Remember how I said that Thomas Freidman vacillates between genius and incoherence? Go over to the NYTimes right now, and read some of the former:

…Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.

(fixed the link; thanks, Dan!)
Continued…

The “real reason” for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn’t enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there – a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things “martyrs” was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such “martyrs” was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.

The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don’t believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government – and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen – got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

I can’t believe this isn’t all over…go read the whole thing, and tell your friends.

A great comment by Francis W. Porretto (of the Palace of Reason blog):

Military analysts use the word “threat” to describe a possible adversary’s capabilities, without reference to his intentions. If our intentions were as bad as many of the world’s horror regimes, we’d use our fantastic power to make ourselves slaveowners over the whole world. Hell, if our intentions were even as bad as those of the Chirac Administration, the world would be in for a very rough ride.

Since there’s absolutely no chance that America will ever deliberately diminish herself militarily just to make other regimes comfortable, all we can do is promote our intentions. This will be a matter of both words and deeds, and the congruence between them.

Continued…I told the story of my Subaru-driving pacifist, and highlighted Barbara Streisand’s hypocrisy exactly because that congruence between what we say we believe and how we act is absolutely critical.

It is critical for us – as liberals and Americans in general – to figure out how to bring our values and lives at least somewhat into line, and it is absolutely critical for us as a nation to use our power in ways that are consistent with what we tell the world we believe and intend to do.

Francis, thanks for bringing some clarity on this.

I typically commute around the traffic-choked Los Angeles basin by motorcycle; today, I was following a Subaru with “No Blood for Oil” and “War is not the Answer” bumper stickers. I had just finished the uncharitable thought that putting “No Blood for Oil” bumper stickers on cars seems kind of like an oxymoron, when we came to a red light and I pulled next to the car.

The driver, a woman my age (middle), rolled down her window and gestured at me.

Continued…“Your lights are flashing”

I ride with a headlamp modulator by Kisan Products, that flashes my motorcycle’s headlights between dipped and high beams about once every other second. I find that it aids greatly in being seen by cars, a useful trait in safe motorcycling. About once a week, people point it out to me, thinking it means something is wrong with my motorcycle. I lifted my helmet visor and went into my typical response.

“Thanks! I know, it’s supposed to do that. It worked! You saw me!” All in a cheerful tone.

“It’s horrible! It’s giving me a headache!”

Periodically, it annoys people. I have a response to that, too.

“I’m sorry! It doesn’t bother most people.”

“Well, it’s giving me a headache. And you ought to be careful because it might make someone so angry they’ll run you over one day!”

…pause…

“Wow, that’s not very peaceful, is it?” I replied, maintaining eye contact.

She rolled up her window and drove off.

Ironically, we were on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, not too far from Barbara Streisand’s estate, featured in this, from the L.A. Times (registration required, use ‘laexaminer”laexaminer’):

Barbra Streisand has filed a lawsuit against an amateur photographer, claiming he is violating her privacy by displaying a picture of her bluff-top Malibu estate on a Web site designed to document erosion and excessive development along California’s 1,150-mile coastline.

The lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Santa Monica, besides seeking $10 million in damages, asks retired software engineer Kenneth Adelman to remove the image of Streisand’s mansion from the 12,000 photos he has posted on http://www.californiacoastline.org . Adelman and his wife, Gabrielle, have been snapping pictures for months from their helicopter to show the splendors of the coastline and what they consider environmental threats.

Look at this:

Democrats need to speak on TV, on radio, on the Internet and in the newspapers about the election and keep hammering home the legislative favors Bush is granting his corporate supporters in exchange for their campaign contributions. Journalists need to spend the same amount of energy and resources investigating Bush and Cheney as they spent over the past decade investigating the Democrats. Democrats need to organize, to motivate, to inspire the disillusioned citizens and the disenfranchised voters of this country who think their votes don’t matter. Democrats must reach out to voters who want sane gun control, voters who want to protect choice, voters dedicated to saving the environment.

Or this:

What Did You Expect?
Posted on Nov. 25, 2002

It has started. Protections of people and of our environment are already being gutted by the Bush administration in favor of corporations and profit.
The first environmental protection to go? Clean Air. On Friday, the Bush administration announced it would loosen industrial air pollution rules – resulting in dirtier skies, sicker people and richer corporations.

