“THE IDEA SOUNDS BETTER than it looks.”

THINGS LOOK TO BE RATHER UGLY IN ZIMBABWE this coming week. Slate has a useful roundup of coverage.

UPDATE: Now Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has been arrested.

KEVIN DRUM is to the right of me and even of Brian Linse on the question of FCC deregulation, which is sure to set some heads spinning.

On the other hand, I think I’d be far more comfortable with the FCC approach if Internet freedom were not under assault from Old Media, and if Michael Powell and the FCC were defending that Internet freedom in ways that they’re most definitely not.

DEREK LOWE IS SUSPICIOUS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ COVERAGE LATELY. Well, yeah. But his suspicions are a bit narrower than most:

Readers may have noticed that I’ve referred to several articles recently that have appeared in the New York Times. They usually do a reasonable job of covering the drug industry – not great, not awful. (I think that the Wall Street Journal pays more attention, and gets more details right.) But I’m starting to wonder if something is up.

The Times has a well-documented tendency for what the current editors call “flood the zone” coverage. Well, the last few weeks have seen a run of stories on the pharmaceutical business. They’ve been long, prominently placed, and rather unfriendly.

He’s got a lot of details. Lowe seems to wonder if the Times isn’t trying to set up an election-year issue. It’s bad news — but not surprising — that the Newspaper of Record inspires such suspicions so routinely now.

STEVE DEN BESTE WRITES ABOUT POSTWAR MALAISE in the blogosphere. I know what he means. In fact, as I said a while back, Kaus put it best:

You’re completely sick of the war — sick of watching cable, sick of reading the paper. The military campaign’s basically been won. The adrenalin is leaving your body. The overwhelming urge is to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to normal life, only more so: normal life minus current events. Yet this is just the moment when it’s probably most important to pay attention to what is going on in the Middle East, because these are the weeks when we will or won’t make the mistakes that will cost us the benefit of all the sacrifice of life and treasure.

That’s why I didn’t take a vacation like Andrew Sullivan, or Bill Quick. (Or, sadly, like Nick Denton). But it’s been a struggle. It’s been made worse by the difficulty of getting a big picture. Yeah, there are lots of media reports suggesting that things aren’t going that well. But they’re mostly from people who were declaring the war a quagmire after 15 minutes, and who peddled the bogus looting stories. Others are from more credible sources, but even those are hard to place in perspective. Europe and Japan looked pretty crappy for quite a while after World War II — ordinary people were putting food on the table via prostitution for quite some time after the war, something now largely forgotten except for vague jokes about nylons and chocolate bars. Things aren’t nearly that bad in Iraq. And in some places they’re quite a bit better. We also faced efforts at subversion by the Russians in Japan and Germany that were far more serious than anything we’re likely to face in Iraq, which is smaller and has — I think — actually got more U.S. troops occupying it per-capita than Japan had in 1946. (I haven’t checked this, but a usually reliable reader emails that fact.)

My waitress at dinner was a Kurd, who reported that relatives in Northern Iraq (she hadn’t been back for a couple of years) say that things are much better since Saddam’s fall. Mark Steyn reports that things look pretty good to him. Phil Carter, meanwhile, is less positive: he has argued pretty persuasively that we had enough troops to win the war, but not enough for the occupation. (He also thinks we’ll see Al Qaeda attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.)

But as Salam Pax says,

Everyone expected a civil war, but now that’s not happening. Actually, the situation is much better than we imagined before the war… People who before the war sold tomatoes now suddenly offer satellite phones on the open street…

And, actually, even this is probably good news:

One thing is sure: No one is relying on the Americans. No one expects
that they will do anything for us.

Low expectations are better than too-high ones, and self-reliance is better than dependence. I think that this has been a deliberate strategy in the occupation, though we may have overplayed it. On the other hand, Baghdad has free Internet now, via self-help. That’s a good sign, I think. But a too-disengaged approach is likely to breed more resentment than an overbearing one, actually. As Osama says, people (especially Arab people) tend to want to back a strong horse. So it’s important to look strong.

