What’s more, as someone who has read all of the books (save “Hubris”) Huffington cited — and having just finished Woodward’s latest — I think I can answer her question as to why someone should bother buying Woodward’s book. Forking over $30 for it is an investment anyone serious about understanding contemporary history needs to make. To be sure, there is some serious overlap between “State of Denial” and “Fiasco” or “Cobra II,” or even “The Assassins’ Gate.” But does that mean that Woodward shouldn’t have bothered? His chapters on the mess that Rumsfeld saddled Jay Garner with are worth the price of admission alone.
The story of Garner, the former Marine general who was appointed as the first head of Iraqi reconstruction (he served from March 2003 to May 2003), has been well told in several other books, most thoroughly in “Cobra II” and “The Assassins’ Gate,” but Woodward goes a little deeper and adds detail and color to the story that other reporters did not have.
In the end, even if Woodward is late in going public with his alarm over the Bush administration’s mishandling of the war in Iraq, for Huffington et al to completely gloss over everything the book adds to our evolving understanding of how the administration has operated since the start of the war, is at least as irresponsible as they accuse Woodward of being.
- 1
- 2
Of course...
Nowhere in Mr. McLeary's "coverage" of the latest example of Woodward's attack journalism do we find a question of the timing of Woodward's little pre-election hatchet job on the Bush administration... A question that permeates the criticism of "State of Denial".. (Including here at CJR, by the way).
Kind of a big thing to miss, isn't it?
And also of course... President Bush's "mishandling" of war is taken as fact in McLearyland (that fantastic world of "professional journalism" where opinions gleen creedence and evolve into an artificial reality through successive iterations of journalistic drivel)... Certainly this supposed "mishandling" is taken as a fact that excuses Woodward from being "a little late" in rendering his screed...
The FACT is that Woodward got caught with his hand in the journalistic cookie jar and is rightly being spanked... Even from the left...
One would think that a self-proclaimed "watchdog" of "professional journalism" would applaud such criticism...
Wouldn't one?....
Posted by padikiller on Mon 9 Oct 2006 at 07:04 PM
I agree with the previous post--Woodward went from a first-rate investigative reporter to an inside court reporter. When this did not work any more, he turned against those who had opened the gates for him.
Hard to believe that he did not some of the insides revealed in book #3, when he wrote books #2 and #1
Posted by Brigitte Nacos on Mon 9 Oct 2006 at 07:39 PM
"The story of Garner, the former Marine general who was appointed as the first head of Iraqi reconstruction..."
Garner was an army general. He was an enlisted marine before he went to university.
On a more substantial note, I could never understand why "Plan of Attack" was seen as praise of Bush and his cadre. I thought they came across as extremely poor strategic thinkers and planners in the book.
Posted by adamskj on Thu 12 Oct 2006 at 03:09 PM
Whoa, I almost missed this nugget of genius: Padikiller thinks that the mishandling of the Iraq invasion is a media invention. Viz.:
"President Bush's "mishandling" of war is taken as fact in McLearyland (that fantastic world of "professional journalism" where opinions gleen creedence and evolve into an artificial reality through successive iterations of journalistic drivel)."
("Gleen" -- I almost thought that was a Lewis Carroll-like portmanteau, before I realized it was a misspelled malapropism.)
Keep up the fight, Padi! Post on some Iraqi sites! If you can just liberate the Iraqi people from this "fantastic", "artificial" media construct, maybe they'll stop turning up in alleys, pretending to be lifeless piles of corpseflesh. Mission accomplished!
Posted by MRooney on Thu 12 Oct 2006 at 04:53 PM
MRooney found a typo in my post and has made some himself some quixotic ad hominem hay for his stack...
Well done, my liberal friend...
Your point, I take it, is that President Bush has "mishandled" the war in Iraq because people have died there...
You want one of those non-violent wars, I suppose...
If only Clinton had invaded Iraq (insteading of bombing children in Gaghdad like he did) NOBODY would have died, right?...
You've got the fretting and strutting down pat... And the sound and fury, too.... Thus the significance of your post is entirely predictable...
