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Times Watch for 04/10/03
Embarrassed Times Warns White House Against Victory “Hubris”
On reaction to Baghdad’s sudden collapse yesterday, Times reporters Elisabeth Bumiller and Douglas Jehl write: “An elated President Bush watched celebrating Iraqis drag a statue of Saddam Hussein through Baghdad today as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, barely disguised their glee and their disdain for critics of the Pentagon battle plan. Although the official word from the White House was that there would be no gloating and that the battles were not yet over, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld seemed to treat cautionary notes about hubris as so much political politeness.”
At least Cheney and Rumsfeld have earned the right to be proud of their record of predictions-- Hussein’s regime was toppled in just three weeks, though fighting continues. The Times, on the other hand, has gotten quite a lot wrong on the war. Here are a few of the Times Vietnam-style flashbacks:
• Christopher Marquis’ April 3 profile of Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke: “She faces a growing chorus, including several retired generals, questioning whether the war plan of Mr. Rumsfeld and his lieutenants was ill advised and whether the administration fueled unrealistic expectations that Iraqis would welcome American troops with open arms.”
• Adam Nagourney and David Sanger’s April 1 story on a Bush speech in Philadelphia: “Despite evidence that most Iraqis have not welcomed American forces, Mr. Bush cast himself as the country’s liberator.”
• David Sanger on March 30 claimed the White House was “scrounging for evidence that it warned the nation all along that this could be a long slog, even in the face of predictions by Vice President Dick Cheney and others that, in all likelihood, the war would be quick and that ‘the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy.’”
• Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote on April 4: “Yet if this isn't Vietnam, neither is it the Afghanistan campaign, where we were hailed as liberators. I was in Afghanistan during that war, and the difference is manifest. Afghans were giddy and jubilant, while Iraqis now are typically sullen and distrustful — and thirsty.”
So, why didn’t the Iraqi people initially greet Allied forces as liberators? The answer is obvious in retrospect: The people had not yet been liberated from Saddam’s thugs and spies. The Times most sensible field reporter, John Burns in Baghdad, got the answer from a young Iraqi in Baghdad: “We were frightened of being killed.”
Iraq and Augusta: The Times Two-Front War
Criticism of a “man called Hootie”…from a paper published by a man called Pinch.
The Times sports section again tees off on the Masters and Augusta National golf club, host of the tournament. Reporter David Halbfinger’s profile of club chairman Hootie Johnson was half-favorable but was nonetheless an amazing patronizing piece of work: “Just because a man is called Hootie, his friends say, does not mean he is a backwoods bumpkin.” That’s a rather hazardous line of attack from a newspaper whose publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., is called “Pinch.”
Donald Luskin posts an amusing “correction in the making” in a report by Times reporter Charlie LeDuff from Iraq. A sentence near the end of LeDuff’s story on the Times web site reads: “The value of the Iraqi dinar has fallen 150 percent since the beginning of the war.” As Luskin notes, “How can any currency drop 150% without becoming worth, in the words of Elvis Costello, less than zero?”
(In my “Late Edition” dead-tree copy of the Times, the sentence has been corrected to read: “The value of the Iraqi dinar has fallen since the beginning of the war.”)
Sight of US Flag Spoils Baghdad Fun
For Times media reporter Alessandra Stanley, the brief pulling of an American flag over the head of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad was a cause of concern, judging by her story’s headline: “Amid the Scenes of Joy, a Sight Less Welcome.” Extra gore on television would have apparently been more to Stanley’s liking.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org