A reader sends in the following mea culpa from former New York Times editorial muckety-muck Max Frankel about the Times’ Osirak editorial. It’s from Frankel’s memoir, “The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times:”
Among my major mistakes I also list a 1981 editorial denouncing Israel for its ‘surgical’ air strike against an Iraqi laboratory working on nuclear weapons. I have never felt comfortable about the effort of the so-called major powers — meaning China, Russia, France, Britain, and the United States — to monopolize the world’s supply of nuclear arms; if they have behaved more responsibly than some lesser powers, it is precisely because they possess those weapons and have good reason to fear their use. When Israel, an unacknowledged nuclear power, staged a surprise attack on Iraq to disrupt Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, it seemed to me to be invoking an impermissibly aggressive right of ‘self-defense.’ Should a Pakistani attack on India have been similarly tolerated and celebrated? My principle was sound but also piously unrealistic, as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and unprovoked missile attacks against Israel demonstrated ten years later. As I should have remembered from reading E. B. White in high school, it is folly to hold nations to a standard of ‘law’ in an anarchic world. Better to acknowledge the jungle until we reach a higher stage of civilization, or at least a world government.
You see? People do live and learn. It’s just powerful institutions like the Times that don’t.
HOW CLEAN IS KRUGMAN? You guys are tougher on him than I am. But this email makes some solid points:
To have truly “come clean” Krugman would have had to admit that the gist of his September 17 column was almost entirely lacking factual support. When he concedes ONLY that he “erred by citing” a spurious email, Krugman admits ONLY that a single piece of evidence supporting his allegations against White was dubious, and he leaves the implication that his allegations are sufficiently supported by other evidence. But the nonexistent email was, in fact, THE crucial piece of evidence underlying every one of the several damning charges he made against White in the September 17 column. Therefore, Krugman’s acknowledging the unreliability of that crucial piece of evidence – while leaving the allegations themselves unretracted – is actually WORSE than Krugman’s original error, for which he could at least claim to have relied upon evidence he honestly believed at the time to be credible. Now that Krugman knows that the crucial evidence his charges relied upon was not credible, if he had any journalistic integrity, he would have retracted all those charges including the allegation that White, “fully aware of what his division was up to,” was “intimately involved” in the “biggest of several deals that allowed Mr. White to ‘hide the loss'” and the allegation that by “maintaining the illusion of success,” White was “able to sell [his] stock at good prices to naxefve victims.” These allegations hinged on the validity of the infamous email.
“CHERISHED ABSTRACT PRINCIPLE”: The New Republic takes a stand:
All of which is to say, you can argue that it’s not fair to allow Democrats to sub in Frank Lautenberg at this late date. You can argue that it violates some cherished abstract principle like rule of law. But, please, spare us the gloom-and-doom talk about what future elections holds if this precedent stands. The answer is nothing appreciably different from the present.
Noam responds to the critics here.
The Dish 