The quotes, of course, are from Barbara Streisand.

The bugbear of small minds…

(fixed typo – ‘basis’ for ‘basin’)

Thomas Friedman, who frustratingly cycles between brilliance and incoherence (hey, who am I to talk…I manage the incoherence part pretty well) has an interesting ‘theory of everything’ column up (hat tip to Atrios):

During the 1990’s, America became exponentially more powerful … economically, militarily and technologically … than any other country in the world, if not in history. Broadly speaking, this was because the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the alternative to free-market capitalism, coincided with the Internet-technology revolution in America. The net effect was that U.S. power, culture and economic ideas about how society should be organized became so dominant (a dominance magnified through globalization) that America began to touch people’s lives around the planet … “more than their own governments,” as a Pakistani diplomat once said to me. Yes, we began to touch people’s lives … directly or indirectly … more than their own governments.

Continued…

…

Why didn’t nations organize militarily against the U.S.? Michael Mandelbaum, author of “The Ideas That Conquered the World,” answers: “One prominent international relations school … the realists … argues that when a hegemonic power, such as America, emerges in the global system other countries will naturally gang up against it. But because the world basically understands that America is a benign hegemon, the ganging up does not take the shape of warfare. Instead, it is an effort to Gulliverize America, an attempt to tie it down, using the rules of the World Trade Organization or U.N. … and in so doing demanding a vote on how American power is used.”

…

Hence, 9/11. This is where the story really gets interesting. Because suddenly, Puff the Magic Dragon … a benign U.S. hegemon touching everyone economically and culturally … turns into Godzilla, a wounded, angry, raging beast touching people militarily. Now, people become really frightened of us, a mood reinforced by the Bush team’s unilateralism. With one swipe of our paw we smash the Taliban. Then we turn to Iraq. Then the rest of the world says, “Holy cow! Now we really want a vote over how your power is used.”

…

“Where we are now,” says Nayan Chanda, publications director at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization (whose Web site http://yaleglobal.yale.edu is full of valuable nuggets), “is that you have this sullen anger out in the world at America. Because people realize they are not going to get a vote over American power, they cannot do anything about it, but they will be affected by it.”

Finding a stable way to manage this situation will be critical to managing America’s relations with the rest of the globe. Any ideas? Let’s hear ’em: thfrie@nytimes.com.

I’m working on my response, but I’ll open by suggesting that there’s more than a thread of truth in this.

The imbalance of power he mentions is a key part of the dynamic that’s driving foreign relations. Our inability to get people to understand that Puff The Magic Dragon had teeth is one of the other. One thing you learn in martial arts is that you can cause fights by being both too belligerent and too meek; the art is finding a middle path.

In the comments section on Good/Bad Liberals, commenter Jonathan brought up a point which I characterized as ‘dumb leftism’, but something I do want to go into a bit more, because I think it helps define the faultline between the Left and Right pretty neatly.

Basically it comes down to this. Adam Smith and Marx both talk about the hypothetical ‘pin factory’, in which workers make pins. Hypothesize for a minute a pin entrepreneur, who invests a machine – or a process – whereby the productivity of the five workers goes from 100 pins/hour to 200 pins/hour.

Who gets the additional 100 pins?

In college, I asked a doctrinaire Marxist economics professor (a fairly notable writer in the area…)exactly this question. His reply?

“Well, imagine that I’m a really good machine thief, and I can steal the machine that the factory uses to make 200 pins/hour, and reduce the productivity to 100 pins/hour. What portion of those 100 pins do I get to keep?”

I still remember my initial response: “You’re kidding, right?”

He wasn’t.

I believed then, and believe now, that it’s actually a somewhat complicated question…but that there’s no question that there’s no comparison between a pin machine inventor and a pin machine thief.

I’ve been following the “good liberal/bad liberal” thread with some interest (and not a little amusement) for a while, not only on this blog, but in the broader world of political commentary.

First, let me suggest that it had definitely been a tactic of the Right to suggest that “love it or leave it” is the best policy, and that “love it” means “my country, right or wrong”, so sit back, shut up, and hang on. I’m sure that Joe, and even Trent, in more reflective moments will acknowledge that this is true.

