September 11, 2007 7:47 PM

Questions About the Moveon Ad "Scandal"

A lot of political elites, reporters and think tank types in Washington (as opposed to regular people out in the rest of America) are very upset with Moveon.org's ad questioning the accuracy of Gen. David Petraeus's past statements about Iraq. Even some self-described "progressives" in D.C. are joining in to chest thump and express outrage. These people are trying to bill the Moveon ad as a huge scandal. But here's what I don't understand: Has anyone actually said that what Moveon wrote was factually inaccurate?

I have checked the background information - the source material which is all linked from Moveon's website. I have read a new story from Newsweek that points out the Pentagon (ie. Petraeus's employer) is preparing a report that will “differ substantially” from Petraeus’s recommendation to keep troops in Iraq and that will call for a substantial withdrawal of troops from Iraq. I have even read that John Arquilla, an intelligence and counterinsurgency expert at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, is "even harsher in his assessment of Petraeus" than anything in Moveon's ad. He says:

“I think Colin Powell used dodgy information to get us into the war, and Petraeus is using dodgy information to keep us there. His political talking points are all very clear: the continued references he made to the danger of Al Qaeda in Iraq, for example, even though it represents only somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the total insurgency. The continued references to Iran, when in fact the Iranians have had a lot to do with stability in the Shiite portion of the country...The glacial pace of reductions beggars the imagination.”

So just to be clear, let's review: As far as I can tell, no one has challenged the veracity of Moveon's ad, the Pentagon itself is planning to undermine Petraeus, and even a U.S. Naval intelligence and counterinsurgency expert is telling reporters that Petraeus is not presenting an honest picture. And yet, Moveon's ad is considered a huge scandal in Washington, D.C.

It seems to me the supposed "scandal" - rather than the actual ad - begs two very important questions.

First, is everyone in Washington, D.C. so utterly uninterested in actual facts, that anything - absolutely anything - that can be spun up into a "scandal" now must take center stage? Because, I thought there was a war going on, and I thought people were dying - and so I thought that, you know, facts about what's happening in Iraq - rather than overheated rhetoric from Washington politicians - would be of utmost importance here.

Hey, I'm the first to say that if there is a problem with any of the facts Moveon cited, then by all means, there should be outrage. But no one is questioning Moveon's factual assertions, meaning that what we're watching is D.C.'s Scandal Industry - the one that manufactures "outrage" and "scandal" out of nothing - taking precedence over the most important questions about casualties, war and peace.

Second, does the reaction of some "progressives" in Washington prove that many parts of the progressive movement have no ideology or principles whatsoever? If you read the criticism from these progressives, it is all in political terms. That is, the thrust of the progressive criticism is that Moveon's ad was a tactical mistake. Yet, the tenor of the progressive criticism of such a tactical mistake is decidedly emotional - that it is the highest moral outrage that a supposed tactical error was made, even though it was made in pursuit of a principled progressive goal of ending the war.

This suggests that in at least some "progressive" quarters in Washington, the goals are power and tactical brilliance - and nothing else. It further suggests that in the pursuit of power and tactical brilliance, these "progressives" believe the nation must fall in line with the most hideous right-wing axioms - in the case of the "progressive" Truman National Security Project, that axiom (based on its email to members) is apparently that no past statement from any General should ever be questioned on the facts, simply because all top military brass should be immune from questions - and that questioning military brass supposedly constitutes unpatriotic behavior and that, even worse in the minds of D.C. operatives, such questioning will supposedly jeopardize politicians' electoral support from those who are serving or have served in the military (at best, an unsubstantiated hypothesis).

Let me say that I think it is possible Moveon's ad might have been a tactical mistake. I say that not because it was inaccurate, but because I believe Moveon both overeagerly jumped the gun by hammering Petraeus before he gave his testimony (Moveon's ad said Petraeus is "likely to become General Betray Us" at the congressional hearings rather than waiting to see if he did become that) and because I believe the organization should have understood the Washington kabuki theater.

In D.C., every action, reaction and statement of "outrage" is already written up in a boilerplate press release. Moveon had to know an ad like this would fit very easily into the Beltway press corps' lazy habits. Reporters in Washington have been writing and rewriting the old "Antiwar Left Is Outrageous" story for the last 30 years rather than actually reporting on the facts. Moveon perhaps should have known that, considered trying to avoid that, and instead simply produced an ad that demanded Congress support a specific piece of legislation to end the war.

All of that said, however, the answer to the questions about the supremacy of manufactured "scandal" over as-yet undisputed facts and to the questions about whether self-described progressive movement voices are actually progressive (or even part of a movement) are a telling - and sad - commentary.