just for your enjoyment. All these nasty people, ganging up on the impeccable Gray Lady for no reason at all ;-)
Paper Chase
Integrity issues at the Times.
By Adam Garfinkle
In Sunday's Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer did something that syndicated columnists rarely do these days: He questioned the integrity of the editor of another major paper — the New York Times. Howell Raines, said Krauthammer, is against going to war with Iraq and so has manipulated the news to serve this end. As Krauthammer was skillfully iterating specifics, notably the lame attempt to characterize Henry Kissinger as being opposed to a U.S. intervention in Iraq, Raines was raising the ante. The lead story in the Times on that selfsame Sunday told the world that the Reagan administration had aided the Iraqi military in its war against Iran despite knowledge that Iraq was using or might use chemical weapons. The subtext of all this was clear: The United States has no moral right to depose Saddam Hussein and his Baath party, or to call them evil, because some of the same people urging war against Iraq, now in the Bush administration, are complicit in that evil.
This, of course, is nonsense. That the United States aided Iraq in order to prevent an Iranian victory in that war is well known to anyone with more than a casual interest in such matters, and was completely justifiable. This is what great powers do in regions like the Persian Gulf; if they don't want to dominate the place directly, they play offshore balancer. It takes an unsentimental mien and it doesn't always succeed, but it is time-honored practice and, in lieu of anything that works better, will no doubt remain one method among many in any great power's bag of tricks. As for knowing about chemical-weapons use, this is not proven; and even if it were, knowing that Iraqis might use chemicals on the battlefield isn't the same as knowing they would use them against civilians years later in places like Halabja.
Nonsense it may be, but Raines hit his mark; within a few hours, the story had percolated down onto the Internet, with most of the relevant historical context, as usual, removed. Few Americans can be relied upon to have a deep memory for such things, and my guess is that of the millions who came upon this story on Sunday, and the millions more who saw it in secondary sources over the next few days, it was "new" news to at least 95 percent of them. Most of them, no doubt, have osmosed the moral umbrage Raines planned out for them, and offsetting this impression by trying to explain realpolitik to the man on the street about a war in a far-off land that ended 14 years ago is utterly futile — like trying to explain quadratic equations to a five-year-old.
Opposition to a war against Iraq isn't the only policy issue in which the editors at the New York Times take an interest. Matters Israeli and Palestinian compose another. Now, it is not true, in my opinion, that the Times, or the Washington Post, or the Philadelphia Inquirer, or the Boston Globe or any other major American newspaper is systematically anti-Israel in its coverage. There is some bias sometimes, particularly against the Sharon government and Ariel Sharon personally, but this bias can be found in Israeli newspapers, too. Mistakes are mostly born of a combination of staggering ignorance, acute time constraints, and insensitivity to language. I am often amused by self-described, avowedly partisan American Jews, openly proud of their muscular diaspora Zionism, who nevertheless claim that despite their passions and partisanship, they, and only they, can judge what is objective in newspaper reporting. If the same "logic" were put to them by partisans of causes in Northern Ireland or Sri Lanka or Kashmir, they would swoon in wonderment at such numbskullish audacity.
That said, every so often the Times does pull off a howler. On July 30, the editors ran an op-ed by Peter Hansen, the director-general of the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA). The piece was an unusually open and quite craven plea for money, Hansen arguing that UNRWA is the best vehicle for relieving the humanitarian suffering of innocent Palestinians. Hansen made several claims in the piece — the standard UNRWA party line — most of which were patently false.
But most readers could not have been expected to detect Hansen's mendacity, again for reasons of short memories and wholly understandable information deficits. Specifically, they could not have been expected to know that Hansen led all cheerleaders in mid-April in the campaign to invent a "massacre" myth over Israeli military operations in Jenin. This is what he said in an official UNRWA press release, dated April 18: "I had hoped that the horror stories of Jenin were exaggerated and influenced by emotions engaged but I am afraid these were not exaggerated and that Jenin camp residents lived through a human catastrophe that have few parallels in recent history." In other words, Hansen tried to persuade the world that, even after there was time for early reports to be vetted, a "human catastrophe" with "few parallels in recent history" had occurred in Jenin.
Hansen was simply lying out loud: 52 Palestinians died in Jenin, only about half a dozen of them civilian bystanders; the rest died with guns or bombs in hand. That is because Palestinian fighters were allowed to co-locate their weapons and booby-traps amid civilians inside an UNRWA camp. Either that or, as of mid-April, Hansen had no knowledge of "recent history" in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Sudan and elsewhere.
Knowledge of Mr. Hansen's activities regarding Jenin would have given New York Times readers some background against which to judge his op-ed contention that UNRWA "is committed to ensuring that its installations remain free of militant activity." I offered this background to the Times in a letter to the editor. I thought it the least I could and should do; for some unexplained reason, however, my letter was not published.
Do these two tales, one of the Iraq debate and one of the Levant, have a moral — besides the obvious one that you can't always believe what you read? I think they may: that in the New York Times these days, on certain sensitive subjects anyway, you can read all the news that is fixed to print.
— Adam Garfinkle is editor of The National Interest.
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