Gary Farber is still struggling, and is looking for some help. I read his story and was reminded of how fortunate I am – in health, family, love and money. That luck brings some obligations with it, so I toss some money at Soldier’s Angels or another charity every month, and can probably stand to miss a another restaurant lunch – and help Gary out – and so can you, I’ll bet.

I’d hope you’d help Gary out, but even if you choose not to please take a moment and do something for the folks who have it harder than you do. In many of our cases, that’s almost everyone.

Wow. Lots of long faces here at Winds.

I’m not sure what to make of it. Actually I am, but I kinda don’t want to say it to my co-bloggers.

No, there’s no magic play in the Bush plan we heard about tonight that will suddenly win the war. No, the mistakes we’ve made over the last three years can’t be unwound.

Everyone is looking for a magic spell that will suddenly unlock all our troubles, or a secret hidden-ball play that will guarantee victory.

Ain’t here. Ain’t happening at all.There are a few points I’d like to make that we all seem to have forgotten.

Iraq is a battle, not a war. If we won – as completely as anyone could imagine – we’d still face a conflict that poses capable, committed adversaries worldwide against us.

It matters a lot that we win in Iraq – both in terms of the impact on the worldwide conflict and in terms of the lives of the Iraqis themselves. Bush is absolutely right – losing in Iraq unlocks a set of potential futures that we really, really won’t like.

Those of us who support (and supported) the war are losing the public argument bigtime; we’re increasingly standing alone in a corner. Get used to it; we’re not an effective political force, and our political leadership (the President…) has pretty much blown things. OK, so what’s the plan? What do we do?

Well, it’s like this.

First, and foremost, I hope we’re all wrong. I hope, more than anything, that the national collapse of belief in the war doesn’t lead to a military collapse. I hope that a military collapse doesn’t lead to a wider war.

As I say – I could well be wrong about this, and hope I am. I’d like to be.

But what if I’m not?

Well, there’s not a lot I can do about it as an individual citizen and blogger. There’s not a lot you can do as blog readers. We’re not even backbenchers right now.

But we’re looking at this as though the daily news is what matters. It’s not.

There is going to be a national debate over the next two years over what to do. We’d better learn how to participate in that debate. That will involve a lot of examination, a lot of discussion – including discussion with people who oppose us.

It’s interesting to be somewhere when a tide turns. Yesterday, I was in Sacramento.

“There will be an open process and as much transparency as we can muster all the way down to how voting machines and counting equipment operate. We are going to eliminate the use of private, invisible, proprietary software that no one can evaluate as a means of counting our votes.”

– California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s inaugural remarks.

Don’t forget the pan the salmon is in was in the oven at 450 degrees.

It’s hard to type with the last two fingers of each hand…

Light posting to continue for a few days, sorry.

Per hypocrisyrules, E & P is reporting that the Iraqi police have found Jamail Hussein.

I’m buried until Sunday when a project is delivered, but have sent a few emails and will chase more down early next week.

I’ll note that AP (who delivered the “he’s found” story) obviously hasn’t been ignoring the complaints, and that had they simply said “That’s weird, give us a week and we’ll have some kind of explanation” and continued – with some transparency – to explain what they were doing, I’d have spend less time in High Dudgeon.

There’s still the issue of whether he’s telling any kind of truth that anyone would recognize…but let’s take it one step at a time.

The Polish government, in an effort to “…draw a line under the country’s Communist past, and “educate” the Polish public about the old regime” has released the documents from a 1979 Eastern Bloc war game, in which Poland is sacrificed to Allied nuclear weapons blocking Soviet reinforcements, and Soviet citybusters strike most Western European cities. Note that the Soviets did not expect NATO to launch against Eastern cities.

The new conservative government that released them said “It’s important for citizens to know who was a hero, and who was a villain. It is important for the civic health of society to make these things public.”

I’m less sanguine; I’m thinking it’s possible we have files full of similar plans.

But it’s both important to note what the Soviet military leadership expected from us – and planned to do about it – and to put into context the challenges and risks we face as compared to those we faced as recently as the 1980’s.

Lots has improved since then. But we do have a ways to go…

My latest Examiner piece, a reprise of ‘Iraq is F**ked, Part II‘ is up. Comments always welcome…

In a display of clueless arrogance unmatched since the Black Knight refused to yield to King Arthur, the AP replies to its critics on l’affaire Jamail Hussein:

NEW YORK A long-running dispute between The Associated Press and critics over one of its Iraqi sources show no signs of abating, despite at least two lengthy rebuttals by the news organization. The new IraqSlogger web site, founded by former CNN news chief, Eason Jordan, is out with a fresh challenge, after failing to resolve the issue in its own detective work. This has not set off a new round of examination by the AP, apparently.

Kathleen Carroll, AP executive editor, told E&P today that she had not read Jordan’s latest item, posted Monday, and likely would not. But she stood by the news organization’s previous statements backing the existence of an Iraqi police captain, Jamail Hussein.

“I’ve been pretty public about what we have done to get to the crux of the criticism we have gotten about it,” she added. When asked about critics’ demands that AP produce Hussein to prove his existence, she said “that area [where he works] has pretty much been ethnically cleansed, it is a nasty place and continues to be.”

