take responsibility for its aftermath).

Second, I want to say that my post is revisionist history, but not in the way mikeca means the term. “Revisionist” often is used to refer to history rewritten falsely as propaganda, such as by the Soviets. That’s the sense in which mikeca is using it, of course, only in this case—as he writes—it would be “conservative” revisionist history.

But sometimes that “first draft” of history—such as the Vietnam War as perceived in real time and told in the MSM—cries out for revision, as in “to revise.” To look at again with fresh eyes and new information, and to question whether the standard viewpoint of the time was correct. Here’s another definition of revisionist history, the one I’m using (a revised one, as it were):

In its legitimate form (see historical revisionism) it is the reexamination of historical facts, with an eye towards updating historical narratives with newly discovered, more accurate, or less biased information, acknowledging that history of an event, as it has been traditionally told, may not be entirely accurate.

So to mikeca and those who agree with him, I suggest that they read Braestrup’s The Big Story on what happened during Tet (including the incorrect MSM evaluation of it), a book recommended in my Cronkite post. Or read this shorter Bishop discussion and review of Braestrup’s book.

If you’ve read Part II of my Cronkite/Tet post, you will see that I briefly summarized some of the myths Braestrup’s book challenged, as discussed in Bishop’s article. Here, though, I’ll spotlight one in particular, since it reflects on mikeca’s contention about the sanguine war predictions of the US prior to Tet:

Misconception: There had been no warning of a coming offensive. Actually, the press ignored cautions expressed by General Earle Wheeler and General William C. Westmoreland in December and January.

Braestrup concluded that the press had made a two-pronged error: minimizing US military warnings before Tet that something big was still in the works, making it seem as though they were far more falsely hopeful than they actually were, and then maximizing North Vietnamese/Vietcong victories during Tet.

As far as the South Vietnamese people’s lack of support for their own government went, it was actually during Tet that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong learned the South Vietnamese wouldn’t support the North, if given the choice. The North had expected a great many South Vietnamese to join them during Tet, but it didn’t happen:

..the NLF apparently did expect large sections of the urban populace to rise up in revolt. With a few exceptions, this didn’t happen. South Vietnam’s city dwellers were generally indifferent to both the NLF and the Saigon Government but the VC clearly expected more support than it actually got.

I’ve never indicated that Walter Cronkite singlehandedly lost the war, or that the task would have been easy otherwise. But it would have been a lot easier if the truth of Tet had been told at the time, and if Cronkite hadn’t taken it on himself to be judge and jury of the war effort. The point is not that, but for Cronkite, the war would have been over after Tet—it most certainly would not have. The point was the mischaracterization of Tet by our own media, and Cronkite’s sudden switch to agenda-driven opinion journalism.

And now for that South Vietnamese government which, according to mikeca, “collapsed like a house of cards after the US left.”

In this post I discuss the drawdown in troops known as “Vietnamization.” Take a look at this diagram, featured in that post. You’ll notice that by early 1972 there were very few US combat troops in Vietnam; by August of 1972 they were all gone.

Read this article on the fall of South Vietnam, and note that the ARVN was not doing half badly several years later (late 1974), until the US Congress pulled the plug on them and left them with sharply diminshed funds to pay their troops or to arm themselves. That was the turning point, not the much earlier departure of US combat forces. The financial betrayal occurred at a time when there were no longer any US fighting forces in Vietnam, and had not been for years (here’s a history of that shameful episode). Meanwhile, the North saw its golden opportunity, fully and generously funded by its Chinese and Soviet allies.

Here are some of the details of how it happened:

In May 1973, Congress voted to cut-off all funds for military action in Indochina, including air support. Having deprived Saigon of U.S. firepower, Congress then cut aid to South Vietnam in [December] 1974, resulting in shortages of fuel, spare parts and ammunition. A month after this Congressional action, the Hanoi Politburo decided to launch a new invasion in 1975. The Soviets increased their military aid to Hanoi, building a heavily armed force that the abandoned Saigon government could not stop. When President Gerald Ford asked Congress for an emergency grant of funds to rush ammunition to South Vietnam on April 10, 1975, he was turned down.

The author of these words, William R. Hawkins, believes that the antiwar Left of the Vietnam era could not tolerate the idea that the South Vietnamese might actually hold off the North; this would contradict some of their most dearly cherished notions. And so, even though there were no longer any American combat soldiers at risk there, funding (which at the time was very modest) had to be cut off; the South had to be abandoned so that the North could win and vindicate the Left.

I’m not quite that cynical; I’m not at all sure that was the motivation. But reading the Hawkins assertion certainly gave me pause, I have to say. Because that’s the sort of mindset I see all too often today regarding Iraq—a need on the part of many on the Left to have us fail there, in order to prove themselves right. I’m not saying that’s true of everyone on the Left, but it most definitely seems to be the sentiment of a significant portion. And I think one can detect what may be a trace of that sentiment in the final paragraph of mikeca’s comment:

The facts are there are limits to what can be accomplished with military power, even overwhelming military power. If you fail to learn that lesson from Vietnam, perhaps you will learn it in Iraq.

