Both sides equally to blame?

Our Savior-General David Petraeus

Charles Peters, the founder of Washington Monthly magazine, gives us a pristine example of fake "fairness" in The Case For Facing Facts Newsweek 12/03/07 issue.

In a world where the Republican Party is trashing science in the name of "creationism", anti-abortion obsessions, and industry propaganda minimizing the effects of global climate change, Peters writes:

The problem is one that I have seen cripple our political life again and again and that seems to grow steadily worse. Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty. Neither side wants to face facts that don't fit its case. (my emphasis)

"Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." Heaven forbid that a columnist in Newsweek accuse conservatives or Republicans of denial of reality without "balancing" it. "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." Brilliant.

As an example of Peters' own reality-testing in this column, let's start with this:

Conservative and liberal rigidity joined to create a tragic end to the war in Vietnam. Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong; in fact, a significant number of them did not want to live under the communist North. The Nixon administration could not admit that South Vietnamese leaders were too inept to prevail. This meant that neither the administration nor its liberal critics planned for our exit. In our chaotic departure, we abandoned hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who could only escape across the South China Sea in boats so rickety that many did not survive. Many of those who could not flee languished for years in North Vietnamese prisons and "reeducation camps." (my emphasis)

What.A.Load.Of.Crap. It's hard to believe an adult would write something like that for other adults to read.

First of all, it was the Ford administration that was in power at the time of Saigon's fall in 1975. Ford's chief of staff was a guy named Don Rumsfeld, and his main assistant was Dick Cheney. Gee, they didn't plan ahead? They believed their own propaganda? Gosh, who would have guessed.

Peters' pseudo-balanced argument is, "This meant that neither the administration nor its liberal critics planned for our exit." What does this even mean? He is particularly referring to plans for evacuating supporters from Vietnam, so it's not very clear how anyone outside the incumbent Republicans administrations could have done much concrete planning for such a thing. But the broader implication that war critics had given no thought to the implications of the US exit is plainly not the case, as a couple of hours in Internet archives or with hardcopies of contemporary publications could have shown.

Peters doesn't indicate what he thinks would have been an appropriate policy for handling the problem he addresses. The idea was that the South Vietnamese government could fight and survive on its own. Just how would the US have offered a policy in 1975 of facilitating massive emigration by government officials and ARVN (South Vietnamese) soldiers without prompting a massive flight that would have undermined the tottering Thieu regime even more quickly?

"Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong." In what alternative universe was that? Peters is sensible enough not to attach any names to that little fantasy. But the statement is batty on the face of it. As an example, Radical America for Jan-Apr 1974, a New Left journal, which meant it's producers considered themselves leftists and not liberals, was devoted to a long paper, "Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam", a study of Vietcong organizing in the Mekong Delta. And, amazingly enough, thanks to the wonders of the Internet and the archiving activities of Brown University, the whole darn thing is available online. If you read the first two paragraphs of the Introduction, you'll see that the editorial position expressed there was explicitly sympathetic to the National Liberation Front (NLF/Vietcong), which was not the position that liberal opponents of the war took.

And yet, even in the second paragraph, the editors explain to their readers that the view that the NLF "consisted of resistance fighters of super-human proportions, enjoying the unwavering support of the people" - for the maybe two dozen people in the US who actually thought that - was not so, because even "some of them defected from the NLF along the way".

The point of this somewhat obscure example being that no one over the age of 13 thought that "every South Vietnamese" was "a closet Viet Cong"! And yet there it is in a respectable column by a respectable writer in respectable Newsweek, "Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong." I repeat: What.A.Load.Of.Crap.

Yes, our Establishment press is that broken.

Here are a couple of present-day examples from his column illustrating his case that "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." One is on abortion, where he writes, "Too many pro-lifers and pro-choicers seem determined to ignore the other fellows' [sic] points as they cling to their own rigid positions."

I don't normally nitpick over gender neutrality or lack thereof in common phrases. But in this case, it's probably indicative of the shallowness of Peters (or maybe his Newsweek editor) on this particular point that he refers to the abortion debate as one between the "fellows".

The point he's making is a vapid one. Abortion and women's right to choose have been actively debated for decades. Abortion was a national issue during the Presidential campaign of 1972, the year before the Roe v. Wade ruling. It's not an issue of sporadic visibility. It's one on which people have well-established positions, and the public attitudes on abortion have actually been stable for a long time. Both sides are familiar with the arguments of "the other fellows" on the abortion issue. This is an issue on which people differ on a matter of basic policy. It's a real difference, not a matter of insufficient manners or attentiveness on both sides.

Theoretically, there could be some actual common ground on which pro-choice and anti-abortion groups could unite, such as sex education and measures to care for women and girls in difficult circumstances who prefer to carry their babies to term. I'm not familiar with the specific instances, but I understand that feminist groups have proposed such joint action on occasion. But regardless of who proposed what to whom, the fact is that the anti-abortion movement is mainly composed of politicized white Christian fundamentalists, aka, Christianists, who also generally oppose sex education in the public schools, except for the proven-ineffective and often plain dishonest "abstinence-only" version. A lot of them are opposed even to the idea of parents provide sex education for their own children. (Do they think the kids will learn it from reading the Bible? Do they think that stories about sex in the Bible fit the fundamentalist model?)

