Media Bias, 101

A lesson in media bias — the headline of the CNN International story give us one narrative:

“Kremlin critic barred from election”

… And the body of the piece reports quite another:

“Russia’s Central Election Commission disqualified one of Kremlin’s critics from the country’s presidential election Sunday, claiming that the signatures collected for his nominating petitions were forged, the state news agency said Sunday. …

“Kasyanov’s spokeswoman confirmed to CNN that he had been barred from running in the elections, scheduled for March 2. He will not appeal the decision, a representative told Interfax.”

The headline tells us that Russia’s much-touted “backsliding” into totalitarianism is accelerating rather rapidly, while the facts, baldly stated, tell us that, for some reason, Kasyanov isn’t appealing the decision of the authorities to disqualify him, which leads us to wonder if the charges of forgery might be substantially true. Of course, forging signature on election petitions is quite illegal in the US, and would undoubtedly result in criminal charges. Perhaps that’s why Kasyanov isn’t making much of a fuss about the matter.

 

Huckabee and Those WMD in Jordan

Following the GOP debate on Thursday night, Huckabee showed both his ignorance and his willingness to believe fairy tales, regardless of whether he heard them or made them up himself.

During the debate, the Huckster said that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (a meaningless term covering everything from WWI-era mustard gas to nukes) were like Easter eggs that we never found, “it doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

Questioned by Chris Matthews following the debate, Huckabee suggested that the WMD were moved to Jordan. When Matthews pointed out that Jordan is a close ally of the US, Huckabee started spinning his fairy tale. Instead of realizing his mistake (he probably meant Syria, not Jordan), he explained that these elusive little WMD could have ended up anywhere, and without the knowledge of the King of Jordan.

The idea that Saddam moved his weapons out of the country before his regime fell never made sense to me, unless you believe that he was so moral as to refuse to use the weapons to save himself and defend his rule.

Bush Does Abraham

The intellectual bootlickers surrounding Bush have apparently persuaded him that he is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln.   Fox News recently had unprecedented access to Bush to produce a documentary to air on Sunday night: ““George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish.”  Fox reporter Bret Baier commented of his meetings with Bush: ”

We talked a lot about President Lincoln. And there’s going to be a lot of people out there who watch this hour and say, is he trying to equate himself with Lincoln?

I tell you what — he thinks about Lincoln and the tough times that he had during the Civil War. 600,000 dead. The country essentially hated him when he was leaving office.

Perhaps the cartoon history books Bush was given neglected to mention the fact that Lincoln was very popular in the North at the time he “left office” via John Wilkes Booth.   Lincoln was hated in the South, not surprisingly – given the Rules of Engagement that northern armies followed in the final years of the war.

Bush has followed in Lincoln’s footsteps when he gushes over freedom while trampling the Constitution.  That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth,” as I noted in Attention Deficit Democracy.

Bush struts when he promises to ”bring to justice” people on his target list.

Hopefully Americans will see George Bush brought to  justice for his crimes.  That would be a rebirth of the Rule of Law in this land.

Anti-Iran Coalition in the Gulf? Read This.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

If President George W. Bush’s main purpose in visiting the Gulf last week — as indicated by his call in Abu Dhabi last Sunday to confront Iran “before it is too late” — was to rally Washington’s Sunni-led regional allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, behind a containment-and-isolation strategy against Iran, especially in the wake of last month’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), it appears that he fell far short of his goal. Indeed, it now appears to have been counter-productive.

While in the run-up to Bush’s visit to Saudi Arabia, its foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, was quoted in some of the mainstream press as warning against U.S. efforts to pit the Gulf states against Iran in this way, a remarkably blunt editorial, entitled “Peace Now,” that appeared in the Jeddah-based English-language Arab News on the second day of the president’s sojourn in Saudi Arabia — two days after his Abu Dhabi speech — received virtually no notice. It should have, because it is probably unprecedented in its bluntness about the kingdom’s honored guest, constituting what the former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, Chas Freeman, today called “a notable …breach of standard Arab etiquette” and one that was presumably condoned, if not approved, by senior members of the royal family. No one from the News has since been publicly admonished or dismissed, let alone arrested; indeed, no official has distanced the government from the sentiments expressed in it. The entire text, which is reproduced below, warrants attention, but the last paragraph — in which U.S. policy is described as “madness” — is not a little breathtaking, considering that the presidential party probably received complimentary copies with their morning coffee.

“Our region is not short of bloodshed and instability. Iraq, Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan are all scenes of past and present conflicts where largely innocent blood has flowed in plenty. We do not need yet another dangerous conflict.

That is why it was so sad, even depressing, to hear US President George W. Bush use his visit to the Gulf to continue his saber-rattling against the Iranians – and over a nuclear weapons program which his own intelligence chiefs say Tehran abandoned five years ago. To any dispassionate observer, US military action against Iran is unthinkable. Unfortunately the Bush administration’s record since 9/11 has not only embraced the unthinkable but, more dangerously, it has embraced it in an unthinking fashion.

