The blogosphere -- and especially progressive bloggers -- are playing a vital role in interpreting, investigating and illuminating the news. Without alert bloggers to dig out the truth, millions of people would not have information and analysis they need to penetrate the fog created by Bush administration around its schemes regarding the war in Iraq and it threats to Iran.
But I worry that, in limiting their role to responding to each new twist in the Bush administration's schemes, cannot defeat those schemes. The now-famous quote by an unnamed adviser to Bush to journalist Ron Suskind in the summer of 2002 is worth recalling here. The adviser said, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Consider for a moment that the adviser (probably Karl Rove, who was the only adviser who could speak with such confidence about what soon to happen) was speaking just as the White House Iraq Group was planning its campaign to shape U.S. public and political opinion to give the Bush administration freedom of action to invade Iraq. The Rove group understood that, by creating the opinions necessary to use invade Iraq, they were about to "create their own reality".
Now we see that same ruthless confidence in the ability to "create their own reality" on display once again on Iran. Even as the administration's credibility on Iraq is the lowest imaginable, we see increasing evidence that Dick Cheney is orchestrating a campaign for war against Iran. There is even a report that he has now ordered Fox and other right-wing media outlets to launch a coordinated new offensive in support of war against Iran after Labor Day. Perhaps it is no accident that it would coincide with the fifth anniversary of the beginning of WHIG's September 2002 "mushroom cloud" campaign on Iraq.
The truth is that a ruthless administration has the tools necessary to manipulate public opinion and the opinions of the political elite. Progressive bloggers can barely keep with each new perverse twist in the administration's use of disinformation, before they have moved on to their next propaganda ploy. The political deck is stacked against those who hope to stop aggressive moves by revealing the truth about them one by one.
That is why I have concluded that progressive bloggers should go beyond their present reactive role and work on the longer-term aim of creating a new way of understanding the problem of aggressive wars. Without a consensus on a new analysis of the problem, there will never be a political movement that can bring about change on the issue.
As it is now, the question of why the United States is so prone to aggressive war is the subject of great confusion in this society, which leads to widespread despair. The traditional approaches to the problem of explaining aggressive war, I would argue, offer no analytical clarity or basis for a program of political action. The liberal theory that the problem is certain ideologies ("anti-communism" or "neo-conservatism") suggest that the larger national security system and the institutional and personal interests associated with it are not really a problem.
On the other hand, the traditional left theory that aggressive wars are caused by economic interests disables potential activists by suggesting that nothing can be done to prevent such wars until the economic system itself is totally transformed.
There is an explanation that goes to the heart of the deep, deep trouble into which U.S. politics and government have descended. The United States has built a war system that perpetuates itself and distorts the national politics of national security in ways we have scarcely begun to understand. Until it takes on the nature of that system and what is to be done about it, the blogosphere will be stuck in the role that the unnamed Bush adviser cynically assigned to the "reality-based community" in 2002.
I don't intend to give up the role of investigating and analyzing the current schemes of those in power. But whenever possible, I intend to relate news stories to the basic dynamics of a national security system that must be changed if we are to end the pattern of aggressive war for empire. It's time to make the underlying war system a political issue, not just the specific insanity of the moment.