Carroll said that Hussein “is a guy we’ve talked to for years,” adding that “we don’t have anything new to say about it, nothing new to add.”

Linda Wagner, AP’s director of media relations and public affairs, said she had just seen Jordan’s post, but did not expect to have more to say about it. She said “it would be highly unusual for any news organization to provide sources on the demands of critics.”

When asked about the fact that no other major news outlet appears to have been using Hussein as a source, Wagner said, “whether he might be used as an anonymous source by someone else, I don’t know.” She added that having a source that is not used by others may not be unusual in a war zone.

Here’s the problem, Ms. Carroll. We don’t believe he exists. If he doesn’t exist, much of your reporting from Iraq is subject to dispute. If your reporting from Iraq is subject to dispute, your credibility is pretty much blown apart – and I don’t know what else you have to sell.

Because we (individuals) aren’t customers of AP, they can afford to ignore our unhappiness. But as we transfer our discontent with their poor professionalism to the newspapers that are their customers – and, for example, cancel our subscriptions in large part because we don’t see the value of subscribing – the AP will be called to account. If you take a look at the share prices of major media properties who own AP – they’ve lost about 20% of their value in the last few years – I’ll bet there will some interesting discussions when it comes to pricing AP’s services over the next few years. So, Ms. Carroll, our views do matter – or more accurately, your ability to publicly defend the value of yours do. You used to be able to do so as casually as you chose because you owned the press.

Not so much any more.

It’s truly sad that they can’t get ahead of the issue. I’ll point out a major media example of someone who has:

From: Kevin Anderson-Washington XXXXXXXXX@bbc.co.uk Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 16:30:18 -0000
To: XXXXXXXXX@eon.law.harvard.edu
Subject: RE: Best of Both Worlds Continued

OK,

I’ve been meaning to contribute to this discussion because I come from the mainstream media world – the other world so to speak. And the editor of the programme I work on at the BBC World Service, Mark Sandell, has been following this discussion.

Our programme has asked several of you to join us to talk about what is going in your part of the world, and we use Global Voices as a way to broaden out our agenda. What stories are you talking about that we should be aware of?

I still am considering my thoughts about the ways in which blogs and traditional media complement each other. I definitely am not of the view of an adversarial relationship between bloggers and traditional media although being from the US, I have definitely seen this in action.

But, I just wanted to flag up a little note from our editor Mark Sandell, about our thinking in covering stories. We had a discussion yesterday about the mining tragedy in the US, although we expanded this to deal with mine safety elsewhere, including China and South Africa. We had a lot of e-mail comments about why we weren’t covering the landslides in Java or returning to cover the plight of quake victims in South Asia.

Mark posted his thoughts here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/world_have_your_say/4584506.stm

Right now, it’s at the top of the page, but it will shift to the middle after our day-end update. Look for the Note from the Editor. Let me know what you think. We’re trying to be more open about why we do what we do.

best,
k

Kevin Anderson
BBC World Service and Five Live

Patterico has his year-end roundup of the – incompetence is one word, but not the only one I’d use – of the LA Times. God, I hope I never do anything that results in his prosecuting me…

I also cancelled my subscription after the SWIFT program debacle, and haven’t missed it (except for a couple of opera reviews), altho I do read some of the paper online.

Much of my news these days comes via RSS reader – my subscriptions can be found at http://www.bloglines.com/public/ArmedLiberal. If you can think of something worth adding, please let me know.

I was surfing around at relative random yesterday, waiting for TG to get ready for the New Years Eve festivities when I visited Jacob Levy’s blog (referencing l’affaire Althouse). I’m only mildly interested in the squabble, because it’s become about personalities much more than ideas – and if I wanted to deal with that c**p I’d work in Hollywood and make a lot more money than I do – but I clicked on Levy’s CV and then read the first chapter of his book ‘The Multiculturalism of Fear’.

I studied political theory as an undergraduate (with Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar)…that was a long time ago and pretty much ran from Homer up to Rawls (who had just published ‘A Theory of Justice’) and then stopped.

So it was with a lot of interest that in Levy’s work I read about and noted Judith Shklar (who I’d heard of but not read) et al who essentially write about a political theory of feelings and emotion, and appear to elevate hurt feelings – literally – to a parity with core human rights. Levy discusses Shklar –

Shklar subordinates the evil of ‘moral cruelty’ or humiliation to the evil of physical cruelty, but acknowledges the reality and harm of such moral cruelty. ‘It is not just a matter of hurting someone’s feelings. It is deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else.’

This is interesting, and on first account worrisome. It legitimizes the views of such folk as Ahmed Sheikh (Editor-In-Chief of Al-Jazeera) who I cite as saying:

In the end, is it a matter of feelings of self-esteem?

Exactly. It’s because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.

The problem with this, I note is

It’s impossible – or very damn close to it – to negotiate with someone who is interested more in his self-image than in any objective thing that may be achieved in the negotiation. Because no matter how the matter is settled, each party to a good settlement feels somewhat wronged.

And if that feeling of wronged-ness is the driver…well, getting to a negotiated settlement is going to be damn difficult.

On first blush, I’m frightened of a political theory of feelings. I need to do some reading because this is something definitely worth digging into a bit. Shklar sounds like a good first stop…(and I’d love some other suggestions).