A cautionary tale about Ashleigh Banfield, one of the few reporters who did not peddle the Bush administrations spin and actually did her job, journalism and questioning war coverage.  The speech in question is linked here.  For that she lost her job.  Its another example of why cable news in the United States is generally unwatchable and why it is probably a good idea in the Internet age to diversify news sources to include other countries.  Al Jazeera is often dismissed as propaganda here, but they sometimes cover issues and trample over sacred cows in a manner the so called free American media does not always do.  If anything, it provides perspective for why everybody abroad does not always attribute the noblest motives to American actions.

When Walter Cronkite died recently the talking heads on TV and in print gushed about his editorial report on Vietnam on February 27, 1968.  Sadly with the corporatization of main stream media where the profit motive trumps the duty of the Fourth Estate to report the news accurately, Cronkite today would have been drummed out of a job as quickly as Banfield.

It is probably summed by by the otherwise respected David Gregory’s defensive burden shifting last year when he essentially said that the media’s job is to mindlessly report what the administration is saying and not to challenge them when they peddle bullshit.  Quoted from the link above:

From the May 28 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews:

CHRIS MATTHEWS (host): Let’s take a look at what McClellan had to say here about the media.

Here he is, faulting the press. He wrote, quote, “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war should never have come as such a surprise. In this case, the,” quote, “liberal media,” close quote, “didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

David?

GREGORY: I think he’s wrong. He makes the same kind of argument a lot of people on the left have made. I tried not to be defensive about it. I’ve thought a lot about this over a number of years, and I disagree with that assessment.

I think the questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us in the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that.

If there wasn’t a debate in this country, then maybe the American people should think about, why not? Where was Congress? Where was the House? Where was the Senate? Where was public opinion about the war? What did the former president believe about the prewar intelligence? He agreed that — in fact, Bill Clinton agreed that Saddam had WMD.

The right questions were asked. I think there’s a lot of critics — and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one — who thinks that if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, “This is bogus,” and “You’re a liar,” and “Why are you doing this?” that we didn’t do our job. And I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role.

This attitude also sums up why traditional media outlets are faltering before blogs and internet based journalists who do show the same deference to power and why John Stewart of Comedy Central may be one of the most trusted newsmen in America (cautionary disclosure, it was an unscientific online poll).

Noticed this chart on linked on Andrew Sullivan’s site.  The chart is misleading however, since all that landmass may not be usable or arable.  This link may provide a better understanding of the population pressures a country may face.

For example while the first chart makes it appear that China has all this unused land the second table paints a different story.  With 3 times the landmass, China has less cultivated land and less arable land than India.  The United States with similar cultivated land and arable land as the two Asian giants has only about one-third the population.

The New York Times reviews rising resentment in France’s former West African colonies from the French embrace of corrupt and brutal dictators.  As with the American embrace of various banana republic dictators in Central and Latin America, this could ultimately be a self-defeating policy.  In the short run, France will benefit but could lose out in the long term due to the local instability it is generating and the backlash on the ground.

In someways this mirrors the cynical Chinese attempt to lock up resources by dealing with kleptocrats and thugs across the world.  But even China (and Russia) are finding themselves the target of public ire.  In Iran it has lead to chants that routinely called for death to America and Israel, replaced with calls for death to Russia and China.  Russia in addition has an often ignored history of meddling in Iranian affairs for the last 200 years, generally to the detriment of Iranian territorial integrity and democracy.

The New York Times reviews the recent air strikes conducted by the Saudi Air Force in Yemen and the risk of a proxy fight with Iran.  The article also has a brief but good overview of the complex religious schisms within Islam at play in Yemen.  It has been close to 50 years since the Saudis had to deal with a proxy fight on their southwestern flank.  In the 1960s the Saudis were sucked into a civil war in Yemen after Nasser inspired rebels toppled the Yemeni monarchy.  Unlike Nasser, the Iranians will not be able to send ground troops into Yemen.  For them it will be a proxy fight akin to their arming of Hezbollah – relatively low cost but high rewards from the likely Yemeni and Saudi overreaction.

TNR reviews the remarkable resurrection of Robert Gates.  The once derided former head of the CIA who was hopelessly wrong on the fall of the Soviet Union has reemerged as a non-ideological competent getting it done Defense Secretary.  A remarkable change from his predecessor who seemed to see only what he wanted to see.

John Brummett of the Arkansas News discusses the 10 year old who refused to recite the pledge of allegiance.  I tend to agree with him.  The rote recitation of the pledge does little to advance national good and as Brummett says is a perversion of the freedom this country was founded on.  The ease of verbally proclaiming ones patriotism without backing it up with substance may have been the root of the famous Samuel Johnson quote.

