| By billmon on Media It's at least mildly encouraging to see that the New York Times may not be on board for the drive to war this time: Analysts Say a Nuclear Iran Is Years Away It took Tehran 21 years of planning and 7 years of sporadic experiments, mostly in secret, to reach its current ability to link 164 spinning centrifuges in what nuclear experts call a cascade. Now, the analysts said, Tehran has to achieve not only consistent results around the clock for many months and years but even higher degrees of precision and mass production. It is as if Iran, having mastered a difficult musical instrument, now faces the challenge of making thousands of them and creating a very large orchestra that always plays in tune and in unison. Maybe Bill Keller really did learn something from his time trying to run herd on little Ms. Run Amok. Of course, you could argue that the neocons don't give a flying you-know-what whether the New York Times falls into rank for the march on Tehran, but they certainly seemed to care about the Gray Lady's views in the runup to the Iraq war -- and again during the counter strikes on Joe Wilson's credibility. But maybe that was just because they knew they had an agent of influence in a place on the WMD beat. Be that as it may, the Times is still, despite past history and all logic, a major player in the shaping of U.S. and global elite opinion. Simple noncooperation in the coming propaganda blitz may not be enough to stop the neocons, but an aggressive effort to report the truth might at least slow them down a bit. I know it's not much to ask for, but at this point I'll take whatever help we can get.
Update 9:20 PM ET: I should have pointed out that there is an alternative explanation here, which is that the Times still is faithfully relaying the message the administration wants to get out, but at the moment that message is to downplay the risk of war rather than whip up popular support for it. Certainly, David Sanger's piece in today's paper would fit into that theory:
But at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration, officials say the prospect of military action remains remote in the short term and highly problematic beyond that. Sanger is a complete idiot (I speak from personal knowledge on this) but he's sentient enough to note the possibility that the sudden eruption of war talk may fit into the administration's diplomatic strategy, as a way of convincing the Chinese and the Russians, as well as the Iranians, that they're serious about this. We can call this the "madman theory" -- after Richard Nixon's famous quip that it might be good for the North Vietnamese to think he was crazy because it would bring them to the table. I hope to post more on this question later. (The fact that Nixon eventually did go crazy, to the point where his own Secretary of Defense felt compelled to issue orders to every U.S. military commander in the world not to obey any orders unless they came through him personally, is one of those historical details that makes the madman theory less than reassuring.) But it appears to be beyond Sanger's brain wattage to ask the obvious question: If talk of war serves the administration's diplomatic purposes, why are they working so hard to try to knock it down now? The logical answer is that the war talk -- and the war planning -- is real, but public discussion of it is at this point is premature, i.e. not part of the media plan. In this particular case, however, I don't believe this reflects an institutional effort by the Times to be a good team player. It's more an example of what we already know: It remains absurdly easy -- at least for this White House -- to turn the corporate media into a government megaphone. | 
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