Posted by padikiller on Thu 12 Oct 2006 at 08:40 PM
"Your point, I take it, is that President Bush has "mishandled" the war in Iraq because people have died there..."
No. My point is that you claimed that Bush's bungling conduct of the Iraq war is a dubious "artificial reality" spun by journalists, and THAT claim beggars belief. Bush went to war based on bad intelligence, and made no serious effort to make sure it was reliable. He disbanded the Iraqi military. He had no effective plan for long-term occupation. Violence in Iraq rivals or exceeds that under Hussein. Iraqis and non-Iraqis are becoming radicalized and trained in terrorist tactics. Cheney's claim last year that the insurgency was in its death throes has been plainly falsified by the facts on the ground. And how many critical generals does it take to constitute a "mishandling"?
Here's one, speaking from firsthand experience: Major General John Batiste, formerly commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq: "Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader ... He surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates who do not grasp the importance of the principles of war, the complexities of Iraq or the human dimension of warfare. . . . Bottom line: His plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today." I suppose the fabulists in the liberal media put those words in the general's mouth.
P.S.: "Opinions gleen creedence" isn't just a typo. It's bad diction, too. Pointing that out isn't an ad hominem attack, either: it's just a statement of another one of those stubborn things: a fact.
Posted by MRooney on Thu 12 Oct 2006 at 10:49 PM
MRooney wrote:
Bush went to war based on bad intelligence...
padikiller responds:
Right.... That AND the UN authorization of force for failure to comply with a billion other UN resolutions... Oh, AND the authorization of Congress (including Sens. Clinton, Edwards, Kennedy, and Kerry (who looked at the same inteligence Pres. Bush used)
MRooney goes on and on:
and made no serious effort to make sure it was reliable.
padikiller replies:
He made as much effort as the afore-mentioned senators who AUTHORIZED him to go to war...
But President Bush "mishandled" it... Not Clinton, Kerry, or any of your liberal pals, right?...
TOO FUNNY!...
MRooney drones:
He disbanded the Iraqi military.
padikiller:
LOL!... I would hardly claim that disbanding the ENEMY'S army amounts to "mishandling" a war!...
What a silly thing to say!...
MRooney persists:
He had no effective plan for long-term occupation.
padikiller:
Neither did Kerry, Edwards or any of the other senators who authorized the war...
Of course, the "professional journalists" had us convinced that Saddam's mighty army would hold out for years (instead of the couple of weeks it actually) took
MRooney just won't stop:
Violence in Iraq rivals or exceeds that under Hussein.
padikiller:
That violence thing is why they call is a "war" instead of "tea party"...
So you are saying that you want a non-violent war?.
What's your point here?... That we should put Saddam back in charge?..
MRooney concludes:
Iraqis and non-Iraqis are becoming radicalized and trained in terrorist tactics.
padikiller:
THAT IS WHY WE NEED TO KILL THEM...
THAT IS WHY WE CALL IT THE WAR ON TERROR...
If you are making the idiotic claim that it is somehow the U.S. fault that Islamists are choosing to become terrorists... Then there is no point in debating with you further...
No amount of political oppression justifies blowing up a Sbarro's full of civilians in order to serve Allah... Or any other ideal....
PERIOD...
Posted by padikiller on Fri 13 Oct 2006 at 02:01 PM
MRooney snipped:
"Opinions gleen creedence" isn't just a typo. It's bad diction, too.
padikiller responds:
In fact, I meant to write:
"Opinions GLEAN creedence..."
Such much for your case of limp "diction", my friend...
A typo is all it was....
Posted by padikiller on Fri 13 Oct 2006 at 03:44 PM
I said:
Bush went to war based on bad intelligence...
padikiller responds:
"Right.... That AND the UN authorization of force for failure to comply with a billion other UN resolutions... Oh, AND the authorization of Congress (including Sens. Clinton, Edwards, Kennedy, and Kerry (who looked at the same inteligence Pres. Bush used)"
So what? It was still bad intelligence, and Bush has admitted that. (And there's good reason to believe that the Senate only saw the intelligence cooked to order by the Bush administration.) Moreover, you're flatly wrong, again: the UN never authorized the 2003 invasion. A majority of Security Council members would have voted such a measure down, so the U.S. never put it to a vote. (Saying that resolution 1441 "authorized" the invasion is legalistic sophistry: why else did the UK want a new resolution authorizing force?)