The anti-abortionists are also generally opposed to any kind of family planning services for adults that include even information about abortion, unless it's the exaggerated and dishonest fundi brand of propaganda against abortion. The Cheney-Bush administration, in line with the desires of the Christianists, has consistently voted in the UN and other international forums with the Vatican and conservative Islamic governments against practical family planning programs and against measures to bolster women's' rights.

So where's the common ground? Peters doesn't tell us. It's just that, "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty."

And, hey, if you can't find a vaguely plausible-sounding parallel, just compare two different things, because liberals and conservatives must be equally guilty of whatever. Peters writes:

I have yet to find a conservative who acknowledges that our lowest unemployment rates since World War II have come in years when we had the highest income-tax rates, but it is a fact. And I have yet to hear a liberal express regret that it was not one of our own who had the courage and imagination to challenge Soviet leaders "to tear down this wall."

Say what? What a goofy comparison. Peters maybe should have explained why John Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech doesn't count in that latter point.

Ostensibly, there is a policy point in Peters' essay. He is saying that the US should plan to make provision to get people out of Iraq who would be subject to retaliation for having worked with the Americans.

But the real purpose seems to be to use the phony "balancing" to trash liberals, even though conservatives in his balancing formula are theoretically equally bad in everything. Because his first three paragraphs aren't concerned with his pseudo-balancing act at all:

I have been troubled by the reluctance of my fellow liberals to acknowledge the progress made in Iraq in the last six months, a reluctance I am embarrassed to admit that I have shared.

Giving Gen. David Petraeus his due does not mean we have to start saying it was a great idea to invade Iraq. It remains the terrible idea it always was. And the occupation that followed has been until recently a continuing disaster, causing the death or maiming of far too many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

Still, the fact is that the situation in Iraq, though some violence persists, is much improved since the summer. Why do liberals not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications? (my emphasis)

The premise, of course, is factually false. Congressional war critics like Jack Murtha and Jim Webb have been in the news recently stating that The Surge has had short-term military benefits in reducing violence. But both they and other war critics have also reminded the Cheney-Bush administration that the whole point of the military surge was to create time and space for political reconciliation. And that political reconciliation is plainly not happening. Why does Charles Peters not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications? (To borrow his wording.)

Even those like Juan Cole who have pointed out the exaggerations and distortions in the claims of reduced violence have also noticed that the overall level of violence has receded to something like 2005 levels, which seemed pretty bad at the time. They've also pointed to the role that ethnic cleansing in Baghdad and other places has played in reducing the immediate level of violence. But I haven't come across anyone denying that The Surge had any effect.

Still, anyone of any ideological persuasion looking at the situation and having the persistence to get past the lazy "press corps" conventional wisdom of the day can see that The Surge has scarcely brought the Iraq War closer to a peaceful resolution, much less created a situation where Cheney and Bush are willing to declare victory and get our forces out of Iraq, the way even the British are doing. (Actually, the Brits, having had plenty of experience losing colonies, aren't so fixated on claiming that an obvious disaster is a Great Victory.) The American alliance with local Sunni warlords, which war fans celebrate as "reconciliation at the local level", is especially problematic in that regard.

The editors of The American Prospect summarize some of the key concerns well in a single-paragraph item, Up Front: Who Did What? Dec 2007 issue (behind subscription at this writing but they make it publicly available later).

In an editorial in the Nov. 5 issue of The Weekly Standard, [neocon hack] Fred Kagan celebrated the success of the surge, a plan he helped devise, in routing al-Qaeda from safe havens throughout Iraq. Since the surge bore no relation to the tribal revolt that has resulted in al-Qaeda's recent defeats, this is a bit like Captain Ahab claiming victory as Moby Dick lies dying of lung cancer. Truth be told, the revolt was unforeseen by any of the surge's proponents, and had begun to weaken al-Qaeda before the surge forces themselves were even in place. Then there's the conundrum that empowering Sunni militias against al-Qaeda has also undercut the U.S.' strategic goal of a unified, centrally governed Iraq. Still, allowing for the facts that it wasn't really us who did it and that what got done has a downside as well as an up: We did it! (my emphasis)

Why does Charles Peters not want to face these facts, let alone ponder their implications? He concludes his essay by chanting the Republican Party line about our Savior-General Petraeus. Peters tells us that the Savior-General "has taught us how to deal effectively with insurgencies." Mission accomplished, dude!

And the American Prospect editors are plainly recognizing the (limited) success of The Surge in that passage: "allowing for the facts that it wasn't really us who did it and that what got done has a downside as well as an up: We did it!"

But you won't get that from Peters' essay. It serves to mainly tell readers, look how vested those Democrats are in a narrative of retreat and defeat. Which just happens to be the Republican prowar polemic of the moment. But look! Even the liberal Charles Peters says it!

As Bob Somerby so often puts it, if we didn't have a press corps like the one we have, you couldn't invent them.

Tags: abortion, authoritarianism, charles peters, establishment press, iraq war, mainstream media, mainstream press, mccain escalation, surge, vietnam war