The Marginal Effect of Military Analysts

The New York Times had a much cited article today on the retired generals who appear on the television networks as "military analysts."

It's not much of a surprise but analysts like Gen. Montgomery Meigs of MSNBC, Gen. Wayne Downing of NBC, and Maj. Gen. Bob Scales of Fox were all shilling for the Pentagon. They all got a series of special Pentagon briefings, were flown to Iraq, and received talking points for their broadcasts. Far from viewing themselves as objective expert commentators, several of the generals saw their broadcasts as part of a broader "psy-ops" operation by which the Pentagon was manipulating American public opinion to support the war.

What's more, several of the retired generals had huge conflicts of interest because of their financial involvement with defense contractors.

As Glenn Greenwald observes, none of this should be seen as much of a surprise. Greenwald likewise digs out an old NYT story making the same point.

But a couple of observations can still be made:

1. Bush's War Against America. The Bush administration saw the American population as a potential enemy in the war on terror from the beginning. Bush's "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric didn't just apply to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. "Psy-ops" operations are directed against enemies and potential enemies. The potential enemies included us as well.

Some of this is hangover from the Vietnam syndrome of conservatives thinking that the Vietnam War was lost on the home front rather than in Vietnam. But there is a domestic angle as well. Activist Republicans have long seen their conflicts with liberals as war. Newt Gingrich used to say that politics was "war by other means."

In this way, the Bush administration was getting ready to extend the war metaphor to its relations with the American population as a whole.

Of course, the big question is whether Bush and his cronies saw themselves as being really at war with the American population after public opinion turned against the war.

My guess is that future revelations will show that the Bush administration and conservative activists did turn against the population as a whole after the 2006 elections. There was a lot of noise about eliminating rights and establishing dictatorships from conservative intellectuals like Harvey Mansfield, Thomas Sowell, Gingrich, and Frank Gaffney in 2007. What I think is that future revelations will show that this anti-democratic chatter was also going on in the White House.

Perhaps that noise would have turned into real pressure to curtail American democracy if the Democratic leadership had stood up to Bush on war funding.

At the same time, I think that much of the hostility to the Democratic leadership originated in the public sense of the high constitutional stakes in ending the war. Since summer 2007, the Bush administration has been governing as a rogue administration and the public has a much better sense of the dangers in this than the Democrats.

2. The Campaign Failed in its primary objective. Like so much about the Iraq War, the effort to corrupt the military analysts was a failure. The Bush people weren't able to bag the most important and prestigious of the retired military analysts, Anthony Cordesmann. None of the other guys made much of a mark and I bet most television viewers couldn't tell them apart without a program. The other thing is that the pressure of constant failure from the onset of the insurgency to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the revolt of the generals, and the post-Samarra collapse functioned to turn public opinion against the war despite the best "psy-ops" the Bush administration could muster.

In other words, the whole Bush media apparatus failed in its primary objective of maintaining public support for the war.

But I do think the media campaign from the Bush administration and the right-wing has had an effect. What it's accomplished is to create enough doubt about the consequences of withdrawal that the Democratic leadership decided not to pull the trigger on a confrontation with Bush. Most of that doubt was among elites, but it was still enough to give the Bush administration the opening they wanted to continue the war.

In this sense, the corrupt military analysts were part of a relatively successful effort to buy the Bush administration time to readjust their war strategy and give them some hope that a pro-war Republican would win the presidential election in 2008.

The Significance of the 2008 Election. This sets up the 2008 election as a big deal. I've thought all along that the Democratic candidate would win handily. But there's still a chance that McCain, the conservative media, or the Democratic nominee him or herself could sow enough doubt about the Democrats that McCain could squeak out a win. If that happens, a McCain administration would spend its four years fighting to keep anti-war governing majority from coalescing just as the Bush administration is now. But if a Democrat does win, there's a good chance that the whole pro-war apparatus will go up in smoke and that the Democrats will have a ruling majority and some momentum.

What they would do with that is another question.