On the broader scale, things look pretty good. We had anti-Al Qaeda demonstrations in Morocco, and Syria seems to be feeling the heat. There have been some signs of self-examination and skepticism toward fundamentalist Islamism even in Saudi Arabia, though the Saudis remain unimpressive on this front. The Iranian mullahs are nervous (though not nervous enough), and — though I remain skeptical — there are some things that could be interpreted as progress with regard to Israel and the Palestinians, though I doubt it will be possible to achieve peace there as long as Arafat is alive. And, over all, Al Qaeda has faced many, many arrests, and we’ve gone over 18 months without a significant Islamic terrorist attack in the United States.

That’s all pretty good news, and far better than we feared in September of 2001. In fact, the big news so far is that things are a lot better than we feared in September 2001.

I certainly agree with Paul Wolfowitz that:

I think the two most important things next are the two most obvious. One is getting post-Saddam Iraq right. Getting it right may take years, but setting the conditions for getting it right in the next six months. The next six months are going to be very important.

The other thing is trying to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

I think the two are connected. Getting things right in Iraq is very important, and it won’t happen overnight, and it won’t be obvious how things are going overnight. (It’s not obvious how things are going in Russia, and it’s been well over a decade since the end of the Soviet Union). I think it’s very important that we work at it, and I think it’s ironic that some of the people who were critics before the war saying “we’ll just put in a friendly dictator and leave” are now pushing arguments and criticisms that imply just such a course of action when the Administration is obviously committed to something more. We want a peaceful, free and prosperous Iraq. Claims that Arabs are somehow incapable of that sort of thing seem a bit dubious to me, especially when they come from people who call themselves “progressive” — and it’s especially unimpressive when those people say “Iraq is ungovernable” with ill-concealed glee at the prospect of what would be, in practice, a far bigger disaster for the Iraqi people than for George Bush. But they don’t care about the collateral damage if they can see Bush hurt.

As for the Palestinian problem, well, I tend to see that more as a symptom than as a disease — it’s a vehicle for Arab despots to use in distracting their citizens. But denying them that vehicle wouldn’t be such a bad thing. And getting rid of Saddam, both because it undermined Arab fantasies and because it deprived the suicide bombers of a very significant subsidy, can only help that.

So overall, I’d say that it’s too early to say how well things are going, but that things in general look pretty good. And though there are predictions of doom aplenty, it’s worth remembering that the doom-predictors have a pretty lousy record so far.

I think, though, that both Iraq and Israel are currently tests for the Arabs. If they can’t achieve a reasonable degree of peace and freedom here, if they sink back into theocracy and thuggery, then it’s going to be easy for the rest of the world to give up on them — as the “progressives” already have — and say “what can you expect from the wogs?” as it turns a blind eye to another generation of dictators’ brutality. I don’t want that, and I don’t think that the Iraqi people, or even the Palestinian people, really do.

But as I said before, and Roger Simon says now: “Patience, patience — now of all times.”

UPDATE: Dave Winer has a notably nasty post on this. It begins “Amazingly, Glenn Reynolds is still covering the war,” and then goes on to blast warbloggers. Um, you’d rather I ignored this, Dave? Or do you just not like the way I point out that “progressives” never gave a damn about the Iraqis, and still don’t? I think you’ve proved that, anyway. And probably provided an answer to Marduk’s question for war opponents:

Given the choice which would you prefer:

A. George Bush is proven correct. Peace in Iraq. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush re-elected.

B. George Bush is proven incorrect. No peace in Iraq. No peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush defeated.

The answer to that one is pathetically obvious. “Pheh” right back atcha, Dave.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s interesting to contrast the antiwar folks’ self-justifying kvetching with this rather thoughtful post from SgtStryker.com:

After the fireworks are over, people like me are sent out unto the world to do all the hard work in support of peacekeeping and all that mess. It doesn’t make for good TV like war does, but war sells. It’s got death, ‘splosions and all that other cool stuff people like to watch. Peacekeeping, on the other hand, isn’t exciting at all. It’s long, boring and never goes as fast as everyone wants it to. It’s kind of like construction. Those buildings they put up always seem to take forever to build and the work isn’t exactly glamorous. I-beam by I-beam, concrete block by concrete block, these buildings slowly rise from the remains of what was there before and begin to take shape. It’s done right out there in public so everyone walking by can give their take on the whole deal and criticise the design, the materials used or how things would go so much better if everyone just listened to them.

