Bloggasm

Earlier this year, The New Republic published first-person accounts from an anonymous U.S. soldier in Iraq. The articles recounted gruesome — often crude — behavior from American service members, including the brutal killing of dogs and one instance of soldiers openly mocking a disfigured girl.

In July, a few media outlets — The Weekly Standard chief among them — began to doubt the veracity of the anonymous soldier’s claims. Editors from The New Republic, including Franklin Foer, initiated an aggressive investigation to test the accuracy of the stories. After several conservative bloggers raised doubts of the anonymous soldier’s existence, TNR managed to convince him to come out in the open, and he revealed himself to be Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a private in the United States Army and a member of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division.

After several months of investigating, TNR published a 14-page article detailing their findings. Many within the conservative blogosphere claimed immediately afterwards that the article admitted that Beauchamp had lied. “The maxi-mea culpa runs more than 10 pages and thousands and thousands of words (self-pitying, rationalizing, messenger-blaming),” wrote conservative Michelle Malkin, “but this is the belated bottom line: The Beauchamp stories are bullcrap.”

But is the article an admission of untruth? After reading it in its entirety, I can conclude that it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, Foer managed to find several soldiers to corroborate Beauchamp’s claims, and the editors only really unearthed one definite factual error.

This is not to say that all their questions were answered; there are several mysteries surrounding the soldier’s claims. But this is not because of TNR or Beauchamp — rather it’s the obfuscation by the U.S. Army that blocked the editors from fully investigating the articles.

While TNR tried continuously to get access to Beauchamp and others who could speak authoritatively on his situation, officials from the Army, many under the cloak of anonymity, began to leak carefully-selected information to highly partisan bloggers in order to smear the soldier’s character. The most notorious incidence of this was when excerpts of an interview transcript between TNR and Beauchamp were leaked to Matt Drudge. It was a very deliberate attempt to undermine the magazine’s investigation while at the same time defaming the soldier’s character.

Many bloggers — typically on the right — have accused TNR from stonewalling the public and not issuing an immediate retraction. But after reading that 14-page document, I can only wonder: “What choice did they have?” How can you release an immediate retraction if you have to go a full month just to speak to the writer in question? By pointing out how long it took TNR to publish this article from the time they were first alerted to the problem without at least acknowledging the magazine’s lack of access to information is engaging in intellectual dishonesty.

Did The New Republic make horrible editorial decisions in this matter? With the revelation that the person assigned to fact check Beauchamp’s work was his own wife, there’s no doubt in my mind that their was some shoddy journalism. But because of the questionable media tactics of the U.S. Army and the highly-partisan echo chamber of those rooting for TNR to be proven wrong, we may never know to what extent.

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SLIGHTLY RELATED: Compare TNR’s attempts to aggressively investigate Beauchamp’s articles to the terrible journalism practices of The National Review when they published outright falsehoods and then refused to investigate them after it was pointed out.

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Dean Esmay is a democracy and human rights advocate who lives near Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a freelance writer and editor, and one of the internet’s most popular webloggers. He is a senior contributor to Pajamas Media. He is a board member and co-founder of Operation Give, a charity that does major works helping distribute medical supplies and toys to children in Iraq. He is a graduate of Colorado Technical University, a husband and a father.

He is also a blogger for Dean’s World.

Simon Owens: One of the hotbed issues dealing with Middle Eastern terrorism has to do with access to weapons, and as you indicate in your post “Reports: Yemen Arming Somalia Again,” we are having a hard time with this particular problem. How do you think our US military should go about solving it?

Dean Esmay: The international arms trade is much like the international drug trade, and there is very little the U.S. military can do about either one. The State Department can apply pressure to government regimes that are irresponsible in the arms trade, such as Yemen. The U.S. military can find and destroy weapons caches in areas it controls, such as Iraq, but otherwise this is a matter of diplomacy and international finance, not military action.

Simon Owens: As a follow up question, do you think that the best way to fight terrorism is to cut off their weapons resources?

Dean Esmay: No. This is like saying that the best way to fight drug abuse is to cut off access to drugs to the drug dealers. No, the best way to fight terrorism is to help promote democracy, promote human freedom, and to put pressure on those government regimes which coopoerate with terrorist networks (all of which are non-democratic states, I might add).

Simon Owens: Do you tend to blog about whatever issue is the most talked-about at the time of posting, or do you like to search for the overlooked stories that nobody has noticed yet?

Dean Esmay: More the latter than the former. Obviously some stories are so big you can’t help but remark upon them, but we usually try to avoid the mad rush of the 24 hour news cycle.

Simon Owens: How do you go about finding the articles you link to in your blog? Do you find them from other blogs, or are there particular news services you monitor?

