ground rule question: should we come to some kind of consensus about what this thing "civil war" is?
the first article that stevo posted above appears to be from one of those reporters whose politics, embedded/in bed with status combine in this piece with very narrow data and time frames to obviate what he might have to sayabout general matters---the equivalent of his viewpoint would be a story from celine set during world war 1---cant remember the book--two guys from opposing sides run into each other on a country road. should they shoot at each other or not?
it turns out that they dont.
the peters logic would be to reproduce this story in detail and to conclude from it that there is no war.
i dont see why anyone would find this compelling.
besides, the guy is a hardline conservative: look at this
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=14321
enough said.
at this point, there are two ways that could be taken: the one would be to simply dismiss the article, not because the details it provides are wrong or uninteresting--i may find them to be both, but that's just me, i guess.
what seems more potentially constructive is to ask whether the article in any meaningful way addresses the question of whether there is or is not a civil war. it seems to me pretty obvious that the question is one of a longer time-frame and not of isolated incidents--you could dissolve any war by focussing on a few guys wandering around doing stuff--the problems is a basic mistake of interpretation rooted in an inadequate understanding of the analytic object--if this piece is even about the possibility of civil war, it surely makes no interesting case.
but what kind of piece could make an interesting case---what are the criteria for evaluating whether an article is or is not addressing whether there is or is not a civil war?
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the other piece is from one of those fine fellows at the hoover institution whose entire piece seems to be rooted in pentagon press releases and/or events as processed from a chair in palo alto. from the chair in palo alto, he presumes to know what iraqis do and do not want--as if they are of a single mind...
but who knows, maybe he is on a junket to iraq and actually talked to folk, toured some american military installations and attended some press pool meetings--the results, in this case, are functionally the same.
in it, you get problematic assertions--which are nothing more than that--first about the nature and activities of the "iraqi security forces"--which are not accompanied with even the slightest piece of analysis---none whatsoever---hanson merely repeats numbers of patrols as if that functioned as a clear index of anything--particularly given the information posted earlier about the problems with this force.
he argues that the americans are not in a position to be militarily defeated by the insurgency--which he refers to in the singular, for some reason. maybe he is right--assuming that what he understands by military defeat would be a more or less conventional war-type scenario in whcih the firepower of the americans would become determinant. but that scenario has been irrelevant from the first 3 days of this farce in iraq, and i suspect that even mr. hansen knows that, really. i am sure that conservative french journalists were saying the same thing about the maginot line in 1937 too.
he didnt speak to anyone from "the insurgency."
which--again---he seems to assume that it is one thing.
at this point, such assertions are preposterous. but whatever, the guy is from hoover and so one can expect little in the way of informed conceptual work--lots of emphasis on details, none at all on how they connect together or to larger arguments.
but hey, why bother with that when the press pool briefings provide arguments readymade?
anyway, it is obvious from reading the piece that he knows nothing about what is happening amongst iraqis.
he heard bombs.
i dont see anything even remotely compelling in his analysis.
what he does do--and this is the point at whcih i object to this piece even being posted--is to repeat the linkage between support of bushwar and the attempt to erase the possiblty of civil war, as if the two went together. this is the same argument that aceventura was running out earlier--though in his case, i still am not sure that it was intentional--but here it is. so to repeat: i find that linkage to be intellectual worthless. i dont see how anyone could possibly imagine that it leaves any room for actual thinking about what is happening in iraq right now--hanson wants to reduce the matter to the a priori. he supported the bushwar, so there is no civil war. there is no real need for any of the pretense of being in iraq--or, if he is there, any need for the infotainment that litters this article--he decided the answer to the question up front, and his article is geared toward conservatives who would tend to think in the same way.
it seems to me that we--if there is a we on this---need more, better and more complex information--not more one-dimensional political hack pieces that require the needless expenditure of time to dismantle.