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Times Watch for December 10, 2003

"Insurgent" Dean Liberal or Not?

     After stints as gourmand and travel writer, R.W. Apple returns to politics Wednesday with a front-page piece on Howard Dean, and picks up where he left off by comparing Iraq to Vietnam.

     Before putting Vietnam into the mix, Apple becomes the third Times reporter in two days to call candidate Dean an "insurgent" (as opposed to the more accurate and obvious "liberal.") Apple opens: "Al Gore's endorsement confirms the status of Howard Dean as that rarest of animals in the jungle of presidential nominating politics: an insurgent front-runner." Times Watch's hard copy edition of Apple's story furthers the idea with the headline, "An Insurgent Gains Status."

     Apple leaves Dean's leanings up in the air: "Is he a liberal, as his passionate young supporters believe, and as his relentless criticism of the war in Iraq implies, who can flank primary opponents to the left? Or is he more of a centrist, as he said in the South over the weekend, who can appeal to general-election voting blocs that have seemed highly antagonistic to each other? What to make of his record in Vermont, where he combined liberalism on abortion with conservatism on gun control?" The story's teaser line goes even further: "Leftist or centrist? Liberal or conservative?" Conservative Dean? Really now.

     Finally, Apple gets to work in his old Iraq-as-Vietnam idea: "But [Dean] has also built a 21st-century version of the student army that helped propel the presidential candidacy of [Eugene] McCarthy, and now as then, one of the main elements in attracting young people has been opposition to an unpopular or at least highly controversial war."

     But polls show most people continue to stand behind the war effort in Iraq. This is one quagmire Apple should avoid becoming mired in, given his dubious history of Vietnam analogies (of the then three-week old Afghanistan war, he wrote: "Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world?")

For the rest of Apple's analysis of Dean, click here.

• R.W. Apple | Campaign 2004 | Quagmire | Vietnam

"Destroying the Village" in Iraq

     There's more of Iraq as Vietnam in Tuesday's editorial "Saving the Village," which leads off with this irony-laced quote from an American battalion commander in Iraq: "'With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them."

     The Times editorial sniffs disapprovingly: "He was speaking from a village that had been virtually wrapped in razor wire after a series of attacks on U.S. troops. 'This fence is here for your protection. Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be shot,' a sign reads." Then the Times harkens back to that infamous and unattributed Vietnam-era line "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," writing "Unwelcome as Vietnam analogies are right now, it's hard to ignore the resemblance to that infamous military comment about having to destroy a village in order to save it. There are also more current, but equally chilling, comparisons."

     Columnist Mona Charen says the phrase originates with anti-war war correspondent Peter Arnett, whose actions during the Iraq war (being interviewed on Saddam controlled Iraqi TV) hardly burnished his reputation for dependability.

For the full editorial, click here.

• Peter Arnett | Editorial | Iraq War | Vietnam

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org