Death of a Nemesis

I’m going to miss the newspapers. Except for one year in Vietnam when it was not possible, I have subscribed to a daily newspaper without break since I was seventeen. One of my most vivid memories from plebe year at West Point was the first snow storm. My duty was to go out to the sally port before breakfast and fetch the papers. They were there, so was I. Drifts were four feet deep. The wind howled. I had ice in my nose and ears. For an Alabama boy it was painful but no discomfort was more important than getting those newspapers. I never considered any alternative. There was none.

It was a part of our curriculum to subscribe to a different paper each year; one year it was the Herald Tribune, the next the Journal American, then the New York Times. That’s only three. I don’t remember the fourth. Only the New York Times survived the sixties. I’m not sure how much longer even the Gray Lady will be around.

Newspapers once ruled the world. When we came to North Texas there were two major papers here. The Dallas Times Herald came in the afternoon, and of course there was the Dallas Morning News. We subscribed to them both. They each had their star reporters, and their columnists. It didn’t last long. I suppose TV news got to the Times Herald first. I don’t remember the exact sequence but as best I recall the two papers began combining their production facilities, then their news rooms, and finally the Times Herald was no more. Now I see where the DMN and the Ft. Worth Star Telegram will begin sharing sports coverage. One will follow the Mavericks and Stars, the other the Rangers. For now they will both continue to cover the Cowboys. I wonder for how long. Of my five adult children, only one subscribes to a daily paper. I think we have established a trend.

When I was eleven my dad got sick and was bed ridden for a year. I had never heard of the New York Times but he subscribed to it and read every page. I didn’t understand that at the time but to this day before I get on an airplane I buy a copy and, like my dad, I read every page. And I love to complain about it. The NYT is the epitome of the Main Stream Media. AAAGHH! They don’t report the news, they spin it. When the facts on the ground don’t fit their agenda they report selectively. At last resort they manufacture the news. AAAGHH!

But what’s the alternative? On my second tour in Vietnam I got the Stars and Stripes, not a bad paper but trust me, the NYT is better. So is the DMN, or any major paper for that matter. It pains me to see them in decline. The Detroit Free Press recently announced they will suspend home delivery for all but three days each week. Ouch! I don’t go to Detroit that often but what will I read when I do? USA Today? How long will they last? They don’t even publish a Sunday paper. I’m not about to begin watching the morning TV programs. Internet news is good as far as it goes but I don’t see it replacing my newspaper.

Maybe the newspapers and I are dinosaurs. Maybe a million years from now some three fingered freak of an anthropologist will dig up my grave and wonder what on earth that unwieldy piece of papyrus is that I seem to be scowling at. Whatever it thinks I will have gotten the better of it. I will have enjoyed Dagwood and Blondie and the daily crossword. I will have noticed my friends’ obituaries and gone to their funerals. Most of all I will have enjoyed railing about the Dallas Morning News editorial board. I just hope they last longer than I do.

Some Folks Never Learn

A Dallas Morning News editorial today includes a remark that the relative calm we are now seeing in Iraq “…reaffirms the wisdom that once in a hole, stop digging. The Bush administration finally pivoted with its surge strategy in 2007…” The comment is as gross a mischaracterization of what happened in Iraq over the last two years as it is graceless. The surge represented not a Bush pivot but a doubling down. Critics including the DMN saw it as a stubborn refusal to admit the war was lost. Fortunately Iraqis saw it as renewed commitment and it was they who pivoted. Sunnis turned on Al Qaeda and Shiites got their thuggish militias under control. It was a pivot all right, in a war many in the American media (and some political elites I’m sad to say) were shamelessly attempting to turn into a debacle.

The DMN advocated their own “plan B” that would have almost certainly have produced said debacle. It called essentially for pulling American troops back into their bases and watching the borders from the air while letting Iraqis slaughter each other to their hearts’ content. Joe Bidden, with his much touted foreign policy expertise, contended that Iraqi ethnic groups could never learn to live together and advocated an American imposed partition. That was a strategy that would have led to one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of last fifty years. Barack Obama just wanted out and damn the consequences. One can only imagine the boost in morale Muslim extremists would have gotten from that. That none of this happened is a tribute to Mr. Bush’s resolve. I suspect historians will judge him a bit more kindly than the DMN does.

It’s worth remembering what Iraqi insurgents were trying to accomplish. Al Qaeda saw an opportunity to defeat a super power, as Afghan Mujahideen had a generation earlier. They thought Americans would soon tire of the chaos and leave. A lesser man than George Bush might well have proved them right. Shiite militias were motivated by a combination of power, greed, and revenge. Calmer heads among them including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani eventually prevailed. Sistani is no friend of the United States but he never liked the idea of Muslims running around killing each other. With the surge and switched allegiances among Iraqis, improving security began to build on itself and make possible the political compromises that may ultimately produce the peaceful Iraq most of us would like to see. At this point that likely includes Messers Obama and Biden. They wouldn’t want to see things go south on their watch.

Much will be written about how all this came about but nobody is likely to study it more closely than the military. They need to get this right. There is one critical lesson to be learned. No foreign insurgency is likely to be defeated as long as countering it is perceived as a predominantly American operation. The turning point in Iraq came when Iraqis began taking responsibility for their own security. Americans can celebrate victory only when they can leave, and leave behind a stable government capable of maintaining order and defending itself. That was always the strategy. It’s been right there on the White House web site since November, 2005. The surge didn’t change that.

The same will be true in Afghanistan, although we’re going to need some serious cooperation from Pakistan. There are some encouraging signs. Pakistan seems to be taking things more seriously and Afghan insurgents are reverting to more primitive tactics as their casualties mount. The key remains however in an emerging Afghan security force. That’s one lesson we had better have learned.