zenpundit.com

This strikes me as an exceedingly unwise media strategy for General McChrystal:

(AP)  WASHINGTON (AP) – The top U.S. war commander in Afghanistan told an interviewer he felt betrayed by the man the White House chose to be his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.An article out this week in “Rolling Stone” magazine depicts Gen. Stanley McChrystal as a lone wolf on the outs with many important figures in the Obama administration and unable to convince even some of his own soldiers that his strategy can win the war.A band of McChrystal’s profane, irreverent aides are quoted mocking Vice President Joe Biden and Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.McChrystal himself is described by an aide as “disappointed” in his first Oval Office meeting with an unprepared President Barack Obama. The article says that although McChrystal voted for Obama, the two failed to connect from the start. Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops.“I found that time painful,” McChrystal said in the article, on newsstands Friday. “I was selling an unsellable position.”Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House’s troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.

The profile, titled “The Runaway General” emerged from several weeks of interviews and travel with McChrystal’s tight circle of aides this spring….

Jesus.

If this story sounds eerily familiar, it is.

The general has a reputation as a straight shooter and a workaholic commander who is 100 % committed to his mission. Anyone even casually paying attention to Afghanistan is aware of the strain between McChrystal’s HQ and the US Embassy in Kabul under Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, himself a retired lieutenant general with tours of duty in Afghanistan in charge of state and military building programs. The leaking of a confidential cable from the Ambassaador that was extremely critical of US strategy under McChrystal most likely poisoned their relationship for good ( though the leak could easily have been from State Department, White House or NSC officials eager to engage in slimy intrigue and ingratiate themselves with the MSM, rather than from the Embassy itself).

I also agree that the timetable and resources that McChrystal must labor under have been deliberately mismatched to the strategic objectives by the Obama administration to a degree best described as “asinine”.

That said, frustrated, straight shooting, honest to a fault and zealous Army commanding generals should not be encouraged to vent their grievances on the record to reporters. Especially about their civilian political superiors. Good things are not going to happen.

Still less should their intensely loyal inner circle and brain trust staff officers come across as “A band of McChrystal’s profane, irreverent aides ” mocking the Vice-President of the United States. While there’s no shortage of things to mock about Joe Biden, active-duty military officers should not be doing it in major media publications. These are the guys who should be running interference for their boss with the press, not making him look worse.

I have sympathy for General McChrystal. There are people in DC who do not have to be accountable as he does, but possess enough authority to get in his way, demand information, waste his people’s time, leak criticism, impose restrictions or whisper in ears and they do not have to accept any responsibility whatsoever for the results of their machinations. It must be intensely aggravating.

But going out and handing these folks knives ain’t smart.

ADDENDUM:

Danger Room reports McChrystal has issued an apology.

ADDENDUM II.

SWJ has a round-up.

ADDENDUM III.

Rolling Stone – The Runaway General

ADDENDUM IV.

Tom Barnett says this interview is not like what Admiral Fallon did

ADDENDUM V.

Dr. James Joyner is reporting this morning that General McChrystal is out after his meeting with President Obama.

Broadening the discussion on the state of blogging begun by Dr. James Joyner and Dr. Bernard Finel, blogfriend Cheryl Rofer at Phronesisaical delves into the stratification and attribution issues that have been wrought in the blogosphere by the MSM:

A Sketch of a Post on Blogging

….Once upon a time, the blogosphere was a sort of talent night, a talent 24/7, with entertainment for all. Much of that is still there, but some of the talent has gone pro; Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias and others have joined the MSM or think tanks and link only to each other. Some days there is almost a perfect linking circle of Drum quoting Klein quoting Yglesias quoting Drum. Drum got linked from The Economist blog the other day, moving up one more notch. Stratification. The MSM, meanwhile, still doesn’t understand the idea of hyperlinks but provides something they call blogs at their sites. Some of these are actually blogs, like Ezra Klein’s at the WaPo. Some are more like newspaper columns with more depth or specialization, like Olivia Judson’s at the NYT. Some are sui generis, like the Gail and David show at the NYT. Others are clearly from reporters who have been told that they will produce a blog, probably not much more instruction provided.And then there’s the problem of the MSM simply stealing bloggers’ material (or those somewhere below them on the food chain) and not crediting it. I’ve seen this pretty unambiguously many times over the almost six years I’ve been blogging. And then there are situations where it’s not quite clear that material has been cribbed, but someone in the MSM says something that looks an awful lot like something I read days before in a blog. As a blogger friend said, “I think they call it research.” Or they don’t take it seriously enough. Today someone on The Oil Drum asked if the MSM was reading their threads, which have much more good information than anything I’ve seen on the BP Blowout in the MSM. Of course, it’s mixed, and there are some just plain dumb comments, but hey! that’s what the reporters get the big bucks to filter, right?

Read the rest here. 