And to suggest that any criticism of U.S. policy is “objectively pro-(Soviet, Saddamite, or whatever)” isn’t the strongest basis for a healthy dialog. The fact that the Soviet Union was smart enough to support Martin Luther King through CPUSA operatives doesn’t in any way invalidate the Civil Rights movement.

But…there is a definite lack of perspective on the part of much of the Left that I read and ly know. I think that that’s a bad thing, both because I think it leads to bad conclusions, and because it self-isolates the Left from the mainstream of American thought. When my friends – who freaking live in Manhattan – explained to me after 9/11 that “we had it coming”, or when my friends suggest that the sole reason for the disaster that is most Latin American politics is American foreign policy – or when they suggest that the sole cause of the crisis in the inner city is the continuing legacy of oppression and debt of slavery – with no acknowledgement of other historic inputs into the problems, or of the responsibility of the people affected themselves to do more – they aren’t making a lot of sense.
I talked about this a while ago, and see no reason to change what I said then:

I know two really bad parents. One is a couple that simply refuses to control their children; they love them totally, and so, they explain, they love everything they do. Unsurprisingly, they are raising two little monsters. The other is a single mother who explains that everything bad in her life is the fault of her child, and that everything he does is wrong. Unsurprisingly, her child is depressed, withdrawn and equally badly damaged.

I’ll define patriotism as “love of country.” Both the parents above (all three of them, actually) claim to ‘love’ their children. But to blindly smile and clean up when your child smashes plates on the floor is not an act of love. And blindly smiling and waving flags when your country does something wrong is not an act of patriotism.

But … there is a point where criticism, even offered in the guise of love, moves past the point of correction and to the point of destruction. It’s a subtle line, but it exists. And my friend (who is less of a friend because I can’t begin to deal with her fundamentally abusive parenting) is destroying her child. And there are liberals who have adopted an uncritically critical view of America. Who believe it to have been founded in genocide and theft, made wealthy on slave labor and mercantilist expropriation, to be a destroyer of minorities, women, the environment and ultimately they argue, itself.

I’m sorry but their profession of love for America is as hollow to me as that mother’s profession of love for her son. Are those things true? As facts, they are an incomplete account of this country’s history. As a worldview, they are destructive and self-consuming.

I really can’t add much to that.

(edited for punctuation)

When I wrote, below, that some measure of enforced equality is necessary to the functioning of a democratic republic like ours, some commenters and other bloggers responded that the problem was that the elites captured the levers of power of the state, and used their control of the state to maintain their power. For example, over at Thought Mesh:

If we look at history and ask how elites have maintained their dominance what we see is that they used the power of the state to do so. It is through law and regulation that persistent aristocracies are created and maintained, not economics and business.

and in the comments:

The best way to ensure a turnover of power is to argue for free markets to remain in place, with little bureaucracy to ensure its stability. Walmart may be powerful now, but in a free market the only thing we can count on is continual productive change.

and

However, it is a mistake to assume that an unequal distribution of private wealth is, per se, evidence of a social problem.

Actually, yes it is a probem, and what these folks are demonstrating is first, a lack of historical awareness – remember why Teddy Roosevelt was famed for being the first major ‘trust buster‘?? This was the first large regulatory intervention, and why do you think it was necessary and popular? Or do you think it was unnecessary?
But lest we think we’re past those eras, and as the 1980’s stock analysts suggested, ‘the old rules no longer apply,’ I saw something in Business Week this week:

Commentary: Why the Market Can’t Police Itself

Now that 10 Wall Street firms have agreed to settle charges of biased research, Congress and the Securities & Exchange Commission are facing a new question: Does self-regulation by Wall Street work?

The answer is a resounding no. It’s not just that the New York Stock Exchange failed to act on phony research. More proof came when Sanford I. “Sandy” Weill, chairman and CEO of Citigroup (C ) (whose Salomon Smith Barney (C ) unit was implicated in the research scandal), was invited to represent the public on the NYSE board. Weill withdrew after a storm of protest.

Reports that NYSE Chairman and CEO Richard A. Grasso’s compensation totaled $10 million last year were another troubling sign. Grasso’s pay is set by a board-compensation committee, but he regulates most of its members. Among them: the chairmen of Bear Stearns (BSC ), Goldman Sachs (GS ) and Merrill Lynch (MER ). And on May 20, Grasso was reelected to the Home Depot (HD ) Inc. board, putting him in the position of both serving on it and policing its conduct. Grasso declined to comment. Says New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer: “Fixing self-regulation is perhaps the most important policy issue facing the SEC.”

