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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (173205)	10/24/2005 10:11:50 AM
From: el_gaviero	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The piece you posted by Juan Cole is interesting but misguided. Cole is saying that Murdoch, Scaife, and other “right-wingers” made the NY Times vulnerable to the charge of treason. It takes a little sorting out to understand how Cole's argument is misguided. What Murdoch, Scaife and the others did was play the game of politics. Because they played well, they won and because they won, they got what they wanted, something rather astonishing as it turned out, an invasion of Iraq. How did they win? For sure it was not by better argument. The actual arguments they used were a tissue of lies. Rather they won in the way that the game of politics is always won: by FRAMING THE DEBATE. That is, they established the basic premise on which the debate about war was to proceed. In the case of Iraq, it was the notion that anything other than an all out response to the events of 9/11 would be unpatriotic. In effect they set the stage so that anything less than war would be seen as a Chamberlain-like response to a Churchill challenge. Once they succeeded, the game was over. Content became irrelevant. Anything thrown against the wall in favor of war was going to stick. No opposition arose (real opposition, you understand, with passion and commitment), hence there was no one around to say that the brown spots on the wall were not truth. When Juan Cole heaps moral opprobrium on “right-wingers” for undermining The NY Times, he mis-frames the debate and helps the cause of war. In the first place, it is simply a waste of breath to condemn people engaged in the political arena and fighting to get what they want of being good at what they do. More importantly, Cole misses the point. The real debate is not between Murdoch, Scaife, Cheney et al on the right, and whoever is now carrying the banner on the left, (Biden, Schumer, Bayh, the Clintons, and so forth). These groups of people don’t represent different parties. Rather they represent different factions of the same party. The Party of Government. The Party of Government wants war not because it necessarily likes war, but because it likes and needs (for its own internal reasons) an ever expanding government. To frame the debate as one taking place between right and left (as Cole does) is to frame the debate in such a way as to guarantee that the Party of Government wins. This is fine if you are in the Party of Government, but understand what it means. As long as the Party of Government wins, there are going to be wars of a certain type, because wars (of a certain type) are the “health of the state.” To correctly frame the debate, if one should want to reduce the possibility of war, requires understanding that there are only two real parties in the political arena, a party of central power, and a party of decentralized power. What has happened slowly over time is that the party of central power has taken over parties of decentralized power. First it was the liberals. (Remember, back in the 19th century, a liberal was someone who favored markets, and opposed the privileged system of aristocratic control of the organs of government.) Now what has happened, with the rise of the Neo-cons, is that the Party of Government has yet again co-opted a party of decentralized power. The result is no opposition, no choice. The Beltway (i.e., government in Washington and their allies in Big Business, now one big, squabbling unhappy family of mafia like fiefdoms) does not really mind war, and can be turned in the direction of war by surprisingly little effort. All it took in the case of Iraq were a few media conglomerates, a rogue operation in the Pentagon, a naive yet somewhat brutal man occupying the office of president, a few well-entrenched spies from Israel and their dual loyalty supporters in this country, and the prospect of some fat contracts for outfits like the infamous Halliburton.