Bush is the commander in chief. He makes the decisions. He commands the CIA. He decided to send America to war based on falsities. (Yet he gave a medal to the director who prepared that farrago of untruths.) However you want to spin it, that's a mishandling right there. In plain English, that's called making a mistake. When a mistake results in tens (or, probably, hundreds) of thousands of dead people, that's about as bad a mistake as you can humanly make.
padikiller:
"LOL!... I would hardly claim that disbanding the ENEMY'S army amounts to "mishandling" a war!... What a silly thing to say!..."
So Jay Garner, the U.S. general who first headed the occupation of Iraq, is silly? He's said it was a mistake.
I said:
[Bush] had no effective plan for long-term occupation.
padikiller:
"Neither did Kerry, Edwards or any of the other senators who authorized the war..."
Again, so what? Bush is the guy in charge. He's the "decider". He's been in control of pretty much all three branches of the federal government for years now. The occupation is still lethally violent, and the Iraqi government is not a successful state, three years on. That's mishandling, at the very least.
padikiller:
"That violence thing is why they call is a "war" instead of "tea party"...So you are saying that you want a non-violent war?. What's your point here?... That we should put Saddam back in charge?.."
No, my point is to show you how your claim that the "mishandling of Iraq is a media invention" isn't true. An occupation that has produced as much or more violence than the regime it replaced is a serious failure of policy.
I said:
Iraqis and non-Iraqis are becoming radicalized and trained in terrorist tactics.
padikiller:
"THAT IS WHY WE NEED TO KILL THEM...
THAT IS WHY WE CALL IT THE WAR ON TERROR...
If you are making the idiotic claim that it is somehow the U.S. fault that Islamists are choosing to become terrorists... Then there is no point in debating with you further..."
You fool. Before 2003, Iraq was a secular regime. Islamists -- such as the Salafists who carried out 9/11 and actually attacked America, none of whom were Iraqi -- had little if anything to do with Saddam's secular tyranny. Bin Laden, e.g., despised Hussein and turned down opportunities to move his operations to Iraq in the '90s. Now Al-Qaeda has a presence in Iraq. Before 2003, Iraq wasn't a front of the war on terror. Now it is. That's "mishandling" -- or in plain English, losing the war on terror.
P.S. I understood your diction error the first time. Look up "glean" in a dictionary. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Posted by MRooney on Fri 13 Oct 2006 at 04:38 PM
MRooney wrote:
And there's good reason to believe that the Senate only saw the intelligence cooked to order by the Bush administration.)
padikiller responds
Like HELL there is!....
The ONLY basis for this stupid claim is a misconstrued reading of a single report written by some liberal flunkie at the Congressional Research Service at the request of Diane Feinstein...
A careful and honest reading of this report shows that Congress has MORE means to obtain intelligence than the President in many respects...
MRooney babbles more nonsense
Bush is the commander in chief. He makes the decisions.
padikiller elucidates magnanimously
" The Congress shall have power to... ...declare war... ...To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress... ...To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces... ...To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions...
MRooney continues
Now Al-Qaeda has a presence in Iraq.
padikiller responds with the obvious reality
And is does NOT have a presence in Manhattan!....
So terrorists are flocking to Iraq to score points... And we are killing a bunch of them there...
GREAT!...
That's way we call it the WAR ON TERRORISM..
At any rate, your claim that Saddam had nothing to do with terrorism is just stupid... Of course he did...
He MAY not have been associated with 9/11... (the jury is still out on this) but he DEFINTETLY maintained contacts with Al Quaida.. And there is no question that he provided all kinds of support to other terror groups...
You might have missed it... But President Bush has made it pretty clear that he is leading a GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR....