And since Bill Gates keeps being brought up as an example of the worthy rich, an article on why Microsoft keeps getting such close government scrutiny:

The Microsoft Monopoly and its Effects April 2001 Edward J. Black President & CEO Computer & Communications Industry Association

As the evidence from the trial showed, heavy-handed abuse of market power may take different forms in different industries, but it doesn’t lose its basic character or effectiveness. Antitrust law may be even more important in intellectual property based industries in which network effects and tipping are common phenomena and technological tie ins and dependencies create “locked in´ customer bases. The Sherman Antitrust Act, the cornerstone of American antitrust law, prohibits monopolization, attempts to monopolize, or conspiracy with others to monopolize a market for goods or services. Microsoft is most serious violations involve efforts to protect its existing monopolies and expand them into adjacent markets through anticompetitive tactics.

…

Microsoft has frequently taken actions that harm original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), the largest source of revenue for their Windows operating systems, and in turn consumers at large. By not allowing OEMs to alter various aspects of Windows, including the bundling of Internet Explorer, the startup sequence, and the arrangement of icons on the initial user interface, Microsoft has prevented OEMs from providing consumers with meaningful choices and potential innovations in computing. Microsoft claims any modification would alter the user is ªWindows experience,´ but in essence is dictating that rather than going “where you want to go today,´ you will go “where Microsoft wants you to go today, tomorrow, and indefinitely.´ Hewlett-Packardobjected to these dictates, and expressed its frustration to Microsoft in a memo introduced as evidence during the district court hearing: “From a consumer perspective, we are hurting our industry … If we had a choice of another supplier, based on your actions, I assure you that you would not be our supplier of choice.” This behavior is what lies at the heart of the case and is classic anticompetitive maintenance of a monopoly, a clear violation of section two of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The practices of a dominant monopolist would be counterproductive and unthinkable for a normal business operating in a competitive environment. Most companies cannot, and will not, behave in the manner that Microsoft has … competitive market forces simply will not permit these actions. If a typical company spent millions on a product only to give it away for free, they would be bankrupted. If a normal company alienated, threatened, and punished its business “partners,” it would surely face retribution. However, such considerations are not of concern to Microsoft. Because of its entrenched monopoly, Microsoft need not heed countervailing forces in the marketplace. Microsoft can even give away Internet Explorer, reducing Netscape is ability to charge and profit from their own revolutionary web browsing software. Microsoft is able to show contempt for its OEM consumers because Hewlett Packard and other OEMs know that Microsoft is the only game in town. This lack of economic accountability is why a monopoly is held to different legal standards the law rightfully recognizes that the marketplace

As financial and legal technology advanced to permit the large corporation, the ability of these giant enterprises to distort the market in their favor can only be counteracted by the central government.

Now, I’ll certainly agree that this presents its own set of meaningful problems. I’m trying to work toward a new kind of liberalism, because I see those problems, and I understand that interests – teacher’s and prison guards’ unions, as well as more traditional ‘investors’ in the political process who work buy regulation that serves their interests (think of the Fanjul sugar interests) – play the current government and regulatory scheme for all it’s worth to them. Which is a lot.

But to imagine that somehow eliminating the government leg of this tripod will create a dynamic economy in which the Microsofts and Citibanks will somehow find themselves in fair competition with small companies is to have read too many Heinlein books. The large enterprises have – whenever not checked by greater powers – been very happy to consistently abuse the markets in their favor.

And, having distorted and abused the markets, they will continue to concentrate power until we are all living in Pottersville.

I’ve been watching the debates on “justifying the invasion” with a lot of interest, as days go by without the WMD ‘smoking gun’ showing up in my morning newspaper.

There is an interesting discussion to have regarding the post-facto moral position, but more important to me is the simpler question of whether we were actively lied to or, as I prefer to put it “wagged like a dog”. I started to talk about some of it below in Freeing Jessica Lynch, and then today, Slate has a piece on the NY Times’ pre-invasion coverage of WMD and whether the Times should review its intel, as the Pentagon appears to be doing.