If we don’t “learn it in Iraq”—if our Iraqi endeavor were to ultimately succeed on some level–it would call into question some of the most deeply and long-held notions of the Left. That can be a very upsetting experience.

Did Vietnam show “the limits” of “military power,” “even overwhelming military power,” as mikeca contends? For political and PC reasons, as well as fear that the conflict would escalate further, we never did unleash our full and overwhelming military power. And it’s indisputably true that, when we cut the ARVN’s funding, we not only were not using our military power, we were not even allowing them to use their military power—which was certainly less than overwhelming.

But back to Tet and the MSM, the topic of my original post: Braestrup (who was a seasoned war reporter and Korean war veteran, and who did exhaustive research on Tet for his “revisionist” book, considered the definitive text on the subject) wrote:

Rarely has contemporary crisis journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality. . . To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other””in a major crisis abroad””cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism.

Braestrup also called the coverage of Tet by the MSM “press malpractice.”

And so it was. Sounds like a history that might cry out for just a bit of revising, doesn’t it?

Iranian elections: free and fair, or changing the display windows?

The New Neo Posted on by

At the end of this week’s podcast, the Sanity Squad briefly mentioned the election results in Iran, which were being counted and reported (preliminarily) even as we spoke. First the results showed a repudiation of Ahmadinejad, then new “results” seemed to be coming in that negated that.

Now the final results are in, and it appears that they’ve favored what Iran calls “moderate conservatives” (i.e. people whose mouths are not quite as big as Ahmadinejad’s) and “reformers.”

Who are these people? They give the appearance, at least, of being an improvement on the loose cannon-esque Ahmadinejad. For example, as the AP reports (via, in this case, the New York Times–and note how, although the article is almost solely about the Iranian election results, the headline manages to be about Bush-hatred):

“We consider this government’s policy to be against Iran’s national interests and security. It is simply acting against Iran’s interests,” said Shariati, a leader of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, Iran’s largest reformist party. His party seeks democratic changes within the ruling Islamic establishment and supports relations with the United States.

Sounds good. The AP and the Times treat the story as though this election were utterly bona fide, a slight change of power at the local level in a democracy, the people speaking out in order to effect change. This is hardly unique; much of the coverage of the Iranian election seems to resemble that of the AP and the Times, taking the whole thing at face value (see this, for example, which quotes an Iranian official who compares the Iranian election to the recent one in the US that repudiated Bush via the defeat of his fellow Republicans).

I find it odd that there’s not a hint in the Times or much of the MSM of any behind-the-scenes maneuvering in Iran, the fact that all candidates must be approved by the mullahs, ballot tampering, or even the fact that Iran is a theocracy run by a dictatorship since 1979. Do dictators ordinarily allow free and fair elections?

Sometimes it’s easy to tell–in the old Soviet days, only the Communist candidates were on the ballot, unopposed, and the results were always something like 99% in favor (surprise, surprise!). But these days tyrants have become far more sophisticated in their PR. Therefore it’s possible and commonplace to report this election as though people were merely repudiating the hardline policies of Ahmadinejad:

“The result of the elections, if there is any ear to listen or any eye to see, demands reconsideration in policies,” the [a moderate daily newspaper] said in an editorial Thursday.

Conservative lawmaker Emad Afroogh also called on Ahmadinejad to learn a lesson from the vote. ”The people’s vote means they don’t like Ahmadinejad’s populist methods,” Afroogh told The Associated Press.

Reformist Saeed Shariati also said the results of the election were a ”big no” to Ahmadinejad and his allies, who he accused of harming Iran’s interests with their hard line.

But do these people actually have any power in Iran? Or is this just a new window display in the Iranian shop, much of it for gullible Western consumption, for folks who believe an election is an election is an election (unless, of course, it was Bush’s in 2000)?

Michael Ledeen has been on Iran’s case for a long time, and he sees the Iranian elections rather differently than the AP and the Times, to say the least. In his National Review article on the subject, he (or his editor) puts the word “votes” in scare quotes, for example, demonstrating Ledeen’s profound skepticism about the whole process.

Ledeen’s contention is that the entire enterprise is a planned and orchestrated propaganda ploy executed by those who really rule Iran (and hint, it’s not Ahmadinejad): the mullahs. Common sense, and previous evidence, dictates that they would not allow a spontaneous and fair election to be held in that country; in Iran’s dictatorship, there are no accidents allowed in the elective process. Here’s the way Ledeen says it actually works:

Yes, people get mobilized and go to the polls and mark their ballots and put them in the ballot box. But then Groucho comes into play: “I’ve got ballots. And if you don’t like them, I’ve got other ballots.” So, as usual, candidates (featuring, as usual, the unfortunate Mehdi Karubi, the eternal loser who nonetheless remains at the top of the mullah’s power mountain) complain that ballot boxes disappeared, and new ones magically appeared, and numbers change, and counters are replaced. It’s all part of the ritual.

