• Home
• Articles
• Support
• About
• Links
Times Watch for 04/15/03
Baghdad’s Useful Idiot
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote “The Stones of Baghdad” from Baghdad back in October, but it’s even more disturbingly relevant now.
Blogger Dean Esmay went down the memory hole to dredge up the words Kristof (one hopes) would rather not have penned: “After scores of interviews with ordinary people from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, I've reached two conclusions: 1. Iraqis dislike and distrust Saddam Hussein, particularly outside the Sunni heartland, and many Iraqis will be delighted to see him gone. 2. Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America's intentions than Saddam's.”
Kristof concluded that October column: “If Saddam thinks the average Iraqi is going to miss him, he's deluding himself. But if President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then he too is deluding himself.” As the joy in Baghdad after Hussein was toppled showed, Kristof was actually deluding himself.
But in between writing those two bits of balderdash, Kristof penned this provocative paragraph: “Public opinion is very difficult to gauge in a dictatorship as brutal as Iraq's, where reporters are mostly accompanied by government minders and where anyone who criticizes Saddam risks having his tongue amputated. It takes quite a bit of arak, the national drink, before conversations even begin to get interesting.”
Talk about burying the lead! Like CNN’s executive news chief Eason Jordan (writing in the Times to give credit where it’s due), Kristof knew first-hand the nature of Iraq’s totalitarian regime. Yet both Kristof and Jordan chose to conceal that truth, Eason through factual omissions, Kristof by trumpeting the Iraqi dictatorship’s coerced party line as a grass-roots reaction.
“As the war began, members of the House of Representatives gave speech after speech praising our soldiers, and passed a resolution declaring their support for the troops. Then they voted to slash veterans' benefits.” That’s how Paul Krugman’s latest column begins, focusing on what he considers rank Republican hypocrisy in a time of war.
But blogger David Hoy points out: “From fiscal year 2002 to fiscal year 2004 the Veteran’s Administration budget increased from $26.9 billion to $34.1 billion. Once again, the House GOP's ‘slash’ is actually a reduction in the rate of increase.”
Krugman’s baseless attack is reminiscent of the media’s phony scare over Newt Gingrich’s Medicare “cuts” that were actually just reductions in the rates of increase. (Sadly, the liberal death-by-a-thousand ‘cuts’ strategy worked.) But back then such things were said mostly by politicians and reporters, who can be presumed ignorant on economic issues. Krugman should know better—after all, he was a respected economist, once.
What the Times “Calls” Objective
From Damascus, reporter Neil MacFarquhar gets Syria’s reaction to US warnings over harboring terrorists and notes: “The United States has long accused Damascus of supporting groups it calls terrorists, especially Hezbollah.” Hezbollah engineered the 1983 truck bombings that killed over 200 U.S. Marines in Beirut, as well as two bombings of Israeli targets in Argentina that killed 114. What does a guy have to do to get the Times to call him a terrorist? On second thought, maybe I’d rather not know.
It’s Frank Rich--What More Is There To Say?
Frank Rich’s Sunday Arts & Leisure column is almost too predictable to lampoon, but we’ll give it the old college try. In “The Spoils of War Coverage,” Rich sees patriotism as a cynical marketing ploy: “In retrospect we can see that patriotism as a TV news marketing ploy was inevitable after Dan Rather took flak for interviewing Saddam in February. There was nothing either exceptional or un-American about Mr. Rather's interview; it showed us a calculating dictator spewing unalloyed propaganda, none of which earned him the sympathy of any American viewers. But the uproar that ensued, stoked by the White House, sent the clear message that news not upholding the administration's message was verboten during wartime (unless the critique is delivered by paid network military consultants).”
And what’s a Rich column without a bizarre bit of moral equivalency? “The resulting mood has at times made American television seem to march in lockstep as much as state-controlled TV in Iraq.”
But Rich isn’t just being silly here; he’s flat wrong. The confessions of CNN’s Eason Jordan should convince journalists there’s nothing benign about trading access for secrecy in the hopes of being “on the scene”—better to leave the country and tell the truth then stay on at a dictator’s pleasure, under his regime’s repressive eye.
For the Times, a statue is always just a statue. On Sunday the paper ran an editorial with the uplifting title: “Aftermath -- the Bush Doctrine.” They’re on board with Bush’s freedom doctrine, but laments those “goals were overshadowed by an arrogant, go-it-alone stance and an aggressive claim to the right to use pre-emptive action against threatening states….A doctrine that purports to spread happiness, but ends up spreading resentment, is not working, no matter how many statues come tumbling down.”
Yeah, just some statues…and a dictatorial regime responsible for the death of millions. Apart from that, nothing’s changed in Iraq, except it’s still all Bush’s fault.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org