Summary: I’ve written thousands of words about America’s broken Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop. Here we have examples of broken observation & orientation in action. These are the mechanisms that prevent us from seeing the world clearly, a precondition for acting effectively. The comment section is open for analysis of this problem. How did we come to this? How might we recovery our vision?
Contents
- Problem: too much civilian control of the military
- We’ve learned nothing from our failed wars
- The GOP exploits the gullibility of its followers
- Evil Iran might reply to our attacks
- Conservatives supply the lies, the US government will supply the war
- The instinctive response of a US courtier to ugly facts
- For More Information
I intended to label each section, describing the specific method used to deceive or channel our thinking. But I left that pleasure for you, the readers.
Bonus question: should I have broken this post up into individual, shorter posts? If so, how many?
The image is embroidery on muslin with acrylica from Jafabrit’s Art.
(1) Problem: too much civilian control of the military
“Why civilian military secretaries are no longer needed“, Harold rBown (Carter’s SecDef), op-ed in Washington Post, 18 October 2012 — Brown describes how the uniformed service chiefs have grown in power, now largely superseding the civilian service secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force — who have become “redundant appendages” who are ” little more than a mouthpiece” for the military. So civilian control has atrophied. Solution: abolish the civilian secretaries! We’ll save money, and slide even faster towards our new political regime.
Brown was the SecDef of that radical leftist Carter, nicely showing the range of political opinion among America’s elites. For more about this see:
(2) We’ve learned nothing from our failed wars
“Afghanistan: Why America’s Longest War is NOT a Campaign Issue“, Robert Dreyfuss, The Diplomat, 19 October 2012 — Sound analysis by a smart guy, but he operates within the bubble of America’s elites — as seen in his conclusions.
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… neither candidate should be expected to answer {at the debates} the hard questions left over from America’s longest war.
Those questions include both tactical and strategic ones. The tactical ones are: Since the United States is leaving, what are your thoughts about how to assemble a rebalanced Afghan government that includes all elements of society, including the insurgents? What can we do about Pakistan, which continues to harbor, support and encourage the Taliban and its allies, including the Haqqani group and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s organization? And what steps will you take to bring Russia, China and Iran to an agreement with the United States and Pakistan to reduce political conflict among their allies in Afghanistan?
The strategic ones, however, are more troubling: What have we learned about America’s ability to engage in counterinsurgency and nation-building in countries like Afghanistan? What does America’s failure in Afghanistan say about its ability to take action in countries as diverse as Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Syria, and Iran? If you claim that the US is “exceptional,” and that American “exceptionalism” still prevails, are you deterred by our exceptional failure in 12 years of war in Afghanistan?
I would like to learn more about Dreyfuss’ answers to his strategic questions, but the phasing of his tactical questions suggests he retains the imperial world-view. The US should “assemble” the Afghanistan government. The US should “bring Russia, China and Iran to an agreement with” us “to reduce political conflict in Afghanistan. America is the decided, the leader, the prime actor. Others must follow and conform. This is the essential element in our failures since 2000.
(3) The GOP exploits the gullibility of its followers
It worked before; eventually they’ll make this is a standard technique: “How to Make the Administration Sound Like It Lied About Libya: Edit the Tape!“, David Weigel, Slate, 18 October 2012
Conservatives have started sending me links to the newest of American Crossroads’ long web videos, arguing that it provides proof that contradicts my piece about Obama and Libya: That there’s no video of Obama denying that terrorists attacked in Benghazi. Readers, I have to ask you to brace yourselves: The video is at least partly bogus. Watch it below, and notice the exchange between U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and David Gregory. … {He compares the video with the actual transcript}
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(4) Evil Iran might reply to our attacks
Washington Times, one of American’s foremost distributors of right-wing propaganda: “Iran may hit U.S. with first cyberattack“, 17 October 2012. A skillful concoction, portraying a small, surrounded, low-tech nation as a cyber-threat to the largest, most technically advanced nation in the world — one that spends roughly the on defense and intelligence as the rest of the world combined. One gets to the end of the article before seeing this:
From the Iranians’ point of view, however, attacks against the United States may be justified because they have been hit hard by American sanctions leveled on their country because of its suspected nuclear weapons program. Iran also believes that the United States and Israel were behind the Stuxnet cyberattack that forced the temporary shutdown of thousands of centrifuges at a nuclear facility there in 2010.
