Year: 2003

I was struck by an aside in Fareed Zakaria’s typically sane op-ed in today’s Washington Post. he says that the $20 billion to be spent on Iraqi infrastructure in the next year amounts to one half of that country’s GNP. The scale of generosity boggles the mind – especially since the lion’s share of the damage was done by Saddam Hussein, not by the war. I wonder how it compares to the sums spent in, say, Germany after the Second World War? Maybe someone out there has an analysis.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: Who says we can’t keep an award for a legend in media bias? Here’s the Guardian today on the Israel-Palestinian impasse:

The militant groups abandoned the truce on August 21 after Israel assassinated a Hamas leader in a missile strike that followed a suicide bombing which killed 22 people in Jerusalem.

Wouldn’t that chronology suggest that the truce was ended first by the suicide bombing – or would that imply that Israel isn’t always at fault? (For a summary of this blogs various awards, click here.)

There’s a correction to the Dowd Award nominee below. Good for the Post. The New York Times is, apparently, too wedded to Maureen Dowd’s ego to do the same thing.

I haven’t blogged much on the California recall because others have that market niche. (Can you imagine the howls of protest if I devoted as much space to gay rights as Mickey does to the intricacies of a California recall? But I digress…) Still, it’s a good question whether I think the court has the right to intervene to prevent an electoral fiasco. I answered that in 2000. I’m not changing my mind now that it (probably) benefits a goddawful Democrat. The real question is: why has it taken them so frigging long to replace those chads? Or, as Mickey suggests, why not have a paper ballot instead?

The big macher at the BBC, Greg Dyke, told the Hutton inquiry a couple of devastating things yesterday. First, he admitted that he had denounced criticisms of the BBC’s journalism without even checking whether the sourcing was accurate or fair. Internal BBC emails worrying about the sloppy standards of reporter Andrew Gilligan’s journalism were unknown to him at the time, he said. He also conceded that it was “unacceptable” that Gilligan had leaked the name of the late scientist David Kelly as the source for another reporter’s work. In another piece of good news for the government, the head of MI6 said he stood by the intelligence that had suggested that Saddam could have had WMD capacity within 45 minutes – the key piece of evidence that the BBC said had been politically inserted into the Iraq war dossier. Advantage Blair.

ANOTHER HIV BREAKTHROUGH: Hey, I could have a kid, after all.

Herewith a new occasional award given to writers, columnists or pundits who deliberately distort, elide, truncate or garble quotes for ideological purposes. The first nominee for this prestigious award goes to Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus for a spectacular performance in the Washington Post yesterday:

Cheney was less forthcoming when asked about Saudi Arabia’s ties to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 hijackers. “I don’t want to speculate,” he said, adding that Sept. 11 is “over with now, it’s done, it’s history and we can put it behind us.”

As Ramesh Ponnuru noticed, this is, er, misleading. The transcript of the show goes as follows. After Tim Russert asked Cheney about “reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public,” Cheney replied:

I don’t want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. At some point, we may be able to declassify it, but there are ongoing investigations that might be affected by that release, and for that reason, we kept it classified. The committee knows what’s in there. They helped to prepare it. So it hasn’t been kept secret from the Congress, but from the standpoint of our ongoing investigations, we needed to do that.
One of the things this points out that’s important for us to understand-so there’s this great temptation to look at these events as [discrete] events. We got hit on 9/11. So we can go and investigate it. It’s over with now. It’s done. It’s history and put it behind us.
From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we’re engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there. We learn more and more as we capture people, detain people, get access to records and so forth that this is a continuing enterprise and, therefore, we do need to be careful when we look at things like 9/11, the commission report from 9/11, not to jeopardize our capacity to deal with this threat going forward in the interest of putting that information that’s interesting that relates to the period of time before that. These are continuing requirements on our part, and we have to be sensitive to that.

Maybe it was the editing that did it. The New York Times refused to correct Dowd’s quote garbling. Will the Washington Post? Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for future Dowd Award nominations.

“Thanks for posting my email comments regarding Hirschman’s rhetoric of reaction. I consider myself a left/liberal–I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life and I even wrote a book on race relations that David Horowitz branded as “anti-American, anti-white, and astoundingly ignorant.” But my comrades are blind to the fact that George Bush has liberated more people than the EU, the UN, and ANSWER put together. How depressing. I feel the same way about the left that you do about the Catholic Church.” – that guy gets two in two days. There’s more feedback on the Letters Page.