But at the end of the thing, the workers have a sense of accomplishing something solid that’ll remain for while. Everyone always gathers around and watches those dramatic building demolitions. The walls explode, the building collapses into a cloud of dust, people clap and then everyone heads off to the next big thing. It’s a brief, transitory moment of excitement, but that’s about it. Building stuff is a hell of a lot less glamorous then blowing it up, but at least you have something to point to years down the road when someone asks what the hell you were doing all that time. It’s kind of hard to point at nothing, no matter how dazzling its collapse may have been.

That’s what I’m writing about, Dave. Sorry it doesn’t interest you.

MORE TROUBLE AT THE TIMES: Reader Ali Karim Bey sends this:

A powerful committee formed at The New York Times to revisit the Jayson Blair reporting scandal and suggest changes in newsroom practices was jolted yesterday by the resignation of a key member.

Sources said Nancy Sharkey, an editor who works in staff development and training, quit because she was concerned the committee had become prosecutorial, sowing fear and confusion in the newsroom.

Called yesterday to answer questions from several other members of the panel and its outside consultants, she voiced a number of reservations before leaving the meeting. When word of her move circulated, she was said to have been congratulated by some Times staffers.

Meanwhile — in a rare, non-Krugman-related post — Donald Luskin notes that the Times’ rot has even reached the gardening reviews.

MORE SHADY JOURNALISM: Stephen F. Hayes says that Bill Moyers has some ‘splaining to do.

Continued Moyers: “According to the watchdog group Public Citizen, power companies pushing for the law’s repeal gave more than $15 million to federal candidates.”

But who will watch the watchdog? Public Citizen is a frequent recipient of Schumann grants: $42,000 in 1999 to “fund a full-time investigative reporter to research and write on the nexus between special interest political contributions and the outcome of major domestic policy debates.” Another $75,000 in 2000 for “the Public Citizen Congress Watch investigative research program.” A further $204,000 in 2001 for “general support of Public Citizen’s educational efforts.” In fact, from 1991 to 2001, the last year for which IRS records are available, Moyers’s Schumann Foundation gave Public Citizen a total of $411,000.

Seems like a one-sided deal, doesn’t it? Courtesy of Moyers, Public Citizen gets a lot of money and, courtesy of PBS, it gets publicity for its work. Not to worry. Public Citizen can scratch backs, too, noting on its website: “It is not often that we advertise for TV programs, but we’ll make an exception this time. Bill Moyers has done a documentary on PBS entitled: ‘Trading Democracy,'” which you can order from Public Citizen “for $29.95 (plus shipping).”

This seems a lot worse than a lot of things people have made a big fuss about. So why is Moyers getting a pass?

OBVIOUSLY, RUMSFELD FAILED TO SEND ENOUGH TROOPS TO KEEP ORDER:

Angry demonstrators erected burning barricades at dawn on a highway . . .and battled riot police who fired tear gas and water cannon . . .some protesters looted a gas station and a supermarket. . . . several hundred clashed with riot police and smashed windows. In the evening, police rushed a crowd after a few protesters smashed windows downtown. The demonstrators responded with a hail of bottles and rocks, and riot police fired tear gas.

Anarchy in the streets. Shameful.

A HIGH SCHOOLER’S INNOCUOUS BLOG ENTRY triggered a visit from local police who pretended to be with the FBI. Lame. Eric Muller notes that the officers may have been committing a felony, too.

I wonder if they’ll be prosecuted? Maybe some high-school students should show up and pretend to be from the Justice Department. . . .

UPDATE: Dang, I pasted the wrong link earlier. It’s fixed now.

SHOULD JUDGES DISOBEY PRECEDENT when they find it unconscionable? Howard Bashman has an oped on this topic in the L.A. Times.

PROTEST NOW — AVOID THE RUSH! Yesterday there was a lone protester in front of West Town mall, holding a hand-lettered sign that read Stay Out of Iran — Destabilize Yourself, Dubya.