Well, who’s correct–the AP or Ledeen? I’ll go with Ledeen, myself; you, of course, may differ.

Ledeen points out that Ahmadinejad–although colorful and newsworthy–has been, like every other Iranian President, a mere figurehead, window-dressing for the real leaders of the country, the mullahs. Khatami, his predecessor, was his exact opposite–he talked the talk the West wanted to hear. But neither he nor Ahmadinejad can walk the walk without the mullahs pulling the strings.

The Iranian President plays nothing like the powerful role of the chief American executive, although the mullahs count on the West’s confusion about the title being similar to make it seem as though the Iranian President is actually a more important figure than he is. However, he’s used to send whatever message the mullahs may want to signal at any specific point in time.

Ledeen writes:

[“Moderate” Khatami’s tenure, Ahmadinejad’s predecessor] was a period when Iran sought to lull the West into the arms of Morpheus, distracting attention from the real horrors of the regime and its preparations for war against us, including the nuclear program.

With Ahmadinejad, the mullahs bared their fangs to us. Convinced they were winning in Iraq, foreseeing the destruction of Israel, the domination of Lebanon, a jihadist reconquista in Afghanistan and the expansion of their domain into the Horn of Africa, they gave us the face of the unrepentant conqueror. He’s played his role well, and he will continue to play it.

So what’s actually going on right now in Iran, according to Ledeen? A power struggle for the succession to the real throne in the country, the one held by ailing (and probably dying) head cleric Khameini:

The war policy is not in dispute among the rulers of Iran, whether they call themselves reformers or hard-liners. Nor is the decision to use the iron fist of the regime against any and all advocates of freedom for the Iranian people. What is decidedly at the center of the current fighting within the regime ”” a fight that has already produced spectacular assassinations, masqueraded as airplane crashes, of a significant number of military commanders, including the commander of the ground forces of the powerful Revolutionary Guards ”” is the Really Big Question, indeed the only question that really matters: Who will succeed Khamenei?

Ledeen suggests that even the regime’s management of the recent student demonstrations (which were real, not staged) reflects this power struggle–they wanted the news to be publicized, and made sure it was. He also mentions that some Western news agencies, by publishing photos of the demonstrators, unmindful of the possible consequences, have forced them into hiding–nice going, guys (and gals).

[NOTE: Ledeen is considered by many to be a hothead, bent on war between the US and Iran. I wrote about Ledeen previously, here; I don’t see any indication from his statements that this is what he’s advocating, although he certainly is in favor of regime change there. Here is an interview with Ledeen that I recommend if you are interested in learning more about his point of view.]

[ADDENDUM: Amir Taheri, an Iranian expert whose views I respect, treats the elections with something between the total cynicism of Ledeen and the total acceptance of the AP. He acknowledges the inherent unfairness there, but still thinks they reflect trends in the thinking of the Iranian public. He reports that “the real winner” of these elections is Khameini–no surprise there, somehow. And that the results were a repudiation for Ahmadinejad in Tehran, but not in other areas of the country.]

New Sanity Squad podcast: be afraid, be very very afraid

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Why afraid? Well, take a look at the graphic for this week’s podcast.

But you needn’t be too frightened; it merely illustrates the artist’s conception of one of Siggy’s many sound bites The topics: Barak Obama’s pumped-up candidacy and the possibility of civil war in Palestine. Join Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped, Siggy, and myself for all talk, no action.

Tet, Cronkite, opinion journalism, and a changing press: Part II (changing the course of history)

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[Part I here.]

In his introduction to that Cronkite interview featured in Part I, Dick Gordon writes:

It was February 1968, and in a three minute editorial essay on the CBS Evening news Cronkite quite simply changed the course of history. On that night, the anchor told Americans that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable; that the generals and pundits were wrong…

Think about that for a moment. Cronkite, a news anchor, goes on a trip to Vietnam (I can’t find any information on how long it lasted, but my guess is a couple of weeks at most). This happens around the time of the Tet Offensive, and he’s briefed on that, among other things. Then he returns home. With no particular military expertise—and, as it turns out, no basic understanding of the strategic realities of the Tet Offensive itself—he comes to the opinion that the war cannot be won.

Although prior to this he’s always considered his role to be the reporting of facts and events, he now develops the idea that he must use his bully pulpit, and the influence he’s gained thoughout his years as a solid and relatively nonpartisan newsman, to tell the “truth” that the government and the military have been keeping from the American people.

Why Cronkite decided to make that transition is still somewhat mysterious, although I aired some theories about it in Part I. Of course, there’s no doubt that Cronkite had—and has—a right to his opinion; but we’re not talking about merely having an opinion. Did he have a right to leap over the traditional boundaries of news reporting and to intone, in a voice almost all Americans had grown to implicitly trust and revere, that the situation was hopelessly stalemated?

