Burton Hersh

Countrymen

And Countrywomen.   And Countrydogs and Manatees and Cockatoos and anybody else interested.  I always use Countrymen as a generic term.  It means:  You All.

My subject for today is the working press, its importance to us all as well as its increasing vulnerability and sometimes its foibles.  I expect to focus here on one significant member of our Establisment of Scribblers, the much-celebrated newsman Dexter Filkins.

A little background first. For a number of years Filkins covered the Near East for The New York Times, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a lot of what we were able to discover about what was actually going on in that tortured corner of the world we found out through Filkins.  A brave and comparatively independent-minded reporter, Filkins was regularly "embedded" with our forces in the region, and a great deal of his reporting dealt with the stresses and triumphs and repeated acts of bravery that characterized our grunts on the ground. Filkins was also able to find his way among wartorn Iraqi civilians, especially in the villages, and his best reporting offers dozens of vignettes full of snapshots of their lives, their gutted houses and destroyed careers and hopelessness about the future.  Many of his most astute observations made it into his very effective book of essays, "The Forever War."

While he was working for the Times, and needed Department of Defense accreditation to get anywhere near the action, the tone of Filkins' reporting was, for the most part, affirmative.  Upending Sadam Hussein was justifiable, our military on the ground and their commanders in the Pentagon knew what they were doing, this would be a long slog but no doubt a necessary one.  Embedded once more in Afghanistan, Filkins kept a sharp eye out but beat the mandatory drum. 

Now, liberated finally from the policy guidelines of the Times, Filkins has moved over and become a staff writer for the somewhat less establishment-obligated New Yorker.  Filkins wrote the opening bit in the recent July 4, 2011 Talk of the Town. Paragraph by paragraph his observations amount to a litany of the hopelessness of our predicament, summing up the rotten prospects of a hopeless enterprise and concluding by quoting Obama's statement that "These long wars will come to a responsible end."  "That's an appropriately tortured construction for two badly managed occupations," Filkins concludes.  "As a prediction for Afghanistan, though, it seems more like a prayer."

I lay this out not to emphasize particularly that Filkins has moved over from the boosters to the jackals but rather to suggest how the system seems to work.  To be embedded is to be closed off, obligated, expected to tow the propaganda line.  Moreover, it implies that the focus of one's reporting will remain on subjects and approaches satisfactory to the military-industrial propaganda mill.

I am reminded of all this reminiscing about my own two recent brushes with Filkins.  It happens that I am a member of the Tampa affiliate of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Filkins has a close friend in the Bay area, and twice -- in 2007, I believe, and 2010 -- he has been generous enough to address our group.  He is an off-the-cuff speaker, personable but inclined to stick to his subject.  After both presentations I had the chance to ask him questions.  In 2007, with the overall military situation in Iraq under control, there were reports that three million barrels of oil a day were being lifted in the southern oil fields there.  Who was doing the lifting, I asked, and where was the money -- oil was approaching the $100-a-barrel  price, which suggested a $300,000,000 daily gross for somebody -- where was all that money going?

He didn't really know, Filkins was free to admit.  That was not something his bosses in the Times newsroom had asked him to look into.

By 2010 Filkins was based in Afghanistan.  Iraq was winding down, we were pulling out.  Filkins was quite straightforward about decrying the shifting and increasingly treacherous deal-making that characterized the Karzai regime -- a reflection of State Department leaks to keep the pressure up on the Afghan president.  I asked about Iraq.  We had built, according to the papers, fifteen city-sized bases in Iraq with mile-long runways to accommodate the supertankers and heavy bombers the Pentagon seemed to think we would require in the region.  These installations cost the American taxpayer billions, probably hundreds of billions of dollars.  Once we had withdrawn, which individuals or government entities in Iraq were going to wind up with these enormously valuable properties?

Filkins didn't know.  That wasn't in the playbook either.

I am taking the opportunity to dig into all of this not to embarrass Filkins, who is one of the best of his breed, but to suggest how our system manages the news and accordingly invites terrible initiatives and reckless decisions every one of us has to pay for later. We don't ask the right questions until it is too late. 

Cheers,

Burton