more perspective

update: I’ve added a link to (and a quote from) the transcript of today’s Reliable Sources.

For foreign-policy wonks who want to get up to speed on the new team that’s just like the old team, except not really.

The other day, I linked to a long piece published in the New Yorker earlier this year, “Breaking Ranks,” by Jeffrey Goldberg, about the ideological divisions within the Republican foreign-policy mavens of the last three decades who have crisscrossed the Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrationo. That article was as serious an insider attack on Bush’s policies (the neo-connish “Bush Doctrine”) as any that has been published during his presidency (including Ron Suskind’s, Woodward’s, and David Kuo’s). As such, it’s definitely worth reading (or re-reading, as the case may be) now that the political ground is shifting in unknowable ways (that is, all astute observers can see that’s it’s shifting, but no one knows where it will settle: there are too many variables—among them the fact that the Democrats are deeply divided too).

Anyway: There’s reason to think things aren’t nearly as simple as a shift from neo-condom [!] to realism. Here, for example, is a very short piece in the Washington Post that adds much more nuance to the picture I had of Bob Gates:

Gates’s nomination unquestionably stands for one proposition: a long-awaited recognition that the administration’s war in Iraq has been a disaster. But the broader interpretation of the appointment as representing a victory of Bush 41 over Bush 43 — or of one school of thought over another — breaks down when you look at Gates’s background and the history of the 1980s and early ’90s.

For one thing, that analysis depends on a selective view of the Bush 41 administration. Yes, it included Gates; then-national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, a determined opponent of the current Iraq war; and Baker, who is now head of a bipartisan group searching for a new Iraq policy. But Vice President Cheney was a charter member of the Bush 41 administration. So were Cheney’s former aide Stephen Hadley, the current national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice — who have been among the principal architects of the war in Iraq.

Moreover, as that 1989 debate over Gorbachev illustrates, the Bush 41 foreign policy team was hardly united. Its members bickered about the Soviet Union, about China, about the Middle East. One of the few things it was in complete harmony on was the belief that American troops shouldn’t go on to Baghdad at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. At the time, everyone thought that would be a bad idea, including Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defense.

Well, then, does Wednesday’s appointment of Gates represent a change of philosophy, the triumph of realism over neoconservatism? That doesn’t quite work, either. Rumsfeld was never a neoconservative; he was an obstreperous contrarian, committed not to putting forward any particular philosophy but to aggressively challenging whatever ideas his bureaucratic opponents and critics put forward.

Things are about to become very interesting. This was underscored for me on Reliable Sources this morning, where (finally!) Howard Kurtz conceded*** that television loves conflict,

KURTZ: We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Candy Crowley, let’s face it, journalists were bored with one- party rule and they hope the Democrats conduct plenty of investigations in Congress and issue subpoenas so that they can feast on the conflict.

True or false? True?

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SR. POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: You know — I mean, you know, yes, in some ways. And here’s why: because journalists love a story.

So I don’t think it’s — you know, that gives the implication that we’re rooting for something one way or the other. I think what journalists root for is a good story. You know, something that gets the adrenaline pumping. And so, you know, yes, in the sense that we want a good story, no in the sense that we want to see somebody or other brought down.

KURTZ: Right. I wasn’t suggesting journalists were taking sides, so much as they were happy to hold the coats of the two sides while they go at it.

and where he prepared the ground for (eventually—say, a couple of months into 2007) more “scrutiny” of the Democrats after the initial warm media bath that met their ascension to power in Congress.

Why more scrutiny? because the media looks for conflict (a good story) and there’s no better story than partisan conflict. What’s more: the audience laps it up—especially when it’s based on something real.

Democrats versus Republicans is a much better show than the Media versus the Republicans—just my opinion, of course. But I’ll bet it’ll be more popular with the audience, too.

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***This isn’t exactly an endorsement of the kind of infotainment (aka entertaining news) that I’m in favor of, but Eat the Press’s Rachel Sklar quotes Kurtz’s begrudging praise of the New York Post on last week’s Reliable Sources, and I repeat here:

[I]t’s easy to make fun of “The Post”. It can be sensational and simplistic. Sometimes irresponsible, and sometimes wrong… I wouldn’t want to see other metropolitan dailies imitate the tantalizing tabloid, except in this one respect: “The Post” is fun to read. Too many papers are cautious and timid and feel like homework.

Note to Howie: you say “sensational and simplistic” as if that’s a bad thing!