The rules about reporting were there for a reason, after all. The responsibility journalists have is an awesome one; we rely on them for the information on which we base our votes in a republic. Journalists need to make sure that the information they convey is correct, properly sourced, accurate. But anchors are generalists, not experts—except in a very narrow field, that of conveying the news. They are good writers and talkers. They are able to keep their calm with a camera on them, and even to ad lib if necessary. But reporters should guard against the hubris of thinking that they’ve become expert in every field they cover.

In his broadcast of February 1968, Cronkite was careful to say in his introduction that what he was about to say was “speculative, personal, subjective.” He then indicates he doesn’t know who won the Tet campaign. He goes on to list a series of battles and conflicts that haven’t been resolved to his satisfaction; it’s all a stalemate, the whole thing.

He then makes a rather extraordinary leap, saying it’s clear this will always be the case. He knows that North Vietnam can—and most definitely will—match us for every measure we can come up with, not just in the past but in the future.

In fact, in clinical terms, one might say Cronkite is speaking of his own weariness and depression in the face of the ongoing conflict. He offers no proof of his assertions of hopeless quagmire, even for Tet—he just doesn’t know. But his language is the language of emotion, not facts or strategy. He is dispirited and disillusioned, experiencing a loss of faith more than anything else:

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.

He calls the conclusion that we are “mired in stalemate” the “only realistic” one. And then he makes the most peculiar declaration of all:

…in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

So, even if Tet turns out to have been a last-ditch effort for the North and the Vietcong, and if the enemy really does prove to have nothing left (“his last big gasp”) before submitting to negotiations—Cronkite sees the US “not as victors, but as honorable people who…did the best they could.”

But under the circumstances, why wouldn’t the US then be negotiating as victors? We see that, even when Cronkite posits a relatively optimistic position as a hypothetical, he still can’t bring himself to draw the proper conclusions from it: that it would represent at least some sort of victory. What comes across instead is an utter weariness, a personal one: that of Walter Cronkite himself.

Cronkite remains exceedingly proud of this broadcast. He’s often called “avuncular,” but I think the following statement of his could be more rightly called paternalistic:

There is a point at which it seems to me if an individual reporter has gained a reputation of being honest, fair as can be, and helps the American people in trying to make a decision on a major issue, I think we ought to take that opportunity.

This illustrates better than anything I can think of the slippery slope that comes from being a reporter and especially an anchorperson. For it’s clear that Cronkite had come to believe in his own persona, and to feel that it conferred a certain amount of wisdom on him. If he is honest and fair and trusted in his reportage of the facts, then he seems to think it follows that his own personal opinions and judgments—even about matters outside his field of expertise, journalism itself—are also reliable ones. And that he is therefore qualified to advise the American people in decisions they make on matters of national and military policy.

So, how wrong was Cronkite about Tet? About as wrong as can be, it turns out. History has declared unequivocally that there were winners and losers in Tet: it was a grand strategy that failed miserably for the North in the tactical military sense but succeeded beyond its wildest dreams as a propaganda ploy—due in large part to Cronkite and his colleagues in the MSM.

One of the oddest things about Cronkite isn’t what he did then; it’s that he’s still proud of it today. I’ve read and listened to a number of his interviews on the subject; at no time does he even address the fact that he was wrong about Tet in the military sense—nor do his questioners bring it up. Is this reticence on their part a show of respect for the frailty of an elderly man? Or are both he and his interviewers largely unaware of the discrediting facts that have been uncovered and widely aired in the intervening decades? Or do they not care if they were wrong about those things, because, after all, they were pursuing that “higher truth?”

The “lower” truth (otherwise known as the actual truth) is that Tet was a disaster for the Vietcong and the North—especially the Vietcong, who never recovered from the blow. But, in the end , it didn’t matter. How they managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat was detailed in the definitive work on the subject, Peter Braestrup’s 1978 analysis of MSM coverage of Tet, entitled “Big Story.”

…the nationwide Vietcong offensive turned out to be an “unmitigated disaster” for the communist side. But the media consensus was just the opposite—an “unmitigated defeat” for the United States.

Cronkite, along with several hundred reporters from two dozen countries, focused on how the Vietcong guerrillas managed to blast their way into the U.S. Embassy compound (but didn’t make it past the Marines in the lobby). War correspondents were also impressed by the view from the cocktail bar atop the Caravelle Hotel: C-47s, equipped with three Gatling guns on one side, were strafing Vietcong pockets in Cholon, the capital’s twin city 2½ miles away.

Yet the Vietcong didn’t reach a single one of their objectives and lost most of their 45,000-strong force in their attacks against 21 cities. It was also a defeat that convinced North Vietnam’s leaders to send their regular army—the NVA—south of the 17th parallel to pick up where the Vietcong left off.

If you want to read a summary of the conclusions Braestrup—a seasoned war reporter and former Marine who had served in Korea—reached in his book, please see this. You’d do well to read the whole thing; it’s rich in important and informative detail.