Andrew Sullivan praises Barack Obama’s deliberative decision making in Afghanistan.  With no end in sight to the war, no Afghan army that can engage the Taliban and an incompetent and corrupt local partner, it is heartening to see that the decision is finally discussing an exit strategy.  In the short run, I think more troops will be sent to Afghanistan (the number 30,000 is being tossed around).  But with American troops already outnumbering the Taliban on the ground, this will not solve a problem that ultimately lacks a pure military solution. The Taliban can always retreat to their Pakistani refuge or melt back into the tribal heartland.The US could try securing the perimeter like the Soviets and does have the decided advantage that the people outside the urbanized zones are not all shooting at its soldiers.  But that leaves a lot of white areas on the map in the previous link from Matt Yglesias that local allies need to fill.  The corrupt thugs and kleptocrats in Kabul will be of no help in this.

Hugo Chavez appears to be beating the war drums to divert attention from his failures at home.  Its not clear what triggered the latest bellicose rhetoric from Latin America’s top blow hard, but its time Venezuelan voters gave him the message previously delivered by Spain’s King Juan Carlos (whose democratic credentials are far superior).

I previously posted on the United States summoning Sri Lanka’s green-card holding army chief for a briefing.  The BBC has an article out about how Sri Lanka’s opposition parties are trying to recruit the general to run for President.  A political campaign between the General and the President who destroyed the LTTE could turn into an exercise in chest thumping nationalism that would do little to solve Sri Lanka’s festering minority problem and could keep its Tamils in their internment camps even longer.

UPDATE: With the general resigning early it looks like a political campaign is in the offing.

A follow up on a previous post.  There is yet more chatter that the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Omar is trying to distance itself from the nihilistic campaign of Al Qaeda.  With the American ambassador in Kabul now joining the critics of an expanded military presence in Afghanistan and with Hamid Karzai showing no signs of mending his ways this could enable the United States to cut bait on the Afghan quagmire and focus primarily on Al Qaeda.  Aram Roston at The Nation has a disturbing account of how the webs of corruption in Afghanistan have the United States funding Taliban operations.  The more I read about this mess, the more I gravitate towards the camp wanting to stop wasting American lives and treasure to protect a bunch of corrupt and brutal thugs.

It appears that the peace deal in Honduras has collapsed due to the inability of the principals to trust each other.  With the existing Honduran constitution barring him from running again and with his original term set to expire the international community faces the question of whether to recognize the upcoming elections.  No side comes out of this mess smelling like roses, but there seems to be no reason to damage Honduran institutions further by propping up the expired term of President Zelaya.  For that to happen, the elections will have to be open, fair and free and certified by international monitors.

An analysis of the changing Franco-German relationship.  In someways the change is not too surprising.  Ever since the Treaty of Verdun in 843 AD unwittingly spawned the framework of Western Europe the two countries have had differing outlets for their energies.

Germany’s eyes have been drawn east for a 1,000 years.  The initial instincts starting with the defeat of the Polish King Boleslaw I Chrobry by the Emperor Henry II to the establishment of the Livonian and Teutonic Knights were expansionist.  That phase was brought to a crushing end by the newly created Polish-Lithuanian super state at the Battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg).  After dealing with internal religious strife for the next 200 years, Germany spent the century after the end of the Seven Years War keeping the newly emerged Russian giant on its door step happy and sated expansionist instincts at the expense of Poland.  The expansionist urge returned with a vengeance in the early 20th century.  The establishment of the iron curtain shut off the eastern outlet and forced Germany to look west, but with the end of the Cold War its not unnatural that the eastern flirtation resumes.  Of course. the expansionist urges today are economic.

When not nibbling away at the German border, French interests historically drew France into the Mediterranean orbit (particularly after the Crusades created a chain of Frankish states in what is now Lebanon and Israel).  But France has always had its western (and often rocky) relationship with England, the Auld alliance with Scotland and it midwifed the birth of the United States.

The historical patterns are not guaranteed to repeat themselves, but they do suggest that the support structure forged after World War II that enabled the two nations (one recovering from military humiliation and the other from annihilation) to regain their strength together may have run its course.  The impact on the creaky new European State will be interesting to observe.

Jon Stewart catches Sean Hannity using footage of another rally to make the Bachmann intimidation rally seem bigger.

Of course this is not the first time Stewart has had fun at the expense of Fox News. See here.  This is also not the first time Fox has spliced video feeds, though they did apologize in that instance.

To be fair to the employees of Fox News, not everybody parrots the company line.  From earlier this summer watch as the Fox News anchor (who does not appear to be one of their opinion talking heads), desperately tries to bring Liz Trotta back on the liberal media bashing meme he was trying to create.  Instead she eviscerates Sarah Palin’s credentials and gets rapidly cut off as she mentions this Vanity Fair article.

