Didn't manage to see the New York Times today. No big loss for me, but I'm reminded that I've been packing parts of the April 20 issue, figuring I'd quote some and comment on others. The big article two weeks ago was "Behind Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand: Courting Ex-Officers Tied to Military Contractors." I didn't actually read the piece. I realized five years ago that the networks' parade of generals were team players, retired from active service but grateful recipients of lavish pensions and lucrative second careers in the Defense racket, and that their "inside sources" were mere propaganda ministries. Moreover, I was hardly alone in noticing this. Still, when Laura started reading me quotes, I asked her to mark a few for a blog post. Here goes.

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke's staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

"You could see that they were messaging," Mr. Krueger said. "You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over." Some days, he added, "We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You'd look at them and say, 'This is working.'"

[ . . . ]

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly "artificial" that he joked to another group member that they were on "the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq," a reference to Mr. Romney's infamous claim that American officials had "brainwashed" him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

[ . . . ]

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. "They can't shoot, but then again, they don't," one officer told them, according to one participant's notes.

"I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south," General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

"You can't believe the progress," General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be "down to a few numbers" within months.

"We could not be more excited, more pleased," Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces.

[ . . . ]

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that "mainstream" journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

[ . . . ]

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the "hit," the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon "sources," the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

"They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level," Mr. Krueger said. "This has been highly honed."

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. "That's not something that ever crossed my mind," he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. "We assume they know where the lines are," he said.

[ . . . ]

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that "some four-star could call up and say, 'Kill that contract.'" For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq's security forces. "I know a snow job when I see one," he said. He did not share this on TV.

[ . . . ]

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq's purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had "smoking gun" proof.

"We don't have any hard evidence," Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. "We are looking at ourselves saying, 'What are we doing?'"

[ . . . ]

Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being "manipulated" to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

[ . . . ]

Some e-email messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

"Recall the stuff I did after my last visit," he wrote. "I will do the same this time."

[ . . . ]

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable "surrogates" in Pentagon documents.

[ . . . ]

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the "twisted version of reality" being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give "a heads-up" that some of his comments on Fox "may not all be friendly." Pentagon records show, Mr. Rumsfeld's senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O'Reilly that the United States was "not on a good glide path right now" in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was "precipitously fired from the analysts group" for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, "simply didn't like the fact that I wasn't carrying their water." The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines' deaths further erode support for the war.

"The strategic target remains our population," General Conway said. "We can lose people day in and day out, but they're never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen."

[ . . . ]

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the "Generals' Revolt" dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. [ . . . ]

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

"I'm an old intel guy," said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers' names.) "And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, 'Oh my God, they're trying to brainwash.'"

"What are you, some kind of a nut?" Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. "You don't believe in the Constitution?"

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld's former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration's overall war strategy, they counseled, was "brilliant" and "very successful."

"Frankly," one participant said, "from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative."

An analyst said at another point: "This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn't mean a tinker's damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that's not a threat to us."

[ . . . ]

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the "political tide." One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to "just crush these people," and assured him that "most of the gentlemen at the table" would enthusiastically support him if he did.

"You are the leader," the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. "You are our guy."

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: "In one of your speeches you ought to say, 'Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi,' And then you just go down the list and say, 'All right, we've got oil money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.' If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, 'Oh my God, I can't imagine a world like that."

[ . . . ]

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled. [ . . . ]

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined.

"Focus on the Global War on Terror -- not simply Iraq. The wider war -- the long war."

"Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran."

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

"I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions," he said.

[ . . . ]

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts' military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. "None of that ever happened," said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

"The worst conflict of interest was no interest."

Plenty of things to note here, but I was especially struck by the scapegoating of Iran -- a card the military, Bush, and everyone in between have replayed whenever the need for a scapegoat arose, which is to say repeatedly.

Same issue has a Jad Mouawad piece on oil called "The Big Thirst." A couple of quotes here show big problems that could be recognized with only a tiny bit of intelligence.

"This is the market signaling there is a problem," said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, "that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies."

Today's tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers: The planet's population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years -- to more than two billion -- as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil -- enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United Statews and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And that's only 22 years away, a heartbeat for the petroleum industry, where the pace of finding and tapping new supplies is measured in decades. [ . . . ]

The problem is that no one can say for sure where all this oil is going to come from.

Let alone draw the obvious inference, which is that if the oil isn't forthcoming, the demand for it -- all those extra people, cars, and development -- is also thrown into question.

But the quote that first tripped my alarm was further down:

A small band of skeptics view today's record prices as evidence that oil supplies have peaked -- that half the globe's oil supply has already been used up. But most experts believe that there are still enough oil reserves, both discovered and undiscovered, to last at least through the middle of the century.

The problem is that in many corners of the world, geopolitics, more than geology, has removed much of those reserves from the reach of independent oil companies.

"There are plenty of resources in the globe," Rex Tillerson, the chairman of Exxon, recently told an investor conference. The difficulty, he said, was "just continuing to have access to all of the opportunities."

Over the past century, the world burned through a trillion barrels of oil. Another 1.2 trillion barrels of known conventional oil reserves wait to be tapped, according to BP, one of the world's biggest oil companies. It sounds like a lot. But given the current rate of growth in demand, a trillion of those barrels will be used up in less than 30 years.

