Greenwald called it "surprisingly good," which is right. But one thing about the piece really bothered me--how it dealt with the death of Bacevich's son in Iraq. Reporter Rick Hampson tells that story via the classroom:

The students knew that Bacevich had always opposed the war in Iraq. They may have known that his only son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was an Army officer there. They did not know that the day before he had been killed there.

That awful irony--a son follows his father into the military and dies in a war the father fought to end--has helped make Bacevich one of the most prominent and credible critics of U.S. foreign policy.

I doubt that USA Today really means to say that the death of Bacevich's son "helped" make Bacevich's critique more "credible," but that's certainly what comes across here. As a politically conservative critic of Clinton, Bush and now Obama policies, one would hope that his record speaks for itself.

Bacevich doesn't speak publicly much about his son's death--I recall that from an interview he did with Bill Moyers in 2008. And Bacevich says much the same later on in the USA Today article:

Bacevich says his son's loss does not affect his analysis and should not affect how it is received. "I've never said, 'You need to listen to me because my son died in Iraq.'"

Again, this is one troubling aspect to an otherwise interesting piece about an important voice in our national debate. But that passage was a little off.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise: Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

We all owe our gratitude to NBC News for single-handedly correcting the shameful, long-standing exclusion from our media discourse of the views of young, journalistically accomplished heirs and heiresses to political power and great fortune; it is long overdue that former NYT executive editor Bill Keller, son of the CEO and chairman of Chevron, be joined by the next generation.

The only other thing to add is that the Times' account included this anonymous source, who offered the kind of remarkable insight one expects from someone who is granted anonymity to speak the truth:

One person close to Ms. Clinton said she had been quietly raising her profile for some time, though the public had not been completely aware of it. That person, who asked not to be identified because of a reluctance to speak for her, said Ms. Clinton had been more active in causes backed by her family’s William J. Clinton Foundation.

Jim Lobe's piece on how Iran experts are reacting is worth reading too.  Juan Cole's post has a provocative, almost unbelievable  headline--"Is an Iranian Drug Cartel Behind the Assassination Plot Against the Saudi Ambassador?"--but then again, the Official Story is pretty out there, too.

One can never underestimate the ways elite media can be spun by official sources, as this anonymous quote in the Washington Post today (10/12/11) demonstrates:

"There's a question of how high up did it go," said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House thinking. "The Iranian government has a responsibility to explain that."

Under normal circumstances, a government accusing another government of a criminal terrorism plot would have to demonstrate that it has the evidence--not the other way around. I guess I'd want to remain anonymous, too, if I was going to say something like that to a newspaper.