…none of Miller’s wild WMD stories has panned out. From these embarrassing results, we can deduce that either 1) Miller’s sources were right about WMD, and it’s just a matter of time before the United States finds evidence to back them up; 2) Miller’s sources were wrong about WMD, and the United States will never find the evidence; 3) Miller’s sources played her to help stoke a bogus war; or 4) Miller deliberately weighted the evidence she collected to benefit the hawks. It could be that the United States inadvertently overestimated Iraq’s WMD program. For example, the United States might have intercepted communications to Saddam in which his henchmen exaggerated the scale of Iraq’s WMD progress to make him happy.

And an idea started to form…
My core profession is managing problem technology projects (note: if you have one in the Southern California area, drop me a note at the address on the masthead). I’m currently working on a major ($400K/month project cost) project at a major national corporation…one where they flipped the switch and the system never turned on. They attempted to go live in front of the user community and the software simply didn’t work. How in the world could that happen?

I’m talking to the various project team members, who with few exceptions are bright, competent people, and I realize that somehow no one was willing to stand up to management and tell them “no”. I just saw it in action. This week, we ‘discovered’ a brand new requirement, ten weeks before the go-live date for the relaunch, when we are almost through testing, and the group sat in a meeting with the program director and listened to her explain that fixing this – which is a minor rework, but will effect may parts of the system – is something we can do in the time we have left.

I was one of two people (out of twenty) who suggested that this was probably not a very good idea. Imagine what it would have been like if company management had people-shredders. Everyone else in the room wouldn’t have been silent, they would have cheerfully explained how well it would work and how easy it would be. And me…

And were I a brutal dictator with fantasies of regional domination, I’m sure that getting these weapons would be my highest priority. But I’d rely on my ever-shrinking inner circle to actually do the messy work of managing those programs and measuring their results.

And since the major activites of those folks would be fighting for position and booty (in all senses), the difficult work of actually managing the technical and industrial infrastructure necessary to actually build some of these things would probably fall a bit behind.

So you get ‘Potemkin weapons’; reports, promises, trailers filled with impressive-looking technical equipment, UAV’s that are really just oversized model airplanes. Occasionally, some competent or especially frightened technician might actually produce something – but almost certainly not on the scale that the dictator believes.

So Saddam believes he has them, and from that, we infer that he does, and what is really going on is a bunch of nervous paper-shuffling.

I like this idea, because it fits in with what I know of human nature, and it explains two things (both of which get trumped if they actually find the Secret Underground WMD Factories) – why Saddam would risk war to hide weapons he knew he didn’t have, and why Bush would risk lying about something so crucial, when it would be impossible for the lie not to get caught.

Trent is standing astride the corpse of statist socialism, metaphorically beating his chest, and a lot of our commenters seem to agree with him.

I think his joy is premature (and somewhat misplaced); so what I want to do is defend redistributive liberalism here. There are two flavors of redistribution. One redistributes income and wealth; usually through transfer payments, social programs, or other kinds of infrastructure paid for disproportionately by the well-off and used by all. The other is defensive; it means to limit the concentrations of wealth and power.

It is about keeping those who have from using what they have to take from those who don’t.

I believe these are important for two reasons.

One is a matter of morality, aesthetics, essentially of taste, and as we all know, de gustibus, non disputandum est (there’s no accounting for taste). I prefer to live in a world where the conditions of the poor are meliorated. I think it’s just and good. The response to that is ‘well, spend your own money!’, and right now I’m not going to dispute that (although I believe it’s quite disputable).

The other is very practical and cold-hearted, and is something I hope to convince you to take seriously; to have the kind of political organization we have…where we grant legitimacy to an abstract body of laws and procedure…there needs to be a rough equality of power.

There will never be a true equality of power; every effort to make it so has collapsed into madness (The Terror, Pol Pot). But one unique feature of the American system – and one of the keys to it’s greatness is the ability of the small to stand up to the strong. This is important for many reasons; one of the most important is that it ties the small and powerless to the system with ties of legitimacy.
My correspondence with Bill, from Rational Expectations, helped get this started.

Here are a few quotes from his emails to me:

First, what’s the problem with wealth concentration? Bill Gates didn’t get rich by making me or any other of his customers worse off.

