Diane Rehm and the indexing of Iraq

The U.S. is increasing its Iraq troop commitment from 138,000 to 150,000 (much too little, much too late), and more and more, the media - and, more importantly, the elite sources with which they index the coverage of this issue - are coming to the realization that this country is involved in a ... what's the key word? .... Oh yes, "quagmire"! Latest example of how the steady shift in elite opinion is panning out is NPR's mainstream-yet-excellent Diane Rehm show. Rehm (based at WAMU in Washington, DC), spent an hour on this morning's show covering the war - again - with some pretty decent guests, such as Julian Barnes, Pentagon reporter for "U.S. News and World Report"; Ivo Daalder, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, co-author of "America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy"; and Maj. Gen. Bill Nash, U.S. Army-Retired, senior fellow and director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. None, repeat none, of these guests seemed to be following the standard Bush administration/neocon argument for why the U.S. is in Iraq. And again, Rehm is mainstream, not an obviously liberal-left-aligned media commentator such as Amy Goodman. It's all going pear-shaped, it was all going pear-shaped 18 months ago, and it'll get even more pear-shaped before this is all over.