Dean Esmay: I get a ton of links mailed to me every day. I’d say about a quarter of my links come from that. I also enjoy randomly browsing the blogs from my blogroll, looking for something interesting. And yes, I scan a few different internet news services periodically.

Simon Owens: Do you think that as each election cycle comes around, political blogs gain more and more influence over the political process?

Dean Esmay: Yes. And they’re alread more important than most people think. But not in the way some bloggers would like to think. It’s not that so many people read political blogs, or that a majority of voters will ever read them. That’s not what makes blogs important. Ditto the impact of blogs as a fundraising tool, which can be significant but will never replace traditional fundraising channels.

What’s most important and powerful in politics is ideas. In the past, most political ideas were nurtured in the pages of political journals like The Nation, The New Republic, The National Review, and other such publications. Those journals at their height never had more than 100,000 readers, usually less. But they were read by decision makers, political figures, academics, an so on, and were enormously influential on the nation in ways that many people even today are unaware of. And I see political blogs as the modern equivalent of that. To the extent that they discuss ideas, they have a cumulaitive long-term impact that’s difficult to measure, but it’s large and it’s growing.

There are people in the White House whose job it is to monitor political blogs. What does that tell you, even if you don’t read blogs yourself?

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own blog?

Dean Esmay: My wife Rosemary’s blog, The Queen of All Evil. She’s far more conservative than I am, and daily rides into battle with the lefties of The Daily Kos, Eschaton, and other far-left blogs. She’s always fun, too.

Trudy Schuett’s Desert Light Journal, covering issues of domestic violence and gender issues from a perspective that’s too rarely seen in the mainstream media.

Michael Demmons’ Gay Orbit. A GLBT community blog with an attitude and a perspective you don’t see much in traditional sources. Plus very funny.

Austin Bay. International relations and military analysis from a fine mind and a terrific writer.

Mohammed and Omar’s Iraq The Model. Whenever I really want to know what’s going on in Baghda, they tell me.

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Greg Burch is a genuine polymath. He got an undergraduate degree in Chinese language and area studies from the University of Washington in 1979. The highlight of his time at UW was being part of the first official study tour to China at the time the United States established diplomatic relations with the PRC. After that, he spent five years working in the ocean shipping business and, as he says at his website, “bumming around here and there on my motorcycle.” He then went to the University of Texas School of Law where he was near the top of his graduating class in 1987. Since then he’s worked for the law firm of Locke Liddell & Sapp LLP, where he’s been a partner for 13 years and is the head of the firm’s China practice and the Houston office construction law group. Of his law practice, he says “It used to be all about white men fighting over money — it’s not all white men any more, but it’s still all about money.”

Greg Burch was, with Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, one of the original authors of the Forsight Institute’s Guidelines for Responsible Development of Nanotechnology. He’s also an accomplished 3d computer graphics artist and space enthusiast. He’s combined these interests to become a noted developer of “addon” spacecraft for the freeware space flight simulator, “Orbiter“. You can see his work here.

Greg began his blog — “Burchismo” — in May of 2003. One of the primary themes of his blog has been the threat posed to the West by the resurgence of Islamic violence in recent decades. “On the morning of September 11, 2001, I immediately perceived that I had a huge hole in my knowledge of the world,” says Greg. “I had spent a considerable portion of my life studying a non-Western culture — China. Now I realized that I would need to begin a program of study of another one.” Since that day, he’s read dozens of books “and literally tens of thousands of pages of text on the web” on Islamic history, society and culture.

You can see all of these interests reflected at Burchismo.

Simon Owens: As someone who focuses a lot on the rising problems in Iran, is there any particular strategy that you’d support?

Greg Burch: Given the terrible squawking about “American unilateralism” to which we’ve been subjected for the last three years, I think that Bush and Rice are handling things as well as they can be for right now. Russian and especially Chinese opposition to meaningful action will take a long time to spotlight for what it really is — simple expression of economic and geopolitical self-interest on their part. I think getting to the point of the recent entente among the five security council nations has been a masterpiece of diplomacy (and I give almost complete credit to Condi for that). We have to give it time to mature. Assuming continuing Iranian intransigience (and we can’t assume that — I expect a long dance of “cheat and retreat”) to be a real possibility, the U.S. should ultimately act militarily, and probably unilaterally. If that day came, the best course would be a pure air campaign, but probably not a quick one, and it would be one with serious military and diplomatic costs.

Ultimately, though I think there’s a better chance of a long, drawn out game that could end with an ambiguous situation in which many believe Iran has developed nuclear weapons, and many don’t. This will be a terrible situation for the next U.S. president, but one that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Simon Owens: How long do you think this administration would hold out before issuing a deadline for Iran. And once they do so, what kind of action do you think they will take?

