BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, April 19, 2004
WHEN DID BUSH TELL RICE HE WAS
GOING TO WAR? How soon we forget! The national-security adviser
went on CBS's Face the Nation yesterday and responded to the
charge in Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, that George
W. Bush decided to go to war in January 2003, while UN weapons
inspections were still under way. The Los Angeles Times
reports:
National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that President Bush's decision to
invade Iraq was not made in January 2003, as a new book asserts,
but came in March, after all efforts to avoid a war had been
exhausted.
The statement in "Plan of
Attack," by Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob
Woodward, is "simply not, not right," Rice said on CBS's "Face the
Nation."
In an interview broadcast
yesterday evening on CBS's "60 Minutes," Woodward said that "the
decision [to invade] was conveyed to Condi Rice in early
January.... [Bush] was frustrated with the weapons
inspections. He had promised the United Nations and the world and
the country that either the U.N. would disarm Saddam
[Hussein] or he, George Bush, would do it, and do it alone
if necessary."
But Rice said the final
determination that war would occur came more than two months after
their private conversation at Bush's Texas ranch.
In that conversation, Rice told
CBS, she and Bush were discussing Bush's frustrations with Saddam,
who Bush said "was starting to fool the world again, as he had
over the past 12 years."
"He said, 'Now, I think we
probably are going to have to go to war, we're going to have to go
to war,'" Rice said.
But that "was not a decision to
go to war," she continued. "The decision to go to war is in March.
The president is saying in that [January] conversation, 'I
think the chances are that this is not going to work out any other
way. We're going to have to go to war.'"
You can read the full Face the
Nation transcript here
(PDF format). But let's get real, shall we? If anything, Woodward is
being incredibly generous to the White House in asserting that the
decision was not made until January 2003. Here's the lead of a piece
that appeared in Time magazine on March 31, 2003:
"F--- Saddam. we're taking
him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who
had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with
three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through
the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's
Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand
dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq
policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably;
Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room.
As far as I know, Time's
account has never been challenged. As we know from a spate of new
books - by former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke,
journalist Ron Suskind (who collaborated with former Treasury
secretary Paul O'Neill), and others - the White House, and especially
Vice-President Dick Cheney, started talking about going to war with
Iraq in 2001, especially after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Bush's
chief of staff, Andrew Card, spoke
infamously about not
wanting to roll out a "new product" (war, that is) until September 2002.
And good grief: Time's Karen
Tumulty was on the set with Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer
yesterday, but she never said a thing about her own magazine's
year-old exclusive. What is wrong with these people?
DIGITALLY CLUELESS AT THE
TIMES. In today's New York Times, Ken Belson
writes
about Sony's attempts to catch up with Apple in the online music
business. The ninth paragraph is a howler:
Like Apple's iTunes online
music store, [Sony's] Connect will have 500,000 songs that
can be downloaded for 99 cents each. But while iTunes songs can
be played only on iPods, Sony already sells a variety of
devices, including minidisc and compact disc players, which can
play songs bought on Connect's Web site. Sony's new Hi-MD disc
player, for instance, will hold up to 45 hours of music on one
disc, which will retail for about $7.
Well, uh, no. Not even close. At
the most basic level, you can burn a CD with songs that you download
from the iTunes Music Store, allowing you to listen to your music on
any CD player on the planet. In fact, that's the way most people use
the store - popular though the iPod may be, there are far more iTunes
Music Store customers out there than there are iPod owners. Belson
should have looked at this.
But though that's Belson's most
obvious mistake, it goes deeper. Apple sells songs in a format known
as AAC, which appears to be the crux of Belson's confusion. AAC is a competitor to MP3 that provides slightly smaller file
sizes, slightly better sound quality, and "digital rights management"
protection - that is, you can burn "playlists" onto a few CDs, but
you can't burn, say, 100, at least not without changing the order of
the tracks. There are a few other limitations, too. The idea is to
let you share your music with family members and friends, but not to
enable full-scale piracy.
However, the tracks on the CD
you've just burned are no longer AACs - they've been expanded into
standard AIFF files, as are all sound tracks on CDs. (This obviously
doesn't mean that the richness that was stripped out when the music
was compressed has somehow been magically restored; that's gone for
good.) You can now take your CD and rip it into plain, unprotected
MP3s. (Apple's claims that these MP3s will somehow be unlistenable
are - how to put this? - not true. This is the equivalent of your
first-grade teacher telling you that you will die if you put your
pencil in your mouth.)
Now you can do anything you like
with your MP3-ized iTunes songs - copy them onto a non-Apple MP3
player, burn them onto a CD-MP3 disc (like the 45-hour disc to which
Belson refers), whatever. Some of those devices might even carry the
Sony brand.
This is not a minor error that
Belson made. The entire point of his story is that consumers
of digital music are awash in a sea of proprietary standards -
Apple's got one, Microsoft's got another, and now Sony is about to
introduce yet another. Gosh darn, what is the poor consumer to
do?
Well, one place to start is to go
somewhere other than the New York Times for authoritative
information.
posted at 9:39 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
