NP--Bush, intelligence, propaganda

[glthompson]

Terrance and all,

I don't want to reply point by point, but to respond in a general way to captioned
items above.

Propaganda in the US assumes misinformation, untruth, conscious deception in the
service of causes we do not agree with. Propaganda in many other cultures is more
or less synonymous with attempts to persuade, and questions of good/evil do not
loom so large. (Cf. the church's Office of Propaganda and the related, neutral
verb to propagate.)

Our classic model of propaganda is based on the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia,
with tight, controlled, top-down perspectives. _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ and Big
Brother. But the US, being a more pluralistic society, has adopted a different
model, in which opposing voices are not silenced but drowned out. That was the
point of my invocation of CNN's recent tilt to the right (perhaps it will be
foregone now?)--being a centrist, not a leftist, perspective and losing market
share, they concluded that there was some potential for gain in sucking up to
those calling it the Clinton News Network because it did not always take Ari
Fleischer's line.

Left voices there are a-plenty, from Susan Sontag to Noam Chomsky, and you will
find them cited on the P-list and other specialized forums. But you won't find
this perspective widely represented in mass media, not until it's too late. To my
mind, we are likely to stumble into a set of military / police actions which will
topple governments in places like Pakistan and produce a situation that is much
worse. These voices of caution (Doug's among them) are relegated to the 10% in the
polls not expressing support for Bush after his speech. (By the way, there was no
malapropism there. Someone has written a dynamite piece of work--good propaganda
in the neutral sense.)

Propaganda is classically difficult to deal with because it stands out as such
only if you disagree with it ideologically. If it's on your side, self-interest
might persuade you not to object, and you might not even notice it. So we accept
the characterization of the airliner attacks as being against Freedom--what Bin
Laden and fellow spirits hate is Our Way Of Life. Calls to arms have to be simple
and ringing, but they also pave over subtleties; they invite us to forget our role
in creating our present enemies in opposing our past ones. And they are linked to
actions in the name of security that we need to be careful with, such as ethnic
profiling and recruiting spooks as a means of gathering intelligence.

Labeling something "propaganda" is a familiar device: if you can dismiss it
categorically you don't have to worry about its truth or balance or fairness.
Rather than thinking about the content and whether we agree with that, perhaps we
should look at formal features, e.g., the use of abstractions to mean conveniently
different things to different people, up to and including the opposite of their
common sense meaning (e.g., "Infinite Justice" as an operational label).

Another of those leftists, Maureen Dowd (who as we know was always in Clinton's
pocket during Bimbogate):

"It is an astonishing knuckleball of history that the president who abhors mess is
presiding over a spectacularly messy conflict. A devout believer in the simple and
short is hunting down a devout believer in the murky and metastasizing, an unholy
demon who creates an endless loop of malevolence. . . .

Washington's organization man is confronting the unknown, abruptly shifting his
attention from T-ball and lockboxes to the amorphous and impenetrable. The
homebody, who always preferred a more sheltered existence than his father, the
peripatetic internationalist, has courageously committed to ripping the homeless
terrorists from their cells. . . .

Those close to the president say he has left his political self behind to take on
his life's mission.

But Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's political strategist, is in the middle of our national
security crisis. First, he called around town, trying to sell reporters the story
— now widely discredited — that Mr. Bush didn't immediately return to Washington
on Sept. 11 because the plane that was headed for the Pentagon may have really
been targeting the White House, and that Air Force One was in jeopardy, too. Then
Mr. Rove apparently grew livid when Dick Cheney's dramatic retelling of the scene
in the White House relegated the president to a footnote.

Mr. Bush seems aware that fate has brought him to an amazing juncture. The scion
who started as an Ivy slacker, getting serious about politics late in life, the
candidate who loped into the White House, propelled by daddy's friends and
contributors, the good-natured guy who benefited from low expectations, has taken
on a campaign that would chill even Churchill: annihilating nihilists in the
cradle of civilization who want to wreck civilization.

The president's inner circle was drawn from the bunker of the Persian Gulf war. He
has used the same language about good vs. evil, but no one is claiming this
conflict is about oil. Poppy's video-game war provides him with little guidance.
America has never tried to protect itself from the inside out. The Bush team says
this is a different kind of war. The country is hoping the Bush crew won't fall
back on conventional thinking.

Mr. Bush promised, as his father once did, to draw a line in the sand. But how do
you draw a line in a maze? How can you be definite in these mists — smallpox and
anthrax and shape- shifting suicide bombers?

We know about the fog of war. Now we learn about the war of fog."

 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/opinion/23DOWD.html

So get on board if you must. I agree (reluctantly) that some kind of military
action is a geo-political necessity, and it appears that Bush is moving cautiously
to build international support, allow the investigation to firm up evidence on
individuals and groups responsible, and so on. But keep in mind the difficulty of
producing good presidential timber from someone whose previous history does not
give large grounds for hope. Good people skills may not be all that is needed
here.

Gary