First thing here is that even the concessions -- from BP at least, if not necessarily from diehard Exxon -- sound like rousing confirmation of the Peak Oil model. One trillion down, 1.2 trillion to go, that's pretty close to half pumped, especially given that it gets progressively harder -- more expensive, most critically in terms of energy -- to get at the last barrels in every oil field. Nor does it really matter if the time frame for getting down to this last 10% of unpumped oil is 30, 40, or 60 years. Within the natural lifetimes of people already born our world is going to change substantially.

In fairness, Mouawad adds the following escape clause:

What then? Many analysts estimate another trillion barrels of yet-to-be-found oil remains, but in remote places like the Arctic Ocean where it will be expensive to extract, or in countries that might restrict access.

Note that the analysts have dropped from "most" to "many," and the costs are hopping. There have been some deep sea finds recently, but they are paltry compared to the discoveries that were common in the 1960s-1970s, and they are expensive and risky. The political cases are hardly any cheaper, especially if Bush's efforts to open up Iraq to western oil exploration are any indication.

What about the United States? The country has shown little willingness to address its energy needs in a rational way. James Schlesinger, the nation' first energy secretary in the 1970s, once said the United States was capable of only two approaches to its energy policy: "complacency or crsis."

The United States is the only major industrialized nation to see its oil consumption surge since the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. This can partly be explained by the fact that the United States has some of the lowest gasoline prices in the world, the least fuel-efficient cars on the roads, the lowest energy taxes, and the longest daily commutes of any industrialized nation. The result: about a quarter of the world's oil goes to the United States every day, and of that, more than half goes to its cars and trucks. [ . . . ]

"The country has been living beyond its means," said Vaclav Smil, a prominent energy expert at the University of Manitoba. "The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don't realize how dire the situation is."

Of course they don't. Americans survived the scares of 1973 and 1979 and came out thinking they're immune. They bought into Reagan's "morning in America" flattery, and now they think it can never be otherwise. This is a nation built on cheap land and cheap oil, so happy go lucky even WWII was just a party. We're so conceited we still refer to ourselves as the world's sole superpower -- a hyperpower even. How can such a run of dumb luck ever run out?

Then, same issue, there's an op-ed by Clinton economist Martin Neil Baily (currently at Brookings) called "Don't Blame the War for the Economy." Several people have said this recently, including Dean Baker, who argues that the numbers from the subprime mortgage crisis simply swamp out the nominal Iraq war expenses. That's true as far as it goes, but only if you assume there are no hidden connections. One of those connections is George W. Bush, whose 2004 election depended on putting up some plausible indication of economic growth to counter his fiasco in Iraq -- itself intimately connected to Bush's quest for power, and failed by the same ideological blinders and reckless disregard that drove the housing bubble through the subprime jungle.

Baily, on the other hand, doesn't even understand that the critical economic problem now is financial, not the relatively simple (albeit intractable) problem of oil prices. He writes:

I am no fan of the war in Iraq, but it simply has not been a major contributor to the financial crisis and the impending recession. The high price of oil is largely the result of strong demand, notably from China and India, pressing against a limited supply. The global oil supply is growing more slowly than it could because of politics and policies in many places -- Russia, Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela as well as the Middle East. [ . . . ] Absent the war, Iraqi oil production under Saddam Hussein might have been somewhat higher, but not by enough to affect the American economy. Iraqi oil production has been very volatile and has experienced a downward trend since the late 1970s, despite its vast potential.

Get that? High oil prices are the result of politics, but not of American politics, even though the strapped suppliers have complex and mostly unsavory experience with US policies, and the voracious consumers are precisely the developing nations with the poorest record of following the dictates of the Washington Consensus on how developing nations should be governed -- nations which also benefit from US offshoring, and which in turn prop up US deficits. Before you let war off the hook for the economy, take a good look at how America's penchant for war and empire affects everything.

Here's another example of Baily's confusion:

Is government borrowing to blame? Chronic budget deficits are harmful because they increase interest rates, crowd out domestic investment, and increase the trade deficit. So, in principle, budget deficits should actually have curbed the housing boom, not fueled it.

In practice, budget deficits did not result in high interest rates because of the huge flows of foreign capital into the American economy. The lack of discipline in the federal budget in recent years is deplorable and we will pay for that,especially as we face the costs of an aging population. The failure to pay for the war is part of this policy mistake, but only a part and not a big cause of today's problems.

Economics is a science? Sounds like we're being scammed by the world, willingly so. Mostly because it makes Bush look less worse than he's actually been -- a delusion we'll pay dearly for.

One good op-ed for a change, Alexandra Fuller on "Recovering From Wyoming's Energy Bender":

For example, oil and gas companies are exempt from provisions of the Clean Water Act that require construction activities to reduce polluted runoff as well as from provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act that regulate underground injection of chemicals. The industry is also generously permitted to drill on critical wildlife winter range (close to 90 percent of all their requests to drill on winter range have been granted). Oil rigs are drilling for natural gas on the banks of the New Fork River (the headwaters of the Colorado) and in the foothills of the Wyoming Range. Well sites in many parts of the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are so closely spaced that, with roads, gas pipelines and compressor stations, the development is continuous.