MRooney suggests
Look up "glean" in a dictionary. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
padikiller complies
glean /glin/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[gleen] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–verb (used with object) 1. to gather slowly and laboriously, bit by bit.
I wrote that "opinions glean credence" when CJR repeats its false information...
This is good English, friend... That's all there is to it...
Posted by padikiller on Sat 14 Oct 2006 at 09:32 AM
Padikiller,
You continue to weasel away from the issue: you said Bush's "mishandling of the Iraq war" was a media artifice. I've produced numerous reasons why it isn't, most of which you've ignored.
Instead you wax irrelevant about liberals in Congress (when the Republicans still have a majority there, at least for the next few weeks) -- Congress, whose constitutional authority over war, as everyone living in reality knows, has been effectively marginalized by a series of dubious expansions of executive power for 50 years now.
You silently evade how critical the military brass has been of the Iraq war's conduct, and the ineluctable facts on the ground: the weakness of the new Iraqi state, the blood-letting on a scale that would make Saddam himself proud. This is Bush's war. It was based on false premises and it has been plagued by mistakes. These failures are Bush's. Whatever happened to the conservative value of responsibility? I guess it went out the door with fiscal conservatism.
P.s. Opinions, not being people, cannot glean anything. It is not interchangeable with "gather". Hint: it has to do with farming. Ask William Safire if you need to hear it from a conservative before you believe it.
Posted by MRooney on Sat 14 Oct 2006 at 10:25 AM
MRooney wrote:You continue to weasel away from the issue: you said Bush's "mishandling of the Iraq war" was a media artifice. I've produced numerous reasons why it isn't, most of which you've ignored.
padikiller responds:
What we have here, my liberal friend is a matter of opinion...
Fewer American soldiers have been killed in the line of duty in the Iraq war than the number of Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks.
Free elections... Women given the vote and civil rights (that Saddam's "secular" government took away in the name of Islam, by the way..)... Regional stability... Purple fingers... Democratic government... Dead terrorists...
All these concrete examples could be used to refute your OPINION that President Bush "mishandled" the war...
The POINT here is that "professional journalism" needs to distinguish between matters of opinion and matters of fact...
Posted by padikiller on Sat 14 Oct 2006 at 11:31 AM
That tens and probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead as a result of Bush's misinformed decisions and military policies and that Al-Qaeda has a presence in Iraq that it never had before, is no media artifice; it's quite objective. If you want to weasel and say it's opinion, fine. (But really -- "regional stability"? Are you that addled?) I'll side with the expert opinion of numerous generals who've been there and soldiers I've spoken with: Iraq continues to be FUBAR. And it happened under Bush's watch.
Posted by MRooney on Sat 14 Oct 2006 at 06:17 PM
MRooney wrote:
That tens and probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead as a result of Bush's misinformed decisions and military policies and that Al-Qaeda has a presence in Iraq that it never had before, is no media artifice; it's quite objective.
padikiller responds
And the tens of thousands people who are saved from Saddam's mass graves are also real, my closed-minded liberal friend... As are the tens of thousands of Kurds who avoided Saddam's ganocidal hobbies as a result of US intervention...
Of course, the fact that terrorists are concentrating in Iraq (where they are easier for us to kill) is, to any reasonable person, a sign of superb handling of military resources in wartime...
Posted by padikiller on Sat 14 Oct 2006 at 07:46 PM
Saddam was a vile despot and murderer, of course. But it's a ridiculously low bar to defend our misrule of Iraq by saying it's not quite as abattoirish as Saddam's. Human rights organizations and supporters of the Iraq war agreed going into the war that Saddam was guilty of roughly 600,000 civilian executions over his quarter-century of rule, plus another half a million war deaths against Iran. According to the Lancet study -- the best estimate anyone has made -- we have matched Saddam's civilian kills in just three years. According to the Lancet study, the death rate has increased more than sixfold over the pre-2003 death rate. So the "we've saved lives" line isn't credible. Why do you think 71% of Iraqis want us out? It must be Woodward's book and other liberal constructs, I'm sure.