CLINTON LIES – SHOCK HORROR: Will Saletan has another example of something Maureen Dowd has also mentioned in the past – that the Bush administration tried to increase the levels of arsenic in the drinking water. Who repeated that hoary old canard? None other than former president Bill Clinton at the Iowa State Fair, saying that the Republicans “tried to put more arsenic in the water.” He knows that it was his administration that delayed new, tighter arsenic standards for eight years, and that all the incoming Bush administration did was to review the last-minute directives from the Clinton White House, before enforcing a standard that was stricter than was the case for all of the Clinton administration. But, hey, who’s listening any more to that incorrigible old rogue? The blogosphere, that’s who.

When it comes to heterosexuals, no standard is low enough. But gay citizens still cannot apply.

THOSE SINGING EGGPLANTS: There is an explanation. Which kind of spoils it for me.

BERSERKELY: No, this isn’t Monty Python. A soccer match between the Anarchists and the Communists just took place. I have no idea how the anarchists kept it up for an hour and a half. Why didn’t they just destroy the ball?

FROM THE FRENCH: An email from my France correspondent, catching me up on the latest grotesqueries from perfidious Paris:

An article in this week’s L’Express pretty much lays bare France’s diplomatic aim on the US-Iraq-UN front, namely, to revamp the UN as a useful weapon against the US.-This poisonous article has to be read to be believed, but basically the theme is that Bush’s offer to get the UN involved again in Iraq is a “poisoned present” that only a “dupe” would accept, but that nonetheless the demarche offers a not-to-be-missed opportunity to restore both “credibility” and “diplomatic survival” to the UN and its Security Council, which alone can hope to control the “all powerful” US.-Anyway, here’s the last paragraph: “In the name of their credibility, and of their diplomatic survival, the UN and its Security Council can’t afford to miss the opportunity to bring back the all-powerful America into the fold and to retake some semblance of initiative on the critically important Iraq dossier.-But it remains to measure their hypothetical power, once more, by the measuring stick of concessions from Washington.” I reread the article, you know, looking for something about doing good work amongst people who could sorely use some, and found nothing.-And there’s nothing about bringing democracy to the Middle East either.-It’s all about bringing the US to heel.

And what else do the French care about?

For something completely different. Singing Japanese eggplants, courtesy of Dave Barry. Hey, it could be a slow day at the office.

A great email addendum to the Buruma essay. Some of you may know Albert Hirschman’s classic book, “The Rhetoric of Reaction,” in which he parses the tropes of conservative argumentation in Western culture. A reader reminds me:

Hirschman lays out 3 aspects of this rhetoric:
1. The Perversity Thesis: “any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.”
Opponents of the war on terror claim that fighting this war will only lead to more terrorism. Toppling Saddam Hussein has only worsened the condition of the Iraqi people, etc. etc.
2. The Futility Thesis: “attempts at social transformation will be unavailing.”
Iraq can’t possibly become a democracy.
3. The Jeopardy Thesis: “the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.”
Fighting the war on terror will lead to the destruction of democracy at home.

Actually, I think this only covers the reasonable side of the anti-war crowd. The unreasonable side of conservativsm that is now in full flourish on the anti-war “left” includes anti-Semitism, isolationism, nativism and paranoia. I think that just about covers Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan.

The best reporter by far on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq unloads a devastating barrage against his fellow hacks in Editor and Publisher. The New York Times’ John F. Burns reveals just how compromised and corrupt so many journalists were in Iraq, how willing they were to hide the atrocities of the regime, how their own self-interest trumped the truth:

Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that [Saddam’s Iraq] was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.
In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people’s stories — mine included — specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Who was that reporter? Why won’t Burns name him? If you still harbor doubts about the overwhelming moral case for the liberation of Iraq, you need to read this interview. It’s devastating about the mainstream media in the U.S., let alone mouthpieces for tyranny like the BBC:

Now left with the residue of all of this, I would say there are serious lessons to be learned. Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It’s not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they’re actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it’s extremely revealing… I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It’s not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: “The universal spirit of sport,” “My esteemed colleague.” The world chose in the main to ignore this.

Of course they did. But they won’t ignore even a single guerrilla attack on coalition forces, will they? (Bonus point: leftist media blogger, James Romenesko, buries Burns’ piece and gives it the headline: “I was the most unfavored of all war correspondents.” He leads on the Bush administration’s alleged spinning. Figures, doesn’t it?)