Kevin Drum says those of us who like to complain about the trouble with objectivity need to check ourselves:

The problem with the convention of objectivity isn’t that no one recognizes that it’s a problem. Everyone recognizes that it’s a problem. Entire tank cars of ink have been spilled discussing it. The real problem is that so far no one has come up with a solution €” a practical, functional, real-world solution €” that’s broadly acceptable. Any ideas?

One observation is that I think it’s simply false that everyone recognizes it’s a problem. Everyone pays lip service to the idea of recognizing that there’s a problem here, but I think your average major American news organization believes it is doing an excellent job of covering US politics when it is not, in fact, doing an excellent job.

The solution, at any rate, is pretty clear to me: market competition. There isn’t a procedural rule that will correctly identify the right level of editorializing and the correct person to write the stories. Rather, as we move toward a world where the internet provides consumers with a large degree of choice, managers and reporters who manage to consistently cover the news in a way that people find useful will prosper, while those who fail to do so will suffer. Ask a journalist about the objectivity convention that governs US newspapers and he’ll tell you a story about the vital role a neutral press plays in sustaining a vibrant democracy. It’s an intriguing story, but if you ask an economist about the optimal strategy for a media organization in a market with few competitors, he’ll tell you that the important thing is to be bland and inoffensive, like television before there was cable. Not coincidentally, America’s newspapers have, secure in their possession of local monopolies, gotten really good at being bland and inoffensive. I’m reasonably optimistic that in the emerging, more-competitive world, new approaches will emerge.

Official Iranian news sources report on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s visit to Teheran:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki said Baghdad in its ties with other countries only acts based on the interests and demands of the Iraqi nation. The office of the Iraqi Prime Minister on Saturday in response to a warning by the US President George W. Bush against Baghdad€™s development of ties with Tehran announced in a statement: The groundless warning was issued with the aim of overshadowing the successful achievements of Mr Al-Maliki in his recent visit to Tehran.The Iraqi Prime Minister€™s office further announced: If the US President assumes that the level of Iraq€™s ties with other countries would be determined according to his views, then he is wrong.George W. Bush on Thursday on the second day of Maliki’s visit to Iran repeated his baseless claims that Iran interferes in the internal affairs of Iraq. This is while Nuri Al-Maliki on the same day appreciated Iran for helping Iraq establish security and stability, calling for expansion of ties with Iran.

It seems obvious to me that the takeaway here is that we should stop expending vast amounts of resources mucking around in Iraq, but I suppose one could take the Ken Pollack view that this means we need to sink deeper into the muck by deposing (but by no means ousting) Maliki’s government and trying to find a more helpful client.

McClatchy’s Matt Stearns writes that “Taking military action against Iran could put President Bush on a collision course with Congress, leading Democrats and a Republican lawmaker cautioned Friday following Bush’s threat of unspecified consequences for alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq.” You’d like to think that starting a second war would rather than could set Bush on a collision course with congress.

That said, considering that congress was willing to cave to Bush on FISA and, eventually, on Iraq funding I don’t think Bush seriously needs to worry that congress would stop him from starting a war with Iran or, for that matter, Venezuela. The Democratic majorities aren’t large ones, and plenty of Democrats still seem to think the appropriate response to Bush yelling “Boo! National security! Here’s my plan to make everything much worse!” is surrender.

The New York Times does us all a great favor with this retrospective on Afghanistan:

With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a €œspent force.€

€œSome of us were saying, €˜Not so fast,€™ € Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. €œWhile not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear.€ [...]

The American sense of victory had been so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call €œthe good war€ off course.

Just about the only place in the United States where you saw substantial opposition to the Afghanistan War back in the day was on college campuses. That, conveniently enough, is exactly where I was at the time, so I got to participate in a lot of arguments on this subject. One thing I’m fairly sure absolutely nobody ever pitched to me was “well, don’t you see that if we invade Afghanistan we’re just going to wind up failing to achieve any of our key strategic objectives because the administration will divert crucial resources and attention to invade Iraq instead?”

That, after all, would just be ridiculous. And yet it appears to be exactly what’s happened.

“One month from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America,” says Stu Bykofsky, conservative columnist.

I think Ross is right and Henry Farrell wrong about the best way to interpret the Kristol/Kagan argument for a “Neo-Reaganite” foreign policy — the argument about this helping the Republican Party is probably offered in a pundit’s fallacy spirit. The dark truth is probably closer to what Bykofsky expressed, something like national greatness conservatism icon Teddy Roosevelt’s sense that war was, as such, a good thing because of its influence on the national character. Strains of this kind of thinking were definitely discernable post-9/11 on both the right and in the more hawkish precincts of the left — a kind of genuine enthusiasm for violence, the sense that war is a force that gives us meaning, and that it’s only by having giant disasters occur that our true national spirit is revealed.

Photo by Flickr user Beija used under a Creative Commons license