Then an honorable mention to Shepard Smith who does try to live up to the Fox news motto.

Foreign Policy attempts to burst many long held notions on what brought down the Berlin Wall.  The article does not list another factor that contributed in Eastern Europe outside the Soviet Union.  Other than Yugoslavia (which having declined to be a client state had been expelled from the Soviet bloc), all the other regimes were imposed by the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II.  The illegitimacy of these puppet regimes did not help the cause of Soviet control.  Even though public unrest was brutally suppressed previously in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, cracks had already appeared in the Iron curtain by 1989(Poland had struggled to control Solidarity for a decade).  The outcome could have been far bloodier, but by 1989 it is not clear that these regimes could indefinitely bribe the men with the guns.  In contrast the regimes that were not imposed solely as a result of Soviet tanks rolling into town and whose local communist leadership had genuine nationalistic credentials (China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam) have proved much harder to dislodge.

Rupert Murdoch is continuing to fire away at Google.  So far it is all talk and no action.  The media baron is stymied by the change brought about by the internet that had upended journalism’s traditional revenue model.  It is hard to see him actually take Fox News off search engine sites that drive traffic to his websites.  Others like Mark Cuban think he may be on to something.  The problem is that many newspapers like the New York times have tried and failed to get subscribers to pay for content.  The Wall Street Journal with its unique business following is one of the only “old media” outlets to succeed with this model.  I tend to agree with Matt Ingram, a link to a site that requires subscription or worse payment is likely to send me scurrying in search of alternative news sources.

Time magazine reviews Hillary’s performance at the State Department.  Tina Brown who previously tut-tutted that Barack Obama had essentially made Hillary don a burkha, changed her tune after the blunt press conference in Pakistan.  See previous post on the subject here.  With the presence of Joe Biden, Robert Gates and Susan Rice in the cabinet and not to mention the President’s own strong views on the importance of diplomacy, Hillary Clinton was never going to have carte blanche on foreign policy (and but for the scandal in New Mexico that kept former ambassador extraordinaire Bill Richardson out of the cabinet she would have had to contend with another foreign policy heavyweight).  However, the tensions within the administration so far have not spilled into the public.  As Tina Brown notes, she appears comfortable with where she is.  Even with an occasional gaffe like the one on Israeli settlements last week, she has largely stayed on message.  With the most challenging foreign policy atmosphere in a generation Barack Obama will need all the help he can get.

Dahlia Lithwick comments on the recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court whether sentencing juveniles to life in prison without parole violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.  It is not hard to feel revulsion at some of the crimes that caused the juveniles to be tried as adults.  However, locking away teenagers for life without ever reviewing the possibility of redemption (which is unlikely given prison conditions) seems like such a waste of human life.

With the largest per capita incarceration rate in the world, the United States appears to have essentially abandoned the pretense of prison as a deterrent.  As the chart below shows, the war on drugs in the 1980s has also caused an explosion in prison populations.

Locking people up and throwing away the keys has caused a drop in the crime rate in the last 20 years.  But at the risk of sounding like a bleeding heart, it has come at the cost of writing off a large section of American society.

By demanding the return of Mother Teresa’s remains to the land of her ancestry, Albania has ruffled some feathers in the city where the diminutive nun conducted her mission.  Not surprisingly the request has been summarily rebuffed.  But it raises a question of national identity and ethnic pride.

To what extent should one bask in the accomplishments of ethnic kin that were almost entirely achieved in another country?

2009 Chemistry Nobel Laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan caused some heartburn in India when he publicly wondered why so many people in India kept contacting him to offer congratulations.  Most such emigres do not share Dr. Ramakrishnan’s humility and are only too eager to soak up all the adulation they can get.  Likewise the people granting the adulation often merely seek to bask in the reflected glory from their ethnic kin.  A more positive use would be to use the ready made role model to inspire and encourage future accomplishments on the home front.

As noted earlier, there seems little enthusiasm to create a genuine European state which would require an even greater surrender of national sovereignty to Brussels.  The Economist on how the process to select the new President will lead to a noneity whose words will carry little weight.  But even if the Europeans choose a stronger personality for the Presidency and for Foreign Minister, the larger European countries are unlikely to kowtow to the missives from Brussels.  With such an inherently flawed structure, the whole debate seems an exercise in futility.

The Economist details the simmering tensions between China and India and the ongoing struggle to resolve the century long dispute over the McMahon Line.  Ever since India’s defeat in its 1962 war with China, the two countries have eyed each other warily.  Pakistan ever eager to seek a counterweight against India has latched on to the Chinese lifeline, while India during the Cold War veered towards the Soviet Union.  In recent years some American policymakers have sought out India as a counterweight to the emerging Chinese superpower.

