PMC Commentary

Déjà Vu-Doo

The anticlimactic death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sparks little more than the weary realization that we have now turned enough corners to come full circle. If the lunatic’s demise means anything, it likely means that Iraq’s foreign fighters will only refocus their lethal energy on U.S. troops -- per Osama’s original memo -- rather than methodically reducing that nation’s indigenous Shiite population.

The sectarian slaughterhouse will remain intact, however, with Zarqawi having accomplished his goal of igniting a civil war just a bit ahead of its inevitable cultural schedule. Now that the bloody marvel of ecumenical love and brotherhood is in full flower, external facilitators need no longer apply.

All of which means we’re right back where we started, which is to say, where reality-based analysts of yesteryear said we’d be if we were foolish enough to militarily insert ourselves in the roiling madhouse of religious and anti-Western hostilities that constitute the Middle East. Iraq’s civil war will widen, sectionalism will deepen, Iran’s influence will broaden and unprepared American infidels will once again line up in the principal crosshairs of radical Islamic purists.

Yet sadly typical of the West’s religious belief in inexorable progress -- ethereal progress forever on the march, given enough secular firepower -- many on this side of Allah’s Paradise see Zarqawi’s personal rapture as a watershed of hope. They hurried in working overtime in re-deluding themselves and potential acolytes into thinking that one psychopath’s assassination will somehow alter the course of centuries-old scattered resentment and 21st-century organized malevolence.

“[Zarqawi’s death is] a great loss for these jihadi networks,” said one hallucinatory counterterrorism expert under the spell of neocon Strategic Optimism. “I don’t think there is any person in Iraq able to control this network the way Zarqawi did. It’s very decentralized. He was the only person in Iraq who could provide the glue.

“By losing Zarqawi, they run the danger of losing Iraq as a battlefield to the nationalist insurgents and others who aren’t interested in bin Laden or the global jihad.”

Right. We’ll check back in a year or so to see how he’s creatively renewed that forecast.

Analysts somewhat more familiar with Islamic radicalism, however, such as analysts living in the geographical heart of Islamic radicalism, see things differently.

The Saudi National Security Assessment Project’s director, Nawaf Obaid, for instance, “said Zarqawi’s network had already been eclipsed in size and strength by other groups of foreign fighters in Iraq. He said units led by Egyptian, Saudi and Algerian commanders posed a much more serious military threat than al-Qaeda in Iraq, although much less is known about how their operations are organized. The strongest, he said, are North African groups in Iraq composed largely of veterans of the civil war in Algeria.

“‘They’re completely autonomous organizations,’ Obaid said in a telephone interview from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. ‘They’re more powerful than Zarqawi was and have more weaponry and money at their disposal. They all have their own networks, their own fundraising abilities and their own way of bringing in fighters.’”

Was this predictable? Of course it was. And predicted it was. For example in the neocons’ hacyon year of 2003 the London Observer’s Jason Burke insightfully wrote in his book Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, that bin Laden -- and one can now add the name Zarqawi -- was “merely a transient phase in the history of Islamic militancy.” His time “ha[d] passed” even then, with the lanky jihadist remaining influential in the Islamic world only in symbolic terms. Now Zarqawi’s influence will remain, and grow, in martyrdom terms.

The problem we face today goes “far beyond the deeds or words of one man or one small organization,” observed Burke. This deeper problem lies in a “broad-based, multivalent, diverse movement” of radical Islamic activism scattered across the globe, in “Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines” -- and, from our own doing, Iraq.

But fret not, worry not. A fresh face of evil personified will soon substitute for Zarqawi in Iraq, and then we can drop another 500-pound bomb on it and turn yet another corner on our drive to Progress.

The Pin-Striped Hookers of Pennsylvania Avenue

A lobbying organization has explained to the Washington Post that “If you try to talk to a member [of Congress] for any great length of time about your issues while they’re in Washington, they’re simply too busy.”

Too busy doing what -- packing? Because as the WP has further reported, based on a thorough research study conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, “Over 5 1/2 years, Republican and Democratic lawmakers accepted nearly $50 million in trips, often to resorts and exclusive locales, from corporations and groups seeking legislative favors….

“From January 2000 through June 2005, House and Senate members and their aides were away from Washington for more than 81,000 days -- a combined 222 years -- on at least 23,000 trips, according to the report…. About 2,300 of the trips cost $5,000 or more, at least 500 cost $10,000 or more, and 16 cost $25,000 or more.”

Democracy at work: Your “lawmakers and their staffers … treated to $25,000 corporate-jet rides and $500-a-night hotel rooms” in the arduous course of “fact-finding” trips to such crisis-drenched hellholes as Paris, Hawaii and Italy (numbering 200, 150 and 140 trips, respectively).

In this week’s winner of Most Boffo Understatement, the Center’s study speculated that “trip sponsors” -- such as the fretting lobbyist above; He who was nonplussed, yea, verily, forced against his will into sponsoring these junkets -- “appeared to be buying access to elected officials or their advisers.”

Oh, say it ain’t so. Please don’t sully the reputation of these esteemed People of the People with your muckraking speculation.

On the other hand, it would appear that lawmakers themselves have questioned the nobility of all this frequent-flying fact-finding, given that their “financial reports that disclose the details of the trips are routinely riddled with mistakes and omissions” -- albeit little picky stuff, you know, like the “sponsor’s” name and what family members accompanied them, gratis.

Actually, it’s a wonder that legislators can even find the time to speed off on yet another investigation into the condo-slum conditions of Molokai, seeing that they’re so busy -- again, reference the abovementioned lobbyist -- or certainly should be, with the people’s pressing business.