Sadly, that’s typical: it’s always about Bush for these guys. And I say that as somebody who thinks that it probably is a mistake to take a too-aggressive line with Iran right now (though it’s not clear that we actually are). I’m no fan of the mullahs, but my general feeling is that less is probably more when it comes to U.S. destabilization efforts. At the moment, my sense is that the mullahocracy is probably ripe to fall from within (and judging by their actions, the mullahs think so too), and that if we push too hard it might actually slow things down. Plus, the example for the Islamic world would be much stronger if the revolution were perceived as indigenous, rather than a U.S. creation. I could be wrong about that, and I’d be interested in hearing both sides. But from the antiwar crew, it’s mostly about “Dubya.” Actual arguments are in, at the very best, second place.

MARK STEYN HAS BEEN IN IRAQ, and reports that things are actually going pretty well:

For most of the Iraq war and its immediate aftermath, it was easy for any relatively rational person to dismiss the media doom-mongering. Hundreds of thousands of dead civilians? Never gonna happen. Hand-to-hand street-fighting as Baghdad morphs into Stalingrad? Dream on. Even that Iraqi National Museum “disaster” was an obvious hoax, though I was sad to see my friends at The Spectator fall for it and add their own peculiar twist that it was all a conspiracy of a sinister US antiquities lobby.

But, when the naysayers started moving on to claim that the whole post-war scene was going disastrously for the Yanks, I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. As a general rule of thumb, when two non-government organisations, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, the BBC and the New York Times agree that the whole powder keg’s about to go up, it’s a safe bet that things are going swimmingly. But who knows? Even these guys have got to be right once a decade or so. So I decided to see for myself.

Unlike those parliamentary delegations getting ferried around by the military and Continental television crews embedded with convoys of NGOs, I have no contacts either in the Ministry of Defence or the World Food Programme. So I hopped on a flight to Jordan, rented some beat-up Nissan piece of junk in Amman and headed east. . . .

Although the camp had set up enough tents for hundreds, the members of this family were the only refugees in residence. The singular of that “IRAQI BOARDER” sign was a slight exaggeration, but not by much. And that underpopulated border camp is a fine motif for what’s going on: vast numbers of bureaucrats are running around Iraq with unlimited budgets in search of a human catastrophe that doesn’t exist.

“Had a lot of refugees?” I asked the Jordanian customs officer.

“We had about 10 through last week,” he said. “Palestinians.”

“Where were they headed? Amman?”

“No, he said. “They were going back to Iraq.”

Apparently, having fled across the Jordanian border to the UN facility near Ruweished, they concluded after a few days that the camp wasn’t quite up to snuff and decided to go back home. . . .

And perhaps that’s why I found rather more hostility towards the WFP, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees et al than towards the military. “Americans only in the sky,” one man told me, grinning as a chopper rumbled overhead. “No problem.” Down on the ground, meanwhile, the new imperial class are the NGOs. They shuttle across the globe, mingling with their own kind – other SUV users – and bringing with them the values of the mother country, or the mother bureaucracy. Like many imperialists, they’re well-meaning: they see their charges as helpless and dependent, which happy condition has the benefit of justifying an ever-growing aid bureaucracy in perpetuity. It will be very destructive for Iraq if the tentativeness of the American administration in Baghdad allows the ambulance-chasers of the NGOs to sink their fangs into the country. . . .

In Ramadi, in another cafe, the maitre d’, in honour of my presence, flipped the television over to BBC World. Some Beeb type was doing a piece about some Baghdadi who hadn’t been paid since March. Now what sort of fellow hasn’t been paid since March? A chap who worked for the toppled thug government perhaps? Might be a committed thug ideologue, might be just a go-along-to-get-along type. But, given that the new Iraqi government is never going to be as huge as the old one, maybe that chap should just stop whining to the BBC and look for a gig in the private sector. Ditto for the BBC reporter, come to that.

