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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (69977)	9/13/2004 10:42:26 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 793761

For perspective, I like the Iraqi bloggers. Salam Pax has proved himself over time. Everybody has their own perspective. The bloggers don't just hang out in Baghdad hotels, they live there, or are related to people who do. I realized the limitation of news media when we were stuck on the Interstate in Richmond for about 7 hours when Tropic Storm Gaston dropped an unprecedented 14 inches of rain, flooding every major road and highway. Nobody knew anything. The news media did not know. The highway patrol did not know. The police did not know. All they knew was what was right in front of them, nobody had the big picture. All the radio airheads could talk about was "it's a lot of rain" and "traffic appears to be at a standstill." No reports of road closings, no reports of floodings, no disaster relief type of effort. Three years after 9/11 and they still don't have a clue. If there had been a nuclear explosion or terrorist attack, people would be SOL. Here in DC metro area the news media cooperate somewhat, but the first to "get" a story is usually the Freepers. For example, they had the breakup of the space shuttle before NASA did. NASA was still saying "we've lost radio contact," Freepers from California to Texas were posting that they heard explosion overhead and saw debris. We're the 21st century version of ham radio. That's the power of new media. I used to read Drudge, now Drudge reads us.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (69977)	9/14/2004 12:22:14 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793761

but his perspective certainly merits consideration. We won the "war," but bungled the "peace." I can't argue with that. I can argue that is was institutional. Our military does not have a "sys admin" to handle the situation. I think we will in the future. DOD is very good at "lesson's learned." "Bungled the peace" is Kerry's best argument. But he is so crossed up on his Iraq position that he can't argue it. Bush's base is with him on Iraq. Kerry's is split. Whatever he says, half of his base disagrees with him. One problem that I see in our future operations is that we start off with massive opposition from the NGO's. They have a systemic bias against globalizaton. And they don't want to work with out military.