To continue such dire warnings was inconsiderate given that Bush was the guest of Gulf states which are on Iran’s doorstep. Such warnings were not what we wanted to hear. As Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal told his Canadian counterpart Maxime Bernier this week in a message that he then repeated to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, confrontational behavior by Washington toward Iran was not the answer. If Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states had a problem with Iran concerning its nuclear program, then they would talk to Tehran as neighbors should.

Before Bush’s Middle East visit, White House briefers were telling correspondents that the president would be pushing the Israelis for a Palestinian settlement in return for Arab backing of a tough stance with Iran. It was suggested that Israel might be more tractable if the “Iranian nuclear threat” were removed. But the linkage simply is not there. It is because of the enduring injustices visited upon the Palestinians, with US connivance, that the Arab world, not least Saudi Arabia, which has long been a US ally, has been so disappointed by the failure to reward loyalty and friendship by Washington’s driving through a Palestinian settlement.

And further, it is because Israel – again with US connivance – has acquired a nuclear arsenal that Iran and, before it, Saddam’s Iraq even thought of acquiring their own nuclear deterrents.

Purblind US policies and Washington’s desperate failure time and again to listen to the advice and guidance of its Arab friends in the region have brought us to this new moment of tension with Iran. We do not need more threats of war. Warmongering has already created the greatest level of regional instability in 60 years. Bush’s inflammatory threats against Iran ride roughshod over the counsels of peace that he has heard from every Arab government on his Middle East visit.

Whatever threat Iran may constitute, now or in the future, must be addressed peaceably and through negotiations. The consequences of further war in the region are hideous, not least because they are incalculable.

Even Bush, with the ruin of Iraq before him, must surely see that. Yet in his confrontational remarks about Iran, he offers no carrot, no inducement, no compromise – only the big US stick. This is not diplomacy in search of peace. It is madness in search of war.”

Freeman, who was moderating a panel on “Iran’s Strategic Concerns and U.S. Interests,” said it was very doubtful such sentiments were expressed directly to Bush during his stay in Saudi Arabia, particularly given the efforts expended by King Abdullah to establish a warm personal relationship with the president. Other participants, who included Gary Sick, Trita Parsi, Barbara Slavin, and Ray Takeyh, appeared to agree that the administration’s efforts to rally the Sunni Gulf leaders behind a confrontational stance against Iran were unlikely to succeed, with Takeyh asserting that, “You’ve begun to see Arab governments moving to integrate Iran as a means of …disarming” the threat that it poses. The Gulf states’ stance, he went on remains contradictory. “(They) don’t want American-Iranian confrontation, and they don’t want American-Iranian normalization,” he said. Along similar lines, readers might profitably read an interesting analysis published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London by Neil Partrick, a Gulf specialist with the International Crisis Group, written on the even of Bush’s trip.

Living in a Dream World

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

If you need an example of just how sophomoric both Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard and AEI’s Michael Rubin can be, don’t miss Rubin’s latest article in the Standard, entitled “Living in a Dream World: The Political Fantasies of Foreign Service Officers”. Rubin’s target is the contents of a regular column in the State Department’s in-house monthly magazine, State, in which diplomats overseas offer brief descriptions of life in their host countries. It’s very difficult to figure out why Rubin, a talented polemicist and Rudi Giuliani’s “Senior Iran and Turkey advisor”, would spend much time going over old issues of the magazine to prove what he calls the “sheer inanity of Foreign Service thinking.” Perhaps he had an intern with a lot of time on his or her hands, and the Standard needed some filler. On the other hand, most neo-conservatives, especially proteges of Richard Perle, believe there’s never a bad time to bash the “realists” in the State Department. (Indeed, in his new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn quotes Douglas Feith, Rubin’s boss during Bush’s first term, as saying that his family’s history as Holocaust victims made him understand the true nature of foreign policy, “unlike the ‘WASPs in the State Department.’” With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder the Feith and the Pentagon civilians tried so hard to keep the State Department out of the loop.)

Of course, it was Rubin more than any other neo-con who repeatedly assailed Gen. David Petraeus for trying to “appease” Ba’athists in his efforts in 2004 and 2005 to pacify Mosul and al-Anbar provinces, as I pointed out in a post last October on the Likudist cast to Giuliani’s foreign-policy team. As late as 14 months ago, Rubin, a de-Ba’athification hawk and Chalabi acolyte from the get-go, was still complaining bitterly about Petraeus’ early efforts to co-opt the Sunni insurgency. That those efforts are now given credit — even by Rubin’s fellow-neo-cons and most especially Kristol, who named Petraeus the Standard’s “Man of the Year” just last month — for what progress has been made in reducing the violence in Iraq over the past year is ironic to say the least. Indeed, the relative success of Petraeus’ tactics also suggests that it’s not just foreign service officers who inhabit dream worlds.