As usual, the piece wound up with the correspondent standing in the children’s ward of the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre predicting more doom and gloom. By contrast, every medical facility I went to in Iraq was well short of capacity. The NGO types concede that Iraqis aren’t exactly rushing the hospitals, but say that’s because they know that there are no drugs and/or they’re worried that they can’t afford them. Might be that. Or it might be that they don’t want to be stuck on a ward trying to get a moment’s sleep under the blazing lights of round-the-clock CNN and BBC camera crews filming their reporter yakking away in front of a telegenic moppet whose acute tonsillitis is somehow all Rumsfeld’s fault. These days, I always laugh my head off at BBC World reports. And, in that Ramadi cafe, I was touched to find that, even though most of them hadn’t a clue what he was going on about, within half a minute, the rest of the crowd was roaring along with me.

Read the whole thing, as they say. And maybe now that there’s free Internet access in Baghdad we’ll get some more firsthand reporting.

UPDATE: The link to the Steyn piece was bad earlier. It should work now.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz notes that if Steyn’s report is accurate, it’s better to be a store owner in Iraq after a war than to be a store owner in a European city after a G8 meeting.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus writes that Steyn’s story would be more convincing if he’d gone to Baghdad. On the other hand, I would find a lot of the gloom-and-doom reporting more convincing if it came from elsewhere than Baghdad. Iraq’s a big place, and what (small) reporting there has been out of cities like Kirkuk and Mosul is a lot more positive.

READER J. SCOTT HARRIS ASKS “DOESN’T ANYBODY FACT CHECK AT THE NYT ANYMORE?” AND FORWARDS THIS LINK to a story on gay Republicans, which says:

As president, Mr. Bush has appointed several openly gay people, including James C. Hormel, the ambassador to Romania, to high-level jobs, and he has also declined to overturn executive orders issued by President Bill Clinton that bar discrimination against gays in federal employment and security clearances.

(Emphasis added.) Actually, Bill Clinton, not Bush, appointed Hormel to be Ambassador to Luxembourg not Romania. Romania does have an openly gay ambassador appointed by President Bush, but his name is Michael Guest. Can the folks at the Times not conceive that there might be multiple gay ambassadors?

Whatever else it suggests, this certainly suggests that things haven’t tightened up at the Times just yet.

UPDATE: Oh, and then there’s this bit of editorial/advertising crossover in tomorrow’s NYT magazine, which suggests that there aren’t enough sharp eyes there, either.

ANOTHER UPDAATE: 58, 68, Carnegie, Century, it’s all the same to the Times according to Marcia Oddi.

LINDA SEEBACH HAS A GOOD COLUMN ON THE BLOGOSPHERE:

This is an entire virtual superorganism evolving in Internet time right before our eyes, based on an unfiltered free trade in ideas. Its participants are far more engaged than the average newspaper reader. . . .

And the blogosphere is not limited by geography. At www.buzzmachine.com Jeff Jarvis harps on the importance of nurturing Web logs in Iraq, Iran and other places where the means of free expression have been severely restricted.

Thankfully, she overstates the number of emails I get per day. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten 1,000, though at the beginning of the war I got more than half that. Now, though, things are back to normal.

MATT WELCH WRITES:

When O.J. Simpson was ruled not guilty of murdering his wife, the United States discovered overnight the chasm of difference in perception between blacks (who found the verdict reasonable) and whites (who found it insane).

Something similar is going on with the fabrication scandals that have rocked The New York Times this month. Elite reporters and editors are reacting to the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg revelations with sorrow and anxiety, while the rest of us proles revel in the spectacle of a haughty institution being humbled and mocked. . . .

Almost every newspaper that views the Times as a role model, on the other hand, is a local monopoly in a less liberal city. Chances are, it will equate success with such Timesian yardsticks as Pulitzer prizes, and (in the immortal words of Rick Bragg) the ability “to go get the dateline.”

All the more reason why the Times’ horrible month will be good for journalism — if it causes papers to reconsider their newsroom values and journalistic role models, old bad habits may receive a fresh round of scrutiny.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd writes:

So as the press now becomes Ouroboros, the beast that feeds on itself, you’ll pardon us if we crack open a Pabst, open a bag of Cheez-Waffles, and enjoy the spectacle. We feel like Christians getting to watch the Romans be fed to the lions.

Well, Pabst is the hip beer, nowadays.