Interestingly enough, Braestrup doesn’t posit press political bias as a major part of the problem. The real difficulty was sheer ignorance, especially about anything military. Here are just a few of the MSM-created myths about Tet that Braestrup effectively destroys:

There had been no warning of a coming offensive.

The offensive was a victory for Hanoi.

The North Vietnamese military initiative bared the unreliability and inefficiency of our own allies, the South Vietnamese.

The characteristic American response was to destroy city districts and villages with overwhelming, indiscriminate firepower.

The sapper raid on the American embassy, the fighting in Hue, and the siege of Khe Sanh typified the war.

Khe Sanh was to be America’s Dien Bien Phu.

How did the press get it so very wrong?

The press corps lacked military experience and the ability to grasp and present matters of strategy and tactics…The press’s lack of knowledge and maturity resulted in a lack of discrimination in the presentation of hastily gathered or incomplete facts and contributed to the disaster theme.

The views of experienced military commentators like Joseph Kraft and Hanson Baldwin and the analyses of Douglas Pike were virtually ignored. The press reflected American ignorance of Vietnamese language and culture, had no expertise in the area of pacification, and almost no sources on the South Vietnamese government or army.

…The press was impressionable. General Bruce Palmer succinctly summed up the problem when he stated that the foe “took the battle down around the Caravelle Hotel and, so, from the standpoint of the average reporter over there, it was the acorn that fell on the chicken’s head and it said ‘The sky is falling.'”

And then you have what I think are the three most important press failings of all, of which Cronkite is guilty as charged, their staying power reflected in his inordinate pride in himself even today, a pride that persists in the face of a book like “The Big Story” (one wonders whether Cronkite has even read it):

There was no willingness to admit error or correct erroneous reporting after the fact. The classic example was the Associated Press’s continued assertion that sappers had entered the U.S. Embassy building in Saigon more than twelve hours after it was clear the attack had been repulsed on the grounds.

…By the time of Vietnam, it had become professionally acceptable in some media to allow reporters to “explain” news, not merely report it…

…In their commentary on events in Vietnam, reporters “projected” to the American public their own opinions and fears based on incomplete data and their own inclinations.

Has any of this changed today? I think things have gotten worse, if anything; the MSM failures illustrated by the press coverage of Tet have become institutionalized in the intervening years.

Tet was a turning point all right, but in a very different way than Cronkite envisioned it: it marked the beginning of a special and destructive type of MSM hubris, in which our own media—without realizing it was doing so, and without meaning to—became, effective ly, the propaganda arm of the enemy.

Holiday ode to ibuprofen, as well as to joy

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: That post on Cronkite, Part II, is coming, coming, coming–but due to holiday doings, I’m on a slightly delayed schedule. The post will appear here later today. Meanwhile…]

Last night, some combination of keyboarding, exhaustion, coughing from the lingering cold I still am fighting, and who knows what else conspired to give me some sort of weird muscle pain in my upper back. It was just one tiny little point–but what a point it was! A knifelike stab whenever I moved, and especially when coughing.

I went to bed with it and woke up with it, unchanged. Hmmm. I started to envision the holidays with this thing, and decided: time for ibuprofen, the over the counter painkiller with the best muscle relaxant properties.

And about a half hour later, to my surprise, joy, and wonderment–the pain is all gone. Normalcy. Sometimes medications do exactly what they say they will.

Leftists, Rousseau, and Islamicist totalitarianism: brothers under the skin

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I ran out of time today for Part II of the Cronkite piece. My plan is to have it appear tomorrow. In the meantime…]

There are several banned trolls whose comments I ordinarily delete here as a matter of course. But every now and then one writes something that I decide to leave up as an example of a certain type of thinking.

Thus, this recent effort from one of my most loyal non-fans in Toronto:

‘Militant’ Islam isn’t going to go away as long as the U.S and Israel continue to control the region through it’s military and corrupt policies.

Given that, there is no U.S chance of winning a military victory there. None.

I’m hoping this site will still be around in a few years when defeat is total and humiliating…

A pithy rendition of a certain type of leftist thinking that, like a snake swallowing its own tail, would devour itself if what it wished for came to pass. Because make absolutely no mistake about it: if this commenter had his way, and defeat of the current effort being mounted by the US were to be “total and humiliating,” and the other side (Islamicist totalitarianism) were to get its way and become victorious in its goal of a worldwide caliphate, not only would there be no sites left like this, the commenter would find his freedoms curtailed so forcefully that he would no longer be able to exercise his own freedom to be a troll. And that would be the least of his (and our) worries.

I’ve often wondered about the failure of the Left to understand this very simple fact. Surely, they are interested in the Enlightenment values of reason, human rights (such as for homosexuals and for women) and individual freedom? Surely they understand what sharia law is all about? Surely they understand that these people are quite serious?