Cheryl brings up a number of points about blogging from an information ecology standpoint I had not really considered when I reacted to Bernard’s post. I’ve noticed ideas or arguments that have been “liberated” from blogs I read in the media with some frequency in recent years and I think I first noticed a MSM outlet cribbing a paragraph, almost verbatim from me circa 2006. At the time, I laughed, but Cheryl’s considered point that attribution is important is not something peculair to the blogosphere – it’s actually the traditional standard for scholarship and journalism. Bloggers, reporters, academics, government officials – anyone writing in the public sphere – should hew to it.

When in doubt, adding the little quotation marks, a link or a hat tip is still the best course of action – it saves headaches down the road.

ADDENDUM:

Peter weighs in at The Strategist.

Blogfriend Karaka has a review of WAR by Sebastian Junger up at SWJ Blog today:

Junger’s War , Review by Karaka Pend

….Part of the purpose of Junger’s exercise is to engage as fully in the experience of being at Restrepo, of living with the men of Battle Company, as he can given the constraints of his embed. He mostly succeeds in that, in part because he let himself get swept up in the life-and-death fraternitas of it all, and perhaps more importantly because Battle Company allowed him to become a part of their brotherhood. It would have be a rather different story had he not won his way into the human terrain of that mountaintop.

….Throughout, Junger’s soldiers describe combat, describe firefight, as an addiction or a high; and perhaps that is the only real framework in which their longing for conflict or engagement with the enemy can be understood. If there is no greater high than when you are protecting your brother, how do you return to a world where you need not always watch your brother’s back?

ADDENDUM:

Video interview of Sebastian Junger by NRO.  Hat tip to Lexington Green.

From the Strategy Conference…..

This strikes me as an exceedingly bad idea from Google:

From Drudge:

GOOGLE FRANKENSTEIN: MACHINES TO CHOOSE YOUR NEWS
Mon Apr 12 2010 08:15:34 ET

GOOGLE CEO and Obama political activist Eric Schmidt declared this weekend that his machines will help decide what news you receive!

News sites should use technology to PREDICT what a user wants to read by what they have already read, Schmidt told the AMERICAN SOCIETY OF NEWS EDITORS, where a few humans still remained in the audience.

“We’re all in this together.”

MORE

Schmidt said he doesn’t want ‘to be treated as a stranger’ when reading online, POLITICO reports.

He envisions a future where technology for news editing could help tailor advertisements for individual readers.

And he wants to be challenged through technology that ‘directs readers’ to a story with an ‘opposing’ view.

[An odd suggestion from the CEO of a company long accused of offering little to no conservative-leaning links on its news page, while aggressively promoting left-leaning hubs.]

Schmidt said GOOGLE is working on new ways to push adverts and content for consumers, based on what stories they’ve read.

What stories his machines have selected.

Developing…

If this no-choice “opposing view” meme sounds familiar, that’s because a prominent friend and appointee of President Obama, former U. of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, has, for several years, articulated a sophisticated  theory on the need for government to regulate speech, “reformulate” the 1st Amendment to ensure greater “diversity” and compel the presentation of “opposing views”. While I share Sunstein’s concern that many people are deliberately corrupting their OODA Loops by only reading sources with which they already agree, forcing legal adults to read something else isn’t the answer. It’s a free country and with liberty comes the right to be left to wallow in ignorance in peace.

Getting the Congress and states to turn the free speech and free press clauses on their head is a task with small chance of political success. Persuading or pressuring a small number of friendly CEO’s of search engine companies to optimize their own systems to produce politically favorable results for the administration and the Democratic Party is a lot easier, far less transparent to the public and more difficult for the GOP and conservatives (or for that matter, dissident progressives and unpopular minorities) to combat.

To put it simply, the long term strategy here is that the information aggregators – Google being the 800lb gorilla – will become the new “gatekeepers” with their finger on the scales that determine the page rank of opposing views on controversial issues.

I feared that Google might be tempted to go down this road when they first became entangled with the Chinese government in a way that compromised the integrity of their search engine. At the time I asked:

” If you have agreed to censor what information can be accessed in China in return for greater market opportunities, have you also agreed to censor what information can be accessed about China by the rest of us ?”

As far as I am aware, that question has never been answered, though I think the answer has bearing on American national security and our domestic tranquility. The temptation to use the enormous informational power of Google to deliberately shape public discourse and cultural evolution to “manufacture consent” for policies favored by the elite without the commoners being aware of the manipulation, appears to be very difficult to resist.

I like Google. The company has provided a truly amazing array of informational services that – and I do not think this is an exaggeration – have added real and significant value to civilization. But part of that value comes from Google being regarded universally as an “honest broker” of information. Their CEO’s proposal jeopardizes that trust and once credibility is lost, it is gone for good.

The odd thing is, that this proposal is a really poor business strategy for Google – unless the objective is to create paranoia and drive a large segment of the population to use rival search engines or create new ones free of elite political gamesmanship.