WORSE THAN THE GUARDIAN

The Mickster noticed the weird James Dao piece on the Senate hearings on Iraq last Wednesday. Great paranoid minds think alike! My column in the New York Sun today makes the same point (alas, it hasn’t been posted on their site). Here’s the gist of my piece: compare the Times story not just with the Los Angeles Times, as Mickey does, but with the Guardian, that ground zero of leftist, anti-war, anti-American Euro-weenie sentiment. The Guardian’s headline for exactly the same hearing was: “Iraq ‘close to nuclear bomb goal.'” Its lead paragraph read: “Saddam Hussein will have enough weapons-grade uranium for three nuclear bombs by 2005, a former Iraqi nuclear engineer told senators yesterday, as the US Congress held hearings on whether to go to war.” Here’s the Times’ headline: “Experts Warn of High Risk for American Invasion of Iraq.” Its lead paragraph read: “In the first public hearings on the administration’s goal of ousting Saddam Hussein from the Iraqi presidency, an array of experts warned a Senate committee today that an invasion of Iraq would carry significant risks ranging from more terrorist attacks against American targets to higher oil prices.” You had to read far down into the text to find the only citation of the nuclear threat: “The experts also agreed that they consider Mr. Hussein a major threat to world peace because of his aggressive efforts to obtain biological and nuclear weapons. But estimates of when he might actually develop those weapons ranged from a few months to several years.” Oh, never mind then. Pre-empting a regional madman with close to nuclear capacity who has already invaded one country and used biological and chemical weapons against his own people – that can wait a few years. More evidence of Raines’ now-unmissable anti-war campaign. More slanted than the Guardian: the New York Times brand is now sinking into, er, a quagmire.