But no; the highlighted comment demonstrates all the basic elements of leftist thought: the attribution of all third-world violence and ills to the always-dastardly doings of those twin repositories of all that’s really evil: the Great and Little Satans, the US and Israel. These beliefs of the Left are offered as a matter of faith, without even an attempt to back them up with facts or logical argument (although if what passes for logical argument is the work of Chomsky and the like, they needn’t bother). Yes, yes, yes, of course; it’s the corruption of the US and Israel that is the cause of all the flaws of the Arab world, and if those things went away all the other problems would magically go away–(or perhaps “wither away,” in the old Marxist phrase).

What’s going on here? I believe that at least part of the answer lies in the philosophical underpinnings of Leftist thought. One of these days I hope to write a long post on its origins in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had a similar reductionist theory of human nature and history (I’ve been wading through this book on the subject, which I highly recommend).

To Rousseau, civilization and society (and reason itself, to a certain extent) were corrupting influences, and must be reformed to better reflect the condition of pre-civilized humanity–a relatively happy state of nature in which people were at peace and non-exploitative towards each other. Civilization led to power inequities and private property (very important to Rousseau, as well as to his heirs, the Jacobins, the Left, and the Communists) and all sorts of unfairness that needed redressing by a state that was not afraid to use Draconian measures and subordinate the people to its will.

In Rousseau’s seminal Social Contract (which, along with Hobbes’ Leviathan, we were made to read in public high school; somehow I doubt whether that’s still the case) he writes [my emphasis]:

…whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body [the public and the state]; this means merely that he will be forced to be free…[if the leaders of the state say to the citizen] “it is expedient for the state that you should die,” he should die.

So the resemblance of the Left to Islamicist fundamentalist totalitarianism isn’t such a stretch after all. The similarity is their profound dislike of modernism, jettisoning of individual freedom for a sort of mythical collective freedom that will be expressed in the general will, the embrace of violent methods for achieving this heaven on earth, and the glorification of feeling over reason. It’s all there in their hero, Rousseau–whether they’ve read him or not.

Gone phishin’

The New Neo Posted on by

Just got this email that somehow evaded my spam folder:

In a brief introduction, my name is George Michael. My intention of contacting you is to have a discussion with you regarding an investment that I want to build in your country. Urgently confirm the receipt of this message with your direct telephone number to enable me call you immediately and furnish you with details.

I will be waiting for your reply as you finish reading this message.

My question: does anyone respond to these things? I know the answer must be “yes” or people wouldn’t bother to generate them and send them, but it’s still hard to believe, since the ploy is so transparent.

[ADDENNDUM: Due to busyness, part II of the Cronkite piece will appear somewhat later than usual today.]

Tet, Cronkite, opinion journalism, and a changing press: Part I (“to tell a conflicted people a higher truth”)

The New Neo Posted on by

While Bush formulates a new plan for Iraq, and others say all is lost there no matter what, I’m reminded of a famous “all is lost” moment from that ever-festering sore of history, the Vietnam War: Walter Cronkite’s editorial on Tet.

Cronkite’s famous post-Tet broadcast of February 27, 1968, delivered on the CBS Evening News, is widely regarded as a turning point in the Vietnam War, as well as broadcast journalism. It caused President Johnson to famously say, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country,” and was apparently instrumental in Johnson’s decision to drop out of the 1968 Presidential race.

Those too young to remember may find such a set of circumstances almost impossible to believe. But Walter Cronkite,”the most trusted man in America” during his 18-year tenure as the anchor for the CBS evening news, is widely regarded to have had great influence on public opinion.

Take a moment to mull that one over and contemplate how the times they have a’changed: it would not seem possible for a major network anchor to be the “most trusted man in America” today (and, by the way, that “most trusted” designation wasn’t just hyperbole; Cronkite was actually judged that in a Gallup Poll of the time. And, of course, today it would be “the most trusted person in America.” But I digress.)

The avuncular Cronkite (and it seems no piece on Cronkite can avoid that perfect description of the man: “avuncular”) held America’s trust for most of his time at the job. Was it simply a more naive era? The fact that so many Americans got their news from that TV half hour (which Cronkite was instrumental in making a full half hour rather than the 15 minutes he originally inherited) through either CBS, or NBC’s rival Huntley-Brinkley, made it seem as though the truth were being told there—after all, there were few competing stories to hear.

And do not underestimate Cronkite’s voice and demeanor, perfect for television. Never slick, not handsome, he seemed profoundly sincere, with a deep and resonant voice and a slight (at least to me) resemblance to another familiar and fatherly icon of the times with the same first name, Walt Disney. Cronkite had distinguished himself during his coverage of the Kennedy assassination, displaying controlled but moving emotion as he took off his glasses to announce the President’s death. It was a deep bonding with the US public through a traumatic time.

Cronkite earned his trust the hard way: by reporting the unvarnished news. In this 2002 radio interview (well worth listening to for insight into his thought process at the time) Cronkite describes his orientation towards his job prior to that watershed moment of the Tet offensive broadcast.