None of this is in the long term interest of either country.  Both have restive minority regions and threats to their stability from regions that have not shared in their economic boom.  The dispute at present is also over a remote sparsely populated region which few Chinese or Indians have bothered to visit, but as the Economist notes is complicated by ties to Tibet.  Hopefully calmer heads will prevail and the countries will avoid a armed confrontation driven solely by notions of national pride.

The Vatican reaffirmed today that the attempt to reel in disaffected married Anglican clergy will not ease the ban on married clergy within the Catholic church itself.  As someone watching from outside, it seems difficult to see how long the Vatican can just ignore this contradiction.  Then there is the failure to effectively enforce the ban in Africa and Latin America, the most notorious recent example being the current President of Paraguay who fathered at least one child when he was still a bishop.  It is yet another example in church history where political expediency causes headaches in matters of religious doctrine.

After death panels, Sarah Palin has moved on to the currency.  This time the target is the now abandoned move of the phrase “In God We Trust” to the edge of new dollar coins.  Left out in the speech was the fact that this change was approved by the Republican controlled Congress in 2005, signed by President Bush into law and has already been reversed in 2007.  Also unadressed is the fact that the phrase has not been present on American coins for a large part of the nation’s history and did not become mandatory until 1955.  Luminaries like Teddy Roosevelt opposed the inclusion of the phrase as a cheap political stunt.  Yet another item overlooked in the search for the latest controversy to fire up the base is the benign artistic rationale for the change, to allow more dramatic artwork similar to earlier American coinage.  But why let facts come in the way of a good conspiracy theory.

Some good news from the middle east.  Iraq’s parliament finally approved an electoral law that will allow it to administer a national election in January without the boycotts that plagued the last election.  There is an element of kicking the can down the road, particularly with respect to Kirkuk, but it is heartening to see a compromise decided peacefully and not with guns.  Here’s hoping that the other ethnic mish-mash America is involved in continues on this path.

The United Nations has declared the Afghan electoral farce as “credible and legitimate.”  I understand the political motivations for this resolution but frankly it insults the intelligence of anybody who is not a political hack.  How credible is a process where blatant fraud was initially overlooked, a runoff was ordered under intense international pressure, and the challenger eventually decided it was not worth it because the crooks in charge of the first round would administer the runoff.  We are stuck with Hamid Karzai and his kleptocrats because there is no Pashtun acceptable to the other minorities in Afghanistan.  Now the result of Karzai’s ham-handed and probably unnecessary electoral rigging is the alienation of the very minorities he was supposedly acceptable to.   The international community is understandably wary of redrawing the map, particularly when the border has remained in place for over 150 years.  However, at some point the question must be asked whether the tribal mish-mash that is Afghanistan is really viable as a modern state.

A 2,500 year old mystery based on a Herodotus story sometimes dismissed as a fable may have been solved.  The Persian Emperor Cambyses II has generally not received good press from historians.  Some of it comes from the difficulty of being the successor of Cyrus the Great, a man who turned a nation of goatherders subject to the Median Empire into what was the largest empire the world had ever seen.  Media, Babylon and Lydia with the famed wealth of Croesus fell before Cyrus.  Cambyses finished the job by conquering the last remaining empire of antiquity, Egypt.

This is when things started to go south and the legend of the lost army begins.  After his initial victory Cambyses failed to subdue Kush in the south and had to give up his plan to attack Carthage because his Phoenician subjects refused to fight their ethnic kin.  The frustrated emperor decided to vent his rage at the Oracle of Amun located in the Siwa Oasis which refused to recognize him as Pharaoh of Egypt.  According to Herodotus the army of 50,000 disappeared in a sandstorm.  An army that size generally leaves behind some traces.  But for 2,500 years nothing was found.  If true, this solves one of the two major location mysteries of Ancient Egypt (the other is the location of the tomb of Alexander the Great which disappears from the historical record in the early third century AD).

To sum up on poor Cambyses, he came to a sticky end.  Forced to leave Egypt to deal with the revolt of his brother Bardiya, he died suddenly.  His eventual successor Darius I would say it was suicide.  Darius, a cousin, who usurped the throne from Bardiya and ruled successfully for 36 years lavished a lot of effort in blackening the reputations of the sons of Cyrus.  Cambyses comes down as a bloodthirsty and moody tyrant who initiated a tradition of royal incest in violation of Persian norms.  Bardiya suffers a worse fate.  The man deposed by Darius was dismissed as an impostor, a Magi priest named Gaumata, who killed the real son of Cyrus.   All of this justified the bloody path of Darius to the throne, sealed by his marriage to the daughters of Cyrus.  As is often the case, the winner got to write history.  In this case the victor inscribed his version in stone.