Here’s today’s New Yorker mag­a­zine arti­cle by Sy Hersh, per­haps the great­est inves­tiga­tive reporter of our gen­er­a­tion, about the war between the Pen­ta­gon and Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld. Thanks to Kar­lin Lilling­ton for the pointer.

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We’ve been inun­dated lately by pun­dits, even from pro­gres­sive voices such as Bill Maher and Nicholas Kristof, who say that now that we’ve invaded Iraq, we should stop ques­tion­ing the admin­is­tra­tion, sup­port the war and hope it ends quickly.

It took a writer from the Bay Area, Vicki O’Day, to put the issue in its proper per­spec­tive in a let­ter to the NY Times:

Nicholas D. Kristof (“Hearts and Minds,” col­umn, March 28) wants us to stop talk­ing about how we got into the war in Iraq, since this is “now a his­tor­i­cal question.”

It is still rel­e­vant to ask whether this war is about con­trol over resources while we are award­ing multimillion-dollar con­tracts to Amer­i­can com­pa­nies to oper­ate in post­war Iraq.

It is still rel­e­vant to ask whether this war is aimed at pro­mot­ing democ­racy in Iraq while polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion groups in Iraq are being kept out of the loop as coali­tion forces top­ple their country’s government.

It is still rel­e­vant to won­der whether this war is meant to pro­vide polit­i­cal cover for our fail­ing econ­omy when the admin­is­tra­tion tells us that a huge tax cut is nec­es­sary for the sake of the troops.

We can’t afford to dis­tance our­selves from the poli­cies and actions that led us into a war with Iraq. They are the same poli­cies and actions that will lead us into the next war, unless the admin­is­tra­tion changes its course.

Mean­time, Thomas Fried­man has lost his mar­bles, while Salon’s Scott Rosen­berg has a more thought­ful analy­sis, The momen­tum of vio­lence.

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Peter Arnett has some part­ing com­ments for NBC and the U.S. new media after he was sum­mar­ily fired last week­end. Here are excerpts from “This War Is Not Working”:

There is enor­mous sen­si­tiv­ity within the US gov­ern­ment to reports com­ing out from Baghdad.

They don’t want cred­i­ble news organ­i­sa­tions report­ing from here because it presents them with enor­mous problems. …

[I am shocked] That overnight my suc­cess­ful NBC report­ing career was turned to ashes. And why?

Because I stated the obvi­ous to Iraqi tele­vi­sion; that the US war timetable has fallen by the wayside.

I have made those com­ments to tele­vi­sion sta­tions around the world and now I’m mak­ing them again in the Daily Mirror.

I’m not angry. I’m not cry­ing. But I’m also awed by this media phenomenon.

The right-wing media and politi­cians are look­ing for any oppor­tu­nity to be crit­i­cal of the reporters who are here, what­ever their nation­al­ity. I made the mis­judg­ment which gave them the oppor­tu­nity to do so.

I gave an impromptu inter­view to Iraqi tele­vi­sion feel­ing that after four months of inter­view­ing hun­dreds of them it was only pro­fes­sional cour­tesy to give them a few comments.

That was my Water­loo — bang! …

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OnlineJournalism.com has a few to-the-point syn­opses and sum­maries from last weekend’s new media con­fer­ence at UC Berkeley.

Glaser Online asks: Should News Sites Charge You to See the War?

And Biz2’s Jimmy Guter­man will be doing a daily Media on Media weblog for OJR, ini­tially focus­ing on what the media think of their cov­er­age of the war in Iraq. Best line today, from Peter Arnett in his new gig for Britain’s Mirror:

“I am still in shock and awe at being fired.”

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One blog­ger, after see­ing the dead body of an Iraqi sol­dier splayed across the front page of today’s New York Times, sug­gests that the sen­si­tiv­ity shown in pro­hibit­ing graphic pho­tos of war casu­al­ties appar­ently doesn’t apply to their dead guys.

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Today Wired News pro­files Ken Rutkowski (whom I’ve inter­viewed in the past) of KenRadio.com, call­ing him Inter­net Radio’s Biggest Geek.

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IWant­Media has a very cool page of point­ers to Media and cov­er­age of the war in Iraq, includ­ing timely quo­ta­tions. From Bill O’Reilly:

“If you watch too much TV news cov­er­age, your per­spec­tive can get warped.”

Espe­cially Fox News.

Here’s the LA Times’ Howard Rosen­berg on Fox’s cov­er­age of the war.

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This may or may not turn out to be true, but it’s inter­est­ing read­ing. It’s about U.S. neo-conservativism, and Tony Blair’s unex­pected alliance with it, as seen from the Euro­pean center-left.

In the Guardian UK: The tragedy of this unequal part­ner­ship. By opt­ing to join the Amer­i­can hard Right, Tony Blair has made the gravest mis­take of his polit­i­cal life.

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In These Times: Dis­sat­is­fied with U.S. press cov­er­age, Amer­i­cans are flock­ing to the Web for war news from the rest of the world. Excerpt:

It

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Wasn’t able to blog from UC Berke­ley yes­ter­day, the site of the sixth annual new media con­fer­ence co-sponsored by USC and Cal, because they offered no wire­less access. I’m told they hope to have it by next year. (My dig­i­tal camera’s in the shop, so had to rely on old-fashioned film. Really hard to switch back to the processed-film era.)

Some of the pre­sen­ta­tions will be avail­able through archived web­casts on the con­fer­ence site. (Related to this, the new media “dons” met before the start of the con­fer­ence to chart strate­gies for online jour­nal­ism cur­ricu­lum.) The high­light, to my mind, was the final panel of the day, which fea­tured six young peo­ple ages 10 to 21 who dis­cussed their use of new tech­nolo­gies. Take­away: Young peo­ple use dig­i­tal tools in ways we can’t pre­dict, and are rely­ing less and less often on print pub­li­ca­tions for their news and information.

One of the best lines at the con­fer­ence came from 14-year-old Amy. Respond­ing to a ques­tion about pastel-colored youth sites aimed at girls, she said, “Pink is evil.”

Among the audi­ence mem­bers: Howard Rhein­gold, Barry Parr and Justin Hall.

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