Previously the top brass at CBS, as well as the reporters there, had understood their function to be reporting “the facts, just the facts.” Editorializing was kept strictly separate; at CBS, it was a function of Eric Sevareid, and clearly labeled as such.

The president of CBS news, Dick Salant, was a man of almost fanatical devotion to the principles of non-editorializing journalism, according to Cronkite’s interview. Cronkite said that, till Tet, he “almost wouldn’t let us put an adjective in a sentence” when reporting, he’d been such a stickler for “just the facts.”

But, according to Cronkite, as the Vietnamese War had worn on, and because of the confusion of the American people about the war, reflected in letters to the station, Salant sent Cronkite on a trip to Vietnam with the idea of doing a piece of opinion journalism when he came back, in order to help the American people “understand” what was going on by explicitly editorializing and advising them.

One can speculate long and hard about why Salant decided it was time to make such a drastic change. From Cronkite’s interview, it appears that the brass at CBS was part of the turmoil of the 60s with its “question authority” ethos. If you listen to Cronkite (and he expresses not a moment’s ambivalence about his actions), you may hear, as I did, an anger at a military that seemed heedless of the difficulties of the Vietnam endeavor, and too sanguine–similar to the “cakewalk” accusation towards the present Iraq War.

Another fact that becomes apparent in the Cronkite interview is that he felt personally betrayed by the military men he’d talked to as Vietnam churned on. He’d been a war correspondent in the Second World War, and that conflict, in which the press had been heavily censored, had featured public pronouncements of public optimism but private “off the record” discussions with the press that were more realistic and often more gloomy. Cronkite had been privy to these. But during Vietnam, when there was no official censorship, the military self-censored when talking to the press—they were profoundly optimistic, because they knew everything they said would be reported. Cronkite seemed miffed that he wasn’t given the inside info, as he had been in WWII.

Cronkite is up-front about these differences in his interview. I think it’s ironic that, if there had been more censorship during the Vietnam War, war correspondents such as Cronkite might have understood better where the military was coming from and might have cut them some slack. However, that’s mere speculation. What actually happened is that Cronkite felt betrayed, and he and Salant thought the American people had been betrayed, and they felt it was important enough that they needed to break their own long-standing rule and spill the beans to the American people.

It never seems to have occurred to them, of course, that in reacting to Tet as they did they were participating in a different falsehood, the propagation of North Vietnamese propaganda about the situation.

Whatever Cronkite’s motivations may have been, it’s hard to overestimate the effect it had when he suddenly stated on air that the meaning of Tet was that the situation in Vietnam was hopelessly stalemated and the war could not be won. We’re used to this sort of thing now, and many of us have learned to brush it off. But then, to much of America, Cronkite’s was the voice of trusted authority that could not be denied—despite the fact that he had no special expertise to make such a proclamation.

Of course, we are reaping the fruit of that moment today. Journalism has changed, and not for the better, mixing opinion and facts in messy attempts to influence public opinion rather than inform. In connection with that radio interview, for example, see this statement, rather typical of the genre:

It was a bold move for Cronkite, and it was an seminal moment for journalism, to go beyond the reporting of events, to tell a conflicted people a higher truth, something beyond the cataloguing of casualties or shifting front lines.

To tell a conflicted people a higher truth. That seems to say it all, does it not?

[ADDENDUM: Here is the text of Cronkite’s Tet statement:

“Report from Vietnam,” Walter Cronkite Broadcast, February 27, 1968.

Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we’d like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. Another standoff may be coming in the big battles expected south of the Demilitarized Zone. Khesanh could well fall, with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there; but the bastion no longer is a key to the rest of the northern regions, and it is doubtful that the American forces can be defeated across the breadth of the DMZ with any substantial loss of ground. Another standoff. On the political front, past performance gives no confidence that the Vietnamese government can cope with its problems, now compounded by the attack on the cities. It may not fall, it may hold on, but it probably won’t show the dynamic qualities demanded of this young nation. Another standoff.

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi’s winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that-negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.]

[Part II here.]

Don’t mean to beat a dead ISG horse, but…

The New Neo Posted on by

The ISG report seems to be dead in the water. And that’s a good thing. The idea behind the report was to get us all to come together, and we did. The only problem is we came together in condemning it.

Krauthammer sees the ISG report as having given Bush “one last chance to alter course on Iraq.” In James Baker and his clueless cronies, Bush has been lucky in his opponents–as he so often is. Their suggestions were so inept that the report has temporarily revived the seemingly moribund Bush and given him at least a chance to regroup. And whatever new plan for Iraq he may come up with can hardly help but seem better than the utterly astounding ISG suggestion of begging Iran and Syria for assistance.

Dean Barnett is, likewise, happy that the ISG report took only a mere eight days to find–as he puts it–“history’s ashbin.” He calls for a new Churchill to define the path back to “greatness,” something for which the American people yearn.

Unfortunately, as a Churchill fan, I have to say I don’t expect one to be waiting in the wings.

