The Media's Antiwar Script
Was the New York Times watching the same war as the rest of us?
Tuesday, April 15, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Just a few days into the Iraq campaign, it became clear that it didn't take military briefings to tell how things were going. You could get a clear sense of that merely by following the overnight shifts in the torrents of charges, questions, and sudden new urgent concerns pouring forth from the peace camp. Ten days ago, an attorney acquaintance in whose blood there lies congealed every article of faith spawned by a past as a '60s political activist began hurling queries about what the administration would do if it found no weapons of mass destruction. What would all the supporters of this war for oil say?
A few hours later, one of the hosts of a New England Cable Network program erupted in fevered questions about the weapons of mass destruction that hadn't been found. Doing a guest stint on the show, and out of touch with news reports all day, I suddenly understood--the war must have taken a decisive turn, and not in favor of the Iraqis. And that indeed was the case April 4, a day of breakthrough advances for the coalition, clearly headed for speedy victory.
Gone, now, was the crowing punditry, the front page stories of "unexpected resistance" and the prowess and determination of Saddam's elite guard units--the dark comparisons to Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan, the confident suggestions the war could last years, and not least, the sneering about American expectations of quick victory. In its place had come the new subject: the as yet undiscovered weapons of mass destruction--not the most potent of themes, given the brief time the war had been under way, as even the most impaired zealots of the antiwar coalition must have understood.
That would have to do, nonetheless, until the arrival of the next crisis--the pictures of liberated Iraqis pounding away at Saddam's statue. It fell to the inveterately high-minded Tom Friedman--whose dexterity in taking every side of every issue ranks as one of the marvels of the age--to write on the conspicuous absence of celebrating Iraqis: a piece that appeared, by a stroke of unkind fate, the very day that TV screens carried virtually nothing but scenes of joyful Iraqis.
But the fates had also provided a new issue--the brief draping of the American flag over the head of a statue of Saddam. Glomming on at the first whiff of a possible embarrassment, anchors began asking tentatively, then more certainly, how this brief scene--the flag quickly came down--might affect the Arab street.
Reporters and analysts came forth to offer their meditations; within hours, we had the makings of a story to run on for days, about the devastating impact of this alleged symbol of American imperialism. As late as Sunday, a Stanford linguist opined, in the pages of the New York Times, on the "problematic" nature of this gesture, and how it brought home how "imprudent and simplistic uncritical flag-waving can be." And besides, the young Marine guilty of this act had put up an American, and not a coalition flag.
By then, the flag story had been joined by the looting story, an indisputably sad affair amplified beyond all reason. No one should have been surprised at Donald Rumsfeld's knife-edge response when Tim Russert asked how it was that Americans had "allowed" the looting. Mr. Russert's phrasing may have been inadvertent. The secretary of defense's thrusting retort "Allowed--allowed?" was not: Its tone summed up all that the sane might feel--and doubtless do--after exposure to endless coverage of looting, events now so magnified as to have been made to seem the central fact of the war that brought the overthrow of Saddam.
But there is no inadvertence in the ill-concealed hostility now coming from the antiwar camp--only a kind of awkward pretense to give credit to the American and British forces that won so swift a victory. And grudging credit it is, replete with arguments that, of course, everyone knew they would win overwhelmingly. That assurance did not, of course, keep this crowd from issuing their dire predictions the first day or two of the war, about the "quagmire" and new Vietnam.
The latest entry in the grudging acknowledgments department comes from Saturday's New York Times editorial that first pays tribute to the great skill of the American forces, credits Mr. Rumsfeld's push for a smaller more agile force, and then goes on to the main point: whether the victory could really be attributed to U.S. military excellence. The Iraqis, it notes, fought poorly and ineptly--perhaps this was simply "a lopsided fight."
The most noteworthy specimen to date, though, must be the lead Talk of the Town item in the April 14 New Yorker, in which Hendrick Hertzberg writes: "By the end of last week--even though American troops who, by all accounts, have fought honorably and without undue cruelty, were at the gates of Baghdad--it was too late for the rosy scenario of the cakewalk conservatives." We may take it, from that "undue cruelty" reference, that Mr. Hertzberg is willing to credit American troops mainly because they failed to perpetrate war crimes. It is a pronouncement worth remembering, and not for what it says about the troops.
Ms. Rabinowitz is an editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal and author of "No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times," which you can buy at the OpinionJournal bookstore.
Copyright © 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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