This morning’s Washington Post has what at first glance seems an important article about American military adventurism in the Persian Gulf, under the administration of George Bush the Lesser. Or rather -- not quite “under” it, for the scary thing, the big takeaway, is that a handful of rightwing cowboys almost created another Tonkin Gulf incident, for their own amusement.
Cosgriff — backed by a powerful friend and boss, U.S. Central Command (Centcom) chief Adm. William J. “Fox” Fallon — was itching to push the Iranians, “There was an intention to be far more aggressive with the Iranians, and a diminished concern about keeping Washington in the loop.”
Cosgriff mused in a staff meeting one day that he’d like to steam a Navy frigate up the Shatt al Arab, the diplomatically sensitive and economically crucial waterway dividing Iraq and Iran.
Cosgriff’s idea, presented in a series of staff meetings, was to sail three “big decks,” as aircraft carriers are known, through the Strait of Hormuz — to put a virtual armada, unannounced, on Iran’s doorstep. No advance notice, even to Saudi Arabia and other gulf allies. Not only that, they said, Cosgriff ordered his staff to keep the State Department in the dark, too. … It was like something straight out of “Seven Days in May,” the 1964 political thriller about a right-wing U.S. military coup.
This would be quite important -- if true.
Leave it to the Post, though, to package the whole thing as a feminist fable. The headline reads
Why was a Navy adviser stripped of her career?
and is illustrated by a picture of a pleasant-looking woman gazing into the middle distance, surrounded by a woodland scene. Typical Sunday-supplement stuff -- it appears in the freaking Lifestyle magazine, where minds go to die. I almost didn’t click on the thing.
True to form, instead of digging more deeply into this (if true) truly disturbing incident, the article turns instead to the favored narrative of the Female Victim / Phi-Beta-neurosurgeon-cum-astronaut-cum-superspy. A sample of their gushy dish:
Gwenyth Todd was from a long line of American diplomats, bankers, and spies… She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Near and Middle Eastern studies from the University of California at Berkeley, then earned a master’s in Arabic and international affairs in 1990 at Georgetown University. Conversant in French, Spanish, Turkish and Arabic…
Bright, brash, tall and sexy — she had modeling jobs between Berkeley and Georgetown — she seemed destined for a promising career. … Todd was fearless about standing up to overbearing men.
The paper then goes on to present a lengthy and admiring account of her various adulterous affairs.
“We began a tempestuous relationship.” In 2000, she learned that she was pregnant — and that Cabelly had no intention of divorce, she said.
Ooh, the cad!
Since I was reading this online, and since it is the featured article on the Website, I simply assumed that this was the front-page lead, and not some glurge from Lifestyle. Yet by the end of the article, I had so lost confidence in the reporter that the key military allegations, which initially I took at face value -- and which, if true, would be a bombshell -- now seemed possibly just so much gossip to spice up the Harlequin romance. The implication as you begin the article is that a heroic whistle-blower saved the nation from a Seven Days in May scenario and was hounded as a result. By the end, it seems the whole thing may have been no more than someone losing their clearance for ample and unrelated causes. She was involved in a number of shenanigans overseas; I know several people who lost their clearances for much less.
It is because of such stuff that I finally allowed my print subscription to the WaPo to lapse. Indeed, were I still subscribing, I would never even have seen this article, since the wretched Lifestyle magazine always goes straight to the trash unglanced-at.
For a further example of an important story being sacrificed to mush:
For more on provocations against Iran:
Not that we have anything against a good weepie romance, mind you -- just not masquerading as front-page news. Our own tender efforts along these lines you can view here:
The enigma of a
woman’s heart,
finally espied by a Private Eye,
for less than the
price of a Valentine …
This Rose
Note: Though the “7 Days in May” scenario is one that this nation has fortunately so far been spared, lesser instances of private, off-the-books foreign policies have been attested, most notably Iran-Contra. As Lou Cannon put it (President Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime, 1991, p. 435):
What Reagan had done was create the conditions under which a shadow, renegade government engaged in high-risk foreign policy adventures could flourish within the NSC.
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