Churchill was sui generis, as well as being very much a man of his times–which was acknowledged to be an earlier time even than World War II. His sort of rhetoric was not only unique, it was grounded in an age long past, and especially British (Tony Blair, for example, comes closer to it than any American ever could. Although not close enough.)

Nor do I think Dean himself really expects a Churchill to emerge. But he is looking for someone who can inspire and clearly articulate what we are fighting for. Someone who doesn’t shirk from asking for sacrifice, and who does not gloss over hardship, but who understands why he/she is requesting it, and what is so important about this fight.

“Leadership” is an old-fashioned word, and a concept towards which many are suspicious. But without it, and without clear vision of success, we flounder.

Parties. Holidays. Home.

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who’ve followed my mother’s journey to a new assisted living facility located in the NY community where she lived for most of her life might be interested in learning there’s good news and bad.

First, the bad. She absolutely detests the place. Every time we talk–which is almost every day–she complains: the food stinks, the people likewise. Some of it may be hyperbole, but it may just very well all be true.

Her apartment itself isn’t the problem. It’s a studio, yes. But even though it’s only got one room, the ceilings are high, and huge multiple windows on two sides give it an air of great spaciousness and openness. Likewise, the staff is pleasant and fairly responsive.

When you’re in a place like that, though, and almost ninety-three, the food and–for want of a better word, your fellow inmates–are really the thing. And she’s unequivocally negative about both.

So, what’s the good news? She sounds very happy nonetheless. Happier than she’s sounded in many years. Her voice–always an instant giveaway to her mood, as far back as I can remember–is light and energetic, and her mind seems very sharp.

I think the reason for her good spirits is clear. As I wrote here, she’s home.

In the eighty-eight years she lived in that community, she probably knew thousands of people, many of them well, many of them from childhood. Even though that huge group of friends has now been sharply culled by death and time, it was originally so extraordinarily large that the survivors still constitute a fairly large number.

That means she gets a couple of phone calls on a daily basis from old friends she hasn’t seen in the five years since she moved to New England to be near me when her significant other (boyfriend, that is) died in 2001 at the age of ninety-four. A couple of times a week they’ve taken her out–to lunch, to dinner. To the golf/tennis club she was a member of for forty years, to our old home (sold in the early 90s), to the hamburger joint that opened in the 50s to great fanfare, even to the museum where she used to volunteer and where she still might be able to.

Don’t ever underestimate the power of that sort of community to lift the spirits. It grounds her in a particular space and a particular history, rather than the far northern city where she lived near me, a random place with random people with no significance for her, however lovely or however friendly it or they may have been.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of “home.” One reason, of course, is my mother. Another, as I mentioned in my piece about her move, is that I’ve been contemplating a move myself. I haven’t gotten too far with the process yet, but stay tuned.

This particular weekend I’m back in the New England town where I landed in the late 70s and lived for the next twenty years. I came here because of a job of my then-husband’s; we stayed far past the time he held that job. Once you get set in a place and start raising kids, it becomes home, even if it isn’t the home you would have chosen (too rural, too isolated, for me). And when you’re cooped up with a bunch of screaming toddlers and going stir-crazy yourself–dedicated to the important task of child-rearing though you might be–the friendships you make are deep and lasting.

This weekend it’s holiday party weekend; that’s why I’m here. Last night I went to a celebration that’s been held every year for the last twenty-five. I don’t know most of the people there well anymore; never did, actually. The vast majority I only see once every year, at that very party. But there’s something about knowing people over time that has a power all its own.

The food is always fabulous and copious; the hostess makes everything herself. Every couple of years she moves to a new house and seems to have a new guy–this is the first year for this home and the third for the guy (I approve, by the way, especially of the latter). But when I look at her I don’t just see the present; I see the past.

The young mother with two little babies so close in age I wonder how she managed. The businesswoman who’s started many successful ventures. The different hair colors. The first husband, a charmer, still a friend despite a messy divorce that broke her heart and estranged them for years (she became so startlingly thin at that time that everyone was alarmed for her health).

And that’s the way it was for me and almost everyone there. If they show photos of their tall, grownup children, or give news of offsprings’ marriages and even a few grandkids (something new in the mix), in my mind’s eye rise images of the adorable little babies and toddlers I originally knew years ago. Some of my friends still look pretty good, themselves, but some of them wear the years harder, and they seem–well, some of them seem pretty old. And don’t get me started on the topic of weight gain.

I don’t think I’d ever want to move back here. It’s still too rural and isolated; I’m a city girl, after all. But don’t think I’m not tempted. No, it’s not “home” in the sense that my mother’s community is to her. But, since most of my good friends are scattered all over the country and I have very few relatives, this is probably the closest thing I have to home.

Perhaps it’s the closest thing I’ll ever have, although I hope not. I hope to make a new home, or even a series of successive new homes.

So, anybody got a formula for “instant home?” Or, as I suspect, is that an oxymoron?