Norman Solomon's new book criticizes, but does little else.

Let me just say this at the outset: I like Norman Solomon. I've been a faithful reader of his Media Beat column on the FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) website for many years now. Apart from Pro Football Weekly and the lukeford.com porn newsletter, it's probably my favorite periodical read. He's like the Mel Kiper, Jr. of media criticism. That's why it pains me to say anything bad about Target Iraq: What The News Media Didn't Tell You, his new book (co-authored with journalist Reese Erlich) outlining the popular myths surrounding the upcoming Iraq war.

But some things can't be helped. Unless you have your own pew at the First Congregation of Pointy-Headed Lefty Self-Congratulation, Target Iraq will likely leave you with a queasy feeling?and you will wonder, as I did, who will be convinced to oppose the war that wasn't on board already.

More on that in a moment. First, a little background on Solomon. Even within the absurdly small subset of journalists who write in depth and detail about the media, he stands out, being one of the only writers who has actually succeeded in forcing media issues into the public eye. Through his persistent work at FAIR and the syndicated Media Beat column, he has done a tremendously thorough job of identifying and cataloguing both common media deceptions and deceptive media techniques?everything from the exposure of bogus catchwords and phrases ("pre-emptive," "New Economy") to detailed information on corporate ownership of media and its influence on coverage of specific stories and themes.

Along with FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (originally a co-author of the Media Beat column), Solomon helped create a model for healthy skepticism of the media that did not really exist in pop culture before, if one grants that FAIR and Media Beat now have a sort of pop culture status. A growing number of Americans snorts instinctively at the sight of Tom Brokaw because of Solomon, an accomplishment that must be applauded.

But if you read Solomon enough?and I've probably read every one of his columns for at least the last three years?you start to notice a few things. For one thing, his jokes don't quite work (I can never read his annual P.U.-litzer Prizes without cringing), even though a kind of wry, pseudo-sarcastic tone is a distinctive feature of the column. When you read his pieces enough, you get the same uneasy feeling you get when you read the bad-pun-filled placards at the antiwar demonstrations ("Read Between the Pipelines!" "Don't Arm a Son of a Bush!"): You're participating in a giant in-joke that isn't all that funny. You know what I mean?"The Black Panthers got to carry shotguns and wear cool leather jackets, and here I am drawing an Osama beard on a poster of George Bush. Where did I go wrong?"

But the other thing about Solomon is the same thing that troubles me most about Target Iraq, a series of essays that includes on-the-ground reportage from Iraq and lengthy deconstructions of pre-war media spin. The book's preaching-to-the-converted factor is through the roof. Like those sheepish, right-thinking guests who keep lining up to be slaughtered on The O'Reilly Factor, it seems to think that a simple recitation of the facts about the Iraq crisis will actually convince people to change their minds. It thinks that in the "The Oil Issue" chapter (actually written by Erlich), it is addressing, and successfully deconstructing, the real motives behind the war. It fails to see?as many people in the antiwar movement have failed to see?that the problem isn't that Americans believe George Bush about Iraq. It's that they want to believe him.

You can talk all you want about suffering Iraqi children and the long-term consequences of using depleted-uranium ammunition, but you're not going to convince some frustrated cubicle slave in Lawrence, KS, with a fat wife and forty grand in credit card debt and a spare tire that makes him sick with self-loathing every time he sees the cover of Men's Health, that he doesn't want to bomb the shit out of somebody, anybody, at the earliest conceivable opportunity, for the first reason you make available to him. He knows better than you what he wants. And your timid little pile of "facts" and tepid appeals to some abstract morality, aren't going to cut it. Throw in a treacly afterword by Sean Penn (which this book has) and you've lost him a good hundred miles before the starting line.

There's a reason why the left, or what America calls the left, has an image problem, and it's not all due to right-wing propaganda. It has an esthetic that turns off ordinary Americans. The Left won't be caught dead eating at Jack in the Box. It doesn't know how to make dick jokes and it doesn't know what the blue line is for. It writes long pseudo-literary articles about boxing, but it's useless in a bar fight. Its vision of the future is one in which all vices except pedantry are strictly regulated?no sex, no rap music, no snowmobiles, no snorting smack with models in fur bikinis? Even its writing, and particularly its political writing, is joyless and condescending. The lefty writing style is characterized most particularly by a preponderance of irritating literary winks to its fellow tribe members, nervous little verbal tics that are the intellectual's idea of secret frat handshakes.

This tedium can be anything from the use of horrible, deflating academic words like "disconnect" (found on p. 54 of Target Iraq: "The disconnect had to do with the arsenals of the United States and its allies") to the nauseating affection for discordant catchphrases like "going along to get along" (p. 23: "The rewards of going along to get along are clear; so are the hazards of failing to toe the line"). Like the right, the left has its favorite facts to offer up at the slightest provocation, but because the left is supposed to be more educated and careful about these things, it seems somehow lamer and more egregious when it makes cliches out of its pet arguments.

In the case of the Iraq war, the oft-quoted figure of 500,000 Iraqi children who died as a result of U.S. sanctions has been overused so much that almost no one believes it anymore. It doesn't help when it is offered up, as Target Iraq co-author Erlich does, without any elaboration at all; after he quotes it, he moves on to a discussion of improving child malnutrition statistics. 500,000 dead children is an epic tragedy, not a PowerPoint slide. You need to make people feel a number that big, breathing fire and using powerful language, or else it seems meaningless. Or worse, it can make using it seem like a lurid exercise in team-building, as it does so often at antiwar demonstrations like the one last weekend, when you'll catch kids caught up in the excitement of protest passionately reciting these numbers with great enthusiasm, like they want them to be true.

Target Iraq is a valuable book, one that needs to exist, that carefully debunks all the popular fallacies about the war, from the "fact" that Iraq evicted U.N. inspectors in 1998 (in fact, they left on their own) to the dubious "connections" repeatedly made in the press between Iraq and Al Qaeda. As a resource for journalists and antiwar agitators, it is certainly useful. But the antiwar movement isn't going to succeed until someone in Solomon's position learns to talk to the other side?or at least learns to seem interested in trying.