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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (248701)	11/17/2007 5:45:20 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

"NYTimes editorials are a reliable contrary indicator for foreign policy. Certainly true whenever the occupant of the White House has an R after his name" Maybe they feel guilty for enabling this war. "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," Bush said in a March 17, 2003 address to the nation. The New York Times' editorial page unskeptically accepted these claims and incorporated them into the paper's own arguments. In a September 18, 2002 editorial, the paper declared: What really counts in this conflict...is the destruction of Iraq's unconventional weapons and the dismantling of its program to develop nuclear arms.... What makes Iraq the subject of intense concern, as Mr. Bush noted, is Mr. Hussein's defiance of the Security Council's longstanding instructions to dismantle Baghdad's nuclear weapons program and to eliminate all its biological and chemical weapons and the materials used to make them. After the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution on inspectors returning to Iraq, the Times editorialized (11/9/02): The unwavering goal is to disarm Iraq, enforcing a string of previous Security Council resolutions that Baghdad has contemptuously ignored. The cost of letting that happen has been diminished authority for the United Nations and a growing danger that Iraq's unconventional weapons will be used in war or passed on to terrorists. Mr. Bush has galvanized the Security Council to declare that its orders must now be obeyed and those dangers eliminated. When the inspectors returned, the paper stated (12/6/02), "Iraq has to get rid of its biological and chemical arms and missiles and the means to make them, and abandon its efforts to develop nuclear weapons." When the inspectors failed to find any evidence of banned weapons, the Times insisted (2/15/03): "The Security Council doesn't need to sit through more months of inconclusive reports. It needs full and immediate Iraqi disarmament. It needs to say so, backed by the threat of military force." As the invasion approached, the editorialists endorsed (3/13/03) British Prime Minister Tony Blair's six-point ultimatum to Iraq as the "last hope of forcing Saddam Hussein to disarm voluntarily." The first point: "Mr. Hussein would have to acknowledge that he has hidden unconventional weapons and pledge to stop producing or concealing such weapons." The Source of the Trouble Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller’s series of exclusives about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—courtesy of the now-notorious Ahmad Chalabi—helped the New York Times keep up with the competition and the Bush administration bolster the case for war. How the very same talents that caused her to get the story also caused her to get it wrong. nymag.com