Greg Burch: As I say above, I think there’s a good chance that the Bush administration won’t have the diplomatic opportunity to be ABLE to issue a deadline for Iran. In that situation, Bush will bequeath a dangerously unstable situation to his successor. If, however, the opportunity presents itself, then a pure air campaign should be the program. First, a steady deliberate destruction of air defenses that could take some days, coupled with initial cruise missile strikes against key known nuclear sites. This would be followed by what could be a protracted campaign of some weeks in which targets are assessed and hit multiple times, and new targets are hit as they present themselves from the responsive activity observable with “national technical” means (i.e. satellites and UAVs).

Under no circumstances would I think that a ground campaign could be a good move. Iran’s too big, the nationalist sentiment is too prickly and the potential for a terrible guerilla war is too great.

But, ultimately, I think those who desire a clear-cut point after which military action is the only clear alternative stand a very good chance of being disappointed. If it comes, it will definitely be after the mid-term elections. From a purely domestic point of view, GWB might consider the right time to do it to be not long after this November. This would give him the longest period in which to try to make it work before his administration is finished. In that regard, he might view the firestorm of protest to which he would be subjected to be a kind of heroic-tragic opportunity for him to be a political “sin eater” — he would take the burden on himself so his successor wouldn’t have to bear it.

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Thomas P.M. Barnett is a contributing editor for Esquire. In addition to this, he has authored the book The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, and has written for multiple news outlets, including Esquire, Wired, and the Washington Post.

His hands-on experience involved him working as strategic planner on national security affairs since the end of the Cold War. He also started his own consulting practice, Barnett Consulting, back in 1998.

Simon Owens: You seem to have a lot more credentials than the average blogger. Do you find that this gains you a lot more respect in the blogging world?

Thomas P.M. Barnett: Not so much in the blogging world per se. I just think my blog tends to attract a higher percentage of professionals than other blogs. Our data from the blog, as well as from others, suggests that my blog tends to attract readers who don’t read a lot of other blog, although I think that will be less true with time. The real attraction with my blog is, in my opinion, my willingness to be transparent about the evolution of my thinking. I think the mechanics of my analytical process attracts reades as much as the content. Then again, the fact that I chronicle my work as a strategist and consultant is interesting to readers as well, and that’s obviously something you can share if you’re a professional vice someone who’s into the material more as an avocation.

Simon Owens: How did you go about becoming an editor for Esquire, and have your articles there raised a lot of controversy?

Thomas P.M. Barnett: I was named the “Strategist” in the inaugural “Best and Brightest” edition back in 2002. That led to an invitation to brief the staff. That led to my first piece in the magazine, “The Pentagon’s New Map,” in March 2003. The huge response to that article led to my getting a literary agent. That led to a book contract, and I signed up Mark Warren, the executive editor of Esquire, to be my editor on the book. After those two great collaborations, it seemed naturally to write more articles for Esquire, which I did, and when the Naval War College asked me to leave in December 2004, Esquire and Warren pre-emptively named me a Contributing Editor, as they were eager to have me keep writing for the magazine no matter what else I pursued. I’ve been awfully happy with that decision.

The articles promote a certain amount of controversy, but that’s good for book sales, the blog, and getting gigs to give speeches, so it all works rather synergistically. The key for my writing in Esquire has been, they ask me to write exactly as I speak. That was a huge leap for me, and it’s why the two books have been successful, I think.

Simon Owens: This sounds like a corny question, but given your expertise, I have to ask: Is world peace possible?

Thomas P.M. Barnett: The global nuclear threat I grew up with is gone. State-on-state wars of the classical variety (A invades neighbor B) has gone the way of the dinosaur, save for a few states in Africa. We still see the need for the U.S. and coalition partners to play Leviathan regularly, but those wars we’ll win easily, leaving the postwar peace for us to get better at. Those postwar situations will be like most of the remaining violence in the system: featuring transnational and subnational actors, but no real opponent nation-states. That means we’re down in the weeds, strategically speaking. Yes, our soldiers will be lost, though the numbers will never come close to matching the sort of frequency we suffered in WWII, or even Vietnam, which is–of course–better but not good enough. And yes, there will still be plenty of killing going on in the world, but primarily within dictatorships and failed states, so we’re basically down to the last rotten cases, fairly concentrated in those handful of regions I call the Non-Integrating Gap. None a serious direct threat to us, save through the extension of transnational terrorism, but all very tough nuts to crack in terms of bringing lasting peace, which only comes with sustainable economic development. I believe we can master even all of those remaining situations within a generation’s time, if America and the rest of the Core commit themselves to “shrinking the Gap” and integrating all those states currently disconnected from, or poorly connected to, the Functioning Core of the global economy (old West plus rising East and South).

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own?)

Thomas P.M. Barnett: I am partial to Zenpundit, Rebecca MacKinnon, Chicago Boyz, Coming Anarchy, and John Robb’s Global Guerillas.