SkaroffBlog

First, a word about the New York Times and their new $50 per year Times Select plan that puts the op-eds and other select features behind a subscription wall. How incredibly short-sighted and foolish of the Times. They’ve turned a blind eye to blogs and the huge impact that citizen journalism is having in pushing public opinion in favor of temporarily increased subscription revenue. Combine that with decreased advertising revenue and the sudden lack of a national voice that Murderer’s Row is faced with and it seems even more foolish. Admittedly I am no publisher or businessman, but I do know a bit about technology and to me Times Select is the paper burying its head in the sand for fear of the future. The Washington Post on the other hand has gone the exact opposite direction by partnering with Technorati to provide live blog links on news article pages. Go to any WashPo article and you’ll see a box labelled Who’s Blogging providing links to bloggers who have recently written about the article. In effect, live commentary on the news as it happens from anyone in the world. And that’s only the beginning of the incredible potential for integration that mainstream media sources could take advantage of along with the blogosphere.

With that off my chest, there are ways to still get to the Select content and today’s editorial by Tom Friedman is particularly enlightening. He offers a unique take on the quagmire in Iraq by claiming that it is not the intelligence failure on WMDs that will ultimately be seen as the Bush cabal’s downfall in Iraq, but rather their complete misunderstanding of the socioeconomic status of the country prior to invaasion:

But I think Saddam knew how busted and bankrupt his country and army were. Therefore, he never wanted to completely erase the impression that he had W.M.D. Saddam lived in a den of wolves. The hint of W.M.D. was his only deterrent shield left against his neighbors, his enemies at home and the West. (This was alluded to in the Duelfer W.M.D. report.) So he tried to allow just enough U.N. inspections to clear him on W.M.D., while playing just enough cat and mouse with the U.N. to leave the impression that he still had something dangerous in the closet.

The Bush team, and the C.I.A., not only failed to learn that Saddam had no W.M.D., they failed to appreciate how devastated Iraqi society really was. The Bush team, listening largely to exiles who had not lived in Iraq for years, thought that there were much more of an Iraqi middle class and more institutions than actually existed. So Mr. Bush thought taking over Iraq would be easy. That is the only way I can explain his behavior.

This intelligence failure about Iraqi society is what is killing us today. Because what really happened after the U.S. invasion is that what little Iraqi state existed just fell apart in our hands, like a broken vase. And then Rummy let the shards get looted.

Friedman has a tendency to create his own grand hypotheses and then treat them as fact, but this one rings true with me.

[UPDATE: Here's a link to the full version.]

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 10:43 am and is tagged as Blogostan, Bush, Iraq, Media, News, Politics, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.