(And the Kurds were already safe in their protected statelet, as they have been since 1991. We didn't need to take over the whole country to save them.)
Padikiller:
"Of course, the fact that terrorists are concentrating in Iraq (where they are easier for us to kill) is, to any reasonable person, a sign of superb handling of military resources in wartime..."
Then I suppose that National Intelligence Estimate wasn't composed by reasonable persons. Your obediently repeated talking point would be credible only if the number of terrorists in the world was static. But of course, it isn't. Back in the '90s, Osama wanted the U.S. to invade and occupy Arab land, the better to incite, recruit, train, and kill. You don't suppose those 600,000 dead Iraqis have any bitter relatives, do they? Nah, that'd be a liberal artificial reality.
Posted by MRooney on Sun 15 Oct 2006 at 01:17 AM
Does anyone else think that maybe Dubya is blogging under the name padikiller?
The similarities are rather striking: the precise use of the English language, the use of logic and reason rather than bombast and belligerence, the careful attention to fact, and, of course, the humble ability to recognize and correct mistakes. Dubya qualities all.
I'm just surprised that, with so much going on in the world today, Dubya, I mean padi, has the time for such pursuits.
Posted by erand on Sun 15 Oct 2006 at 08:38 AM
MRooney speads it thick
Human rights organizations and supporters of the Iraq war agreed going into the war that Saddam was guilty of roughly 600,000 civilian executions over his quarter-century of rule, plus another half a million war deaths against Iran. According to the Lancet study -- the best estimate anyone has made -- we have matched Saddam's civilian kills in just three years.
padikiller wields the Reality Mop
B A L O N E Y...
First of all... It must be noted that the Lancet is a thoroughly biased, liberal bastion... And that the calims of the study have been widely ridiculed...
Even so...
The "cluster sampling" of the screwy liberal Lancet study claims that the death rate in Iraq.. from ALL sources... went from 5.5 to 13.3 deaths per thousand civilians over a three year period...
The claimed increase is thus much less than 600,000 deaths, even by the Lancet's Bush-bashing arithmetic...
FURTHERMORE the Lancet's study is not conclusive as to the cause of the rise in the death rate (assuming for the sake of argument that there is in fact such a rise)
MRooney drones on
Why do you think 71% of Iraqis want us out?
padikiller responds
Besause they are incapable of governing themselves... They make bad decisions...
That's why we are O-C-C-U-P-Y-I-N-G Iraq...
MRooney blames President Bush for creating terrorists
Your obediently repeated talking point would be credible only if the number of terrorists in the world was static. But of course, it isn't. Back in the '90s, Osama wanted the U.S. to invade and occupy Arab land, the better to incite, recruit, train, and kill. You don't suppose those 600,000 dead Iraqis have any bitter relatives, do they?
padikiller responds
This is the single most idiotic liberal argument there is...
That WE somehow "make" terrorists through our policies...
The poor "bitter" bastards are prodded to become terrorists because President Bush somehow provoked them...
Well, I have some news for you, friend...
No amount of political oppression (from President Bush, Tony Blair, or anyone else) can drive an "embittered" but otherwise non-terroristic person to blow up babies in a Sbarro's.. Or blow up a mosque full of civilians...
Terrorists are terrorists because....
They are EVIL! We need to KILL or IMPRISON them...
PERIOD
WHY can't you liberal freaks jam this little bit of reality between your ears?...
Posted by padikiller on Sun 15 Oct 2006 at 11:54 AM
I take it that I've been nixed from erand's Christmas card list..
Darn...
I misunderestimated his tolerance here..
Posted by padikiller on Sun 15 Oct 2006 at 11:57 AM
First, I was wrong to say the death rate has increased sixfold. I was mistakenly comparing the absolute number of deaths for 2003-06 to the number of deaths for the 15 months before the invasion, which is obviously apples and oranges. The mortality rate has gone from 5.5 to 13.3 per thousand people, which is not quite a 150% increase.