I think there’s a huge difference between an agricultural society in which a handful of families own all the land and everyone else is a peasant on the one hand and a society in which there’s significant mobility *within* the income distribution. The key is whether people have access to education and credit markets and are free to enter into any business or occupation of their choosing.

And I started realizing that he feels the way a lot of the people who read and comment on this blog (and not a few of those who write for it) do.

I feel differently.

As noted above, my feelings aren’t based entirely – or even largely – on some deep moral values. They are based on a look at the founding principles of this country, and on what people have discussed and believe that makes a polity work.

Jefferson put it well:

“There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents… There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendency.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Adams

“With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?” –Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper

“I do not believe with the Rochefoucaults and the Montaignes that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues. I believe a great abatement from that proportion may be made in favor of general honesty. But I have always found that rogues would be uppermost, and I do not know that the proportion is too strong for the higher orders and for those who, rising above the swinish multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into the places of power and profit. These rogues set out with stealing the people’s good opinion, and then steal from them the right of withdrawing it, by contriving laws and associations against the power of the people themselves.” –Thomas Jefferson to Mann Page

And much of the Federalist Papers is about the fear that an aristocracy of wealth hand power would rise up and destroy the fragile republic.

(and that the mobs would vote themselves wealth and power, to be sure)

There is a critical level of diffusion of power that has made the American model work. Not too diffuse, for there we get the demos, and ultimately the mob; and not too concentrated, for there we begin to stratify as those with privilege erect barriers to make sure that they can keep it.

My biggest concern is that we are near a tipping point where that delicate balance will be at risk. I, and others like me, want to shove the pendulum back the other way.

Like some, Mitch Ratcliffe as an example, I’m looking for a way to pull power away from the corporate and financial elites without handing it to the political/administrative elites. I don’t want a choice between Dickens’ and Orwell’s Londons – between Oliver Twist and 1984.

I intend to make another one. If I can’t find it, I’ll help create it.

Robert Scheer replies to his critics:

It is one thing when the talk-show bullies who shamelessly smeared the last president, even as he attacked the training camps of Al Qaeda, now term it anti-American or even treasonous to dare criticize the Bush administration. When our Pentagon, however — a $400-billion- a-year juggernaut — savages individual journalists for questioning its version of events, it is worth noting.

Especially if you’re that journalist.

Last week, this column reported the findings of a British Broadcasting Corp. special report that accused the U.S. military and media of inaccurately and manipulatively hyping the story of U.S. Pvt. Jessica Lynch and her rescue from an Iraq hospital. The column was also informed by similar and independently reported articles and statements in the Toronto Star, the Washington Post and other reputable publications.

What is particularly sad in all of this is that a wonderfully hopeful story was available to the Pentagon to sell to the eager media: one in which besieged Iraqi doctors and nurses bravely cared for — and supplied their own blood to — a similarly brave young American woman in a time of madness and violence. Instead, eager to turn the war into a morality play between good and evil, the military used — if not abused — Lynch to put a heroic spin on an otherwise sorry tale of unjustified invasion.

The Chicago Tribune story he references:

The final story has not been told, and no one contests Lynch’s bravery during a horrifying ordeal. But the Iraqi doctors who treated her tell a less Hollywood-ready version of her rescue: They say they worked hard to save her life, they deny reports that she was slapped by an Iraqi officer and they say there was no resistance when U.S. forces raided the building.

Let’s go to the issues raised.

As far as I can see, there are four:

1) Did Lynch battle fiercely before being captured?

2) Was she mistreated when captured?

3) Did the hospital staff give her exemplary treatment and try and return her to U.S. lines?

4) Was the dramatic ‘dynamic entry’ into the hospital necessary?

[Update: Check out Bill Herbert’s detailed history of the media wars on this over at cointelprotool…]

As I read it, the core of Scheer’s critique is that the entire event was ‘stage managed’, and that we could have simply driven a Humvee and a couple of corpsmen up to the hospital and picked her up. Everything else…the tale of her heroism, mistreatment, and the ‘daring’ of the Iraqi who told us where she was…was simply a ‘wag the dog’ staged for the benefit of wartime propaganda.

Sadly, I think the Scheer is so blinded by his need to prove the Bush administration mendacious in all things, and by his conviction that the war was – charitably – an evil enterprise that he would take this attitude toward almost any positive news that came out of the war at all.