Somewhere out there lie two lesbians kissing in a matrimonial bed. America’s fate rests with them. Yet, in an acute, unconscionable abdication of moralistic oversight, the nation’s caretakers can simply drop their attention to this Music Man situation of capital “T” proportions?

I think not, and I think it’s shameful.

We should demand that Congress first eradicate the horrifying specter of same-sex marriage. Then it should tackle the secondary issues like that little ruckus over in the Middle East, a bit too much spending with slightly insufficient revenues, the few folks still without health care, that sort of stuff. Then, and only then, should Congress be permitted to exercise its whorish personality in $500-a-night hotel rooms.

The gang that simply cannot talk straight

Here we go again -- or rather, here they go again. How many times must we suffer the president or a member of his administration shaking his finger and peering into the camera and averring that he never had sexual relations with the Bill of Rights.

They just can’t be honest. There’s something deeply, morbidly ingrained in their psychological makeup that prevents them from being aboveboard.

The latest administration scam was a meeting of Internet executives called by the attorney general and FBI director to discuss, purportedly, the corporate record-keeping of Web-surfing activities that child pornography investigators could tap, if needed. That was the “hook” -- child pornography -- that has been publicly touted by the attorney general as the sole justification for expanded snooping powers. Who wouldn’t want to see child-porn purveyors nailed, right?

“In a speech in April,” recalls the NYT, “[Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales said that investigations into child pornography had been hampered because Internet companies had not always kept records that would help prosecutors identify people who traded in illegal images.”

“The investigation and prosecution of child predators depends critically on the availability of evidence that is often in the hands of Internet service providers,” said Mr. Gonzales. Good. Fantastic. Go get ‘em.

But when ISP executives were gathered by Mr. Gonzales of the Justice Department, accompanied by FBI Director Robert Mueller, to discuss ways of identifying these nefarious, on-line creatures, “they gathered that the department was interested in records that would allow them to identify which individuals visited certain Web sites and possibly conducted searches using certain terms” [emphasis added] -- and for purposes far outside the originally offered reason.

“An executive of one Internet provider that was represented at the first meeting said Mr. Gonzales began the discussion by showing slides of child pornography from the Internet. But later, one participant asked Mr. Mueller why he was interested in the Internet records. The executive said Mr. Mueller’s reply was, ‘We want this for terrorism.’”

Nor did it end there. Administration officials went on to talk of the records’ “value in investigating other crimes like intellectual property theft and fraud, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, who attended the session.”

“It was clear that they would go beyond kiddie porn and terrorism and use it for general law enforcement,” said a startled Rotenberg, adding that “This is a sharp departure from current practice. Data retention is an open-ended obligation to retain all information on all customers for all purposes, and from a traditional Fourth Amendment perspective, that really turns things upside down.”

Fourth Amendment? That old thing? Pshaw.

Kate Dean, the just-as-startled executive director of an ISP trade group, noted that “When they said they were talking about child pornography, we spent a lot of time developing proposals for what could be done. Now they are talking about a whole different ball of wax.”

Which is what we have for a government these days -- “A whole different ball of wax.”

Former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card once advanced the once-novel idea that journalists “don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. I don’t believe [journalists] have a check-and-balance function.”

No, he didn’t. Neither do other ill-schooled members of the Bush administration. But we’ve come to expect that. What’s worse is that more and more journalists, often modulated by their corporate keepers, have joined in subscribing to this peculiar, ahistorical, aconstitutional and thoroughly antidemocratic point of view.

And that disturbing phenomenon -- accompanied by a devastatingly sober, point-by-point, case-by-case record of it over the last several years -- provides the foundation for a new, critical must read: Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, by Rolling Stone contributing editor Eric Boehlert. (My thanks to Lapdogs’ publisher, Simon & Schuster’s Free Press, for providing a promotional copy.)

“The goal of Lapdogs,” writes Boehlert [p.x], “is to cut through incessant rhetoric about a liberal media bias, and to show, factually, just how the mainstream media has tipped the scales in President Bush’s favor for going on six years…. Lapdogs simply corrals as much of the information as possible and lays it out in a way I think makes the conclusion -- that the press rolled over for Bush -- inescapable.”

Although regular observers of the press have been saying so for some time, that conclusion will indeed be inescapable to any remaining fence-sitters after scouring Boehlert’s 296 pages of meticulously researched sins and omissions committed by today’s journalists. It’s a long and depressing list that includes:

· their fear of appearing “rude” to POTUS.

· their mortal terror of “being tagged with the liberal Scarlet L.”

· their look-the-other-way fondness for Bush’s affability.

· their frequent and open disdain of Democratic leaders.

· their “worship at the altar of ‘balance’ -- Not necessarily ‘fairness.’”

· their timidity against the onslaught of conservative criticism.

· their preference to avoid at nearly any cost the “career track implications the ‘liberal bias’ allegations carry” versus the easier but less-honestly earned rewards of getting and going along.

Traipsing through Boehlert’s nearly six-year history of the Bush administration’s arrogance toward the press and the latter’s responding obsequiousness may be a real downer, but it’s a recommended journey.

Perhaps it’s because we live in such a dog-eat-dog era that a canine theme seems to be emerging in book titles these days. There’s Boehlert’s Lapdogs, and then there’s Helen Thomas’ upcoming Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public, a volume, obviously, of concerns similar to Boehlert’s. I recommend it as well, especially for its nostalgic references to the typewriter-clattering pressrooms of yesteryear, when most journalists shied away from mere stenography.

Today, whether they’re labeled lapdogs or errant watchdogs is your call, but there’s no denying the press corps isn’t the public referee it once was -- and that’s a journalistic reversal of fortunes that only journalists themselves can overcome.

(Note: BuzzFlash readers can purchase a copy of Lapdogs here. Watchdogs of Democracy? is being released June 20.)