That mistake aside, however, I note that Padikiller has been reduced to mere sputtering. The Lancet study may be widely ridiculed -- primarily by those with a partisan interest -- but it has not been refuted. Padikiller raises no evidence to show the study's methodology or findings are flawed or incorrect, he merely blusters and whines. The arithmetic is very straightforward: 13.3 - 5.5 = 7.8 per 1000 per year. Iraq's population being 26,000,000, that's (26,000 x 7.8) x 3 years = a bit over 600,000 more people have died since the invasion than would have died at pre-2003 death rates. That's our legacy in Iraq so far.
Padikiller wrote, preposterously: "the Lancet's study is not conclusive as to the cause of the rise in the death rate (assuming for the sake of argument that there is in fact such a rise)"
That line would be funny if we weren't talking about human lives. What the hell else do you think caused the increase? Bad spinach? The Lancet study breaks it down: the violent death rate has gone from 0.1 to 7.2. And the violent mortality rate continues to rise, from 3.2 in the first year under our occupation, to 12.0 in the past year. You are on the verge of declaring night is day here.
Padi then goes on to maintain, again, that Iraqis are incapable of governing themselves, hence we should continue the occupation regardless of their wishes. It's touching to hear somebody echo George III after all these years.
And Padi caps it off by gently informing me that terrorists are just evil and aren't created by any amount of political oppression. Padikiller seems to borrow another notion from the 18th century here, viz., the theory of spontaneous generation. Terrorists just appear. "Stuff happens" as Rummy said. No responsibility here. In any case, Padi gives absolutely no argument to support his highly implausible assertion, just strong language and bold capital letters.
I think we've reached the end of rational discussion here. Enjoy the last word, Padikiller, and please do tell someone in Iraq some day that their current suffering is a media artifice.
Posted by MRooney on Sun 15 Oct 2006 at 01:47 PM
ONE MORE TIME, MROONEY...
Try reading this over and over until your lips stop moving...
And THEN we may be able to move on...
No amount of political oppression (from President Bush, Tony Blair, or anyone else) can drive an "embittered" but otherwise non-terroristic person to blow up babies in a Sbarro's.. Or blow up a mosque full of civilians...
PERIOD
That's just the REALITY here, pal...
You can deal with this truth... Or instead you can click your heels together and wait for the whirlwind to take you home to McLearyland...
But either way, the reality isn't going to evaporate just because it bites your facile argument in the butt...
Posted by padikiller on Sun 15 Oct 2006 at 02:12 PM
MRooney backs out of corner
First, I was wrong to say...
padikiller
It is nice to see a willingness to come clean and correct a mistatement of fact...
But it is, I believe, worth noting that in our heated exchange in the epicenter of the Blogorealm of "Professional Journalism"...
Only one of us has been called to task for playing fast and loose with the facts...
And it wasn't me...
Posted by padikiller on Sun 15 Oct 2006 at 02:32 PM
Though I've ceded the last word to Padikiller, I feel obligated to correct a possible misunderstanding, lest I be accused of false pretense: I am not now nor have I ever been a professional journalist, nor have I anywhere implied that I was. Sorry to deprive Padikiller of another imaginary victory in his one-man crusade against the mighty liberal media juggernaut.
Posted by MRooney on Sun 15 Oct 2006 at 05:16 PM
Two questions for Padi (the poster child of tolerance):
How many incorrect statements have you made at the CJR site in the last month?
How many of those incorrect statements have you corrected?
Posted by erand on Mon 16 Oct 2006 at 05:27 AM
erand wrote:
How many incorrect statements have you [padikiller] made at the CJR site in the last month?
padikiller responds:
ZERO... That I know of...
If you can find one... Go for it...
I'll correct any mistatement I make... Good luck!... (You'll need it...)
Generally though... In contrast to the widely accepted practice of "professional journalism", I tend to check my facts BEFORE I publish them...
Believe it or not, this contrarian behavior of mine results in a greatly reduced need for correction!...
Of course, the facts I have provided in my posts here have resulted in corrections to, explanations of, and apologies for CJR articles...
Go figure...
Posted by padikiller on Mon 16 Oct 2006 at 08:20 AM