I’ll note here that my own biases tend me to the opposite tack, but that I’m cynical enough about both sides of the argument for Scheer and myself.

Here is my take on the four points:

1. Did she fight fiercely before being captured? Advantage, Scheer. Importance: low. When I read this, my first take was “How do they know? If it’s just from interrogating her, a) she’s probably not in the best shape to remember, and b) she’s probably not experienced enough to judge what fierce battle looks like.” One Iraqi private shooting at me with a machine gun would sure as hell feel like fierce battle in my eyes. My immediate reaction was that this was harmless spin, designed to make our soldiers out as heroic.

2) Was she mistreated when captured? The hospital staff says “No.” Advantage: none. Importance: high. Tough call; on one hand, the Iraqi’s don’t have a sterling reputation in the human-rights arenas; on the other, when Trent blogged about her probable treatment here, I thought it a bit over-the-top. This is somewhat solvable; she either shows the signs of good medical treatment, or the signs of mistreatment. Legitimate concerns about her privacy will probably keep this answer from ever being public.

3) Did the hospital staff take good care of her? Advantage: none. Importance: low. As above, there are some provable facts that will probably never come to light. But I’m equally cynical about two things: on one hand, hospital workers have a bias toward taking care of people, regardless of who they are – that’s why they’re health care workers in the first place. And on the other, if I knew the Americans were coming, I’d sure be nice to any of them that I had handy as a relationship builder for the group that next walked through the door. And, sadly, other than the facts written on Lynch’s body, there is really only the self-serving word of the hospital staff to support this position.

4) Was the ‘raid’ necessary? Advantage: Pentagon. Importance: Critical. In my mind, this is the core of Scheer’s argument, that the entire rescue was unnecessary and a ‘staged event’. In his own words: “…U.S. military and media of inaccurately and manipulatively hyping the story of U.S. Pvt. Jessica Lynch and her rescue from an Iraq hospital.”

Here’s something I know a little bit about. I’ve had pretty extensive tactical training, at Gunsite as well as some of the other leading schools that teach police officers and members of the military ‘low-intensity’ tactics (it’s a different thing from full-on military tactics, but similar to what a small squad or group of SWAT officers would use). I’ve done force-on-force training, using ‘Simunitions’ against other people who were trying to shoot me, and training with live ammunition against targets in tactical environments (inside buildings designed for the purpose).

I say this because it is important to realize just how risky it is for the average police officer to walk into a house with one hostage-taker – a house in the middle of a peaceful suburb here in the U.S. There is a reason why the ‘dynamic entry’ tactics – which are badly overused, as Instapundit notes – are designed the way they are. The kind of overwhelming force applied in a dynamic entry maximizes the odds that – even in the face of an armed and hostile opponent – deadly force will not have to be used, and if it is, that the good guys will all get to go home. It does this at a substantial cost – not every warrant served is worthy of it, the entry teams don’t always get the correct address, and sometimes just plain tragic and bad things happen when lots of adrenaline-charged people are running around with loaded guns.

I can only project how much riskier it would be – and how much more force I would want – to enter a large building in the middle of a hostile city in wartime with the intent of rescuing a hostage.

The notion that the U.S. forces ‘overdramatized’ the rescue by using flash-bang grenades, and relatively standard tactics for moving through a potentially hostile building is just absurd. As is the notion that we should have waited for her to be released, and not acted as promptly as possible once we had clear intelligence on her likely position.

Scheer and the hospital staff may see it as a bunch of ‘cowboys’ acting out with weapons, but – having shot more than a few friendly targets myself in the course of training – I’ll point to the quality of our troops with pride given the fact that the hospital staff is alive today to tell the tale.

Go watch Rashomon. Lots of overlapping stories are believable and have some element of truth.

But I’ll stand firmly behind the Pentagon in their choice of how to go collect her. The optimist in me hopes that the hospital staff’s story is true, and that they treated her as well as they claim. But it seems to me that any reasonable person can contain both ideas – that the hospital staff treated her as well as they could, and that, given the information and situation, the U.S. military was absolutely right to go in in force to collect her.

And if doing so was good P.R. can someone please explain why they shouldn’t have used it?