This is astonishingly false on many levels. First, the US has in effect admitted involvement in the Stuxnet attack on Iran. Second, this ignores the campaign of assassination and sabotage conducted against Iran. But the WT’s owners presumably know that their readers want to be lied to, so these methods bring both commercial and ideological success.
(5) Conservatives supply the lies, the US government will supply the war
Another engine of right-wing propaganda: “Report: Iran Sanctions Have Failed“, The Washington Free Beacon, 18 October 2012 — Opening:
Economic sanctions on Iran have failed in their “principal objective” of preventing Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, according to a nonpartisan study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
Compare with what the report actually says. “Iran Sanctions“, Kenneth Katzman (Specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs), Congressional Research Service, 15 October 2012 — Opening:
The principal objective of international sanctions—to compel Iran to verifiably confine its nuclear program to purely peaceful uses—has not been achieved to date. However, a broad international coalition has imposed progressively strict economic sanctions on Iran’s oil export lifeline, producing increasingly severe effects on Iran’s economy. Many judge that Iran might soon decide it needs a nuclear compromise to produce an easing of sanctions … sanctions may be slowing Iran’s nuclear program somewhat by preventing Iran from obtaining some needed technology from foreign sources.
The Beacon’s headline is especially nuts because the latest round of sanctions were signed by Obama on 10 August 2012. They took time to implement, and are just now having severe effects on Iran. But although false, the Beacon knows its audience, which demands lies that feed their preconceptions (this also drives the flood of conservative email chains, a large fraction of which are bogus).
(6) The instinctive response of a US courtier to ugly facts
A typically powerful, fact-rich article by Glenn Greenwald: “US justice likely coming soon to Benghazi with extrajudicial executions“, Guardian,19 October 2012 — “If the Obama administration identifies suspects in the consulate attack, should they simply be killed without a trial?”
The instinctive, immediate response of Michael Cohen (New America Foundation; bio here):
He’s a courtier to our power elites, and a skillful, smart one (IMO, one of the best of the younger members in that potentially lucrative service). As such he automatically knows what worldviews are acceptable — what facts can be seen — and still remain respectable. His automatic reply is not to dispute Greenwald’s facts, reasoning, or values — but to deny. A courtier to US elites must master crimestop — the refusal to see heterodox ideas, or even discuss thoughtcrime. From Orwell’s 1984:
The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. .. not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted {Party dogma).
(7) For More Information
For all posts about this see the FM Reference Page Information & disinformation, the new media & the old.
About the mainstream media
- A time-saving tip when reading the daily news, 2 January 2008
- Only our amnesia makes reading the newspapers bearable, 30 April 2008
- “Elegy for a rubber stamp”, by Lewis Lapham, 26 August 2008
- “The Death of Deep Throat and the Crisis of Journalism”, 23 December 2008
- The media doing what it does best these days, feeding us disinformation, 18 February 2009 — About sea ice
- The media rolls over and plays dead for Obama, as it does for all new Presidents, 19 February 2009
- The magic of the mainstream media changes even the plainest words into face powder, 24 April 2009
- The media – a broken component of America’s machinery to observe and understand the world, 2 June 2009
- We’re ignorant about the world because we rely on our media for information, 3 June 2009
- Are we blind, or just incurious about important news?, 6 July 2009
- We know nothing because we read newspapers, 12 October 2009 – About mythical numbers
- Journalists, relying on anonymous government sources, attack anonymous bloggers who correct journalists’ errors, 25 July 2010
- The Raymond Davis incident shows that we’re often ignorant because we rely on the US news media. There is a solution., 18 February 2011
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