Will Only Kausfiles Defend the NYT?
Well, sort of ...
Did the New York Times, as charged by Charles Krauthammer and the Weekly Standard, inaccurately classify Henry Kissinger as one of those "warning [President Bush] against going to war with Iraq?" The answer is yes, at least judging from the Kissinger op-ed piece cited by the Times--Kissinger'scrabbed, confusing article generally supports a pre-emptive war. But the Times' critics themselves inaccurately describe Kissinger's position, because Kissinger adds more qualifications than they let on. It's not true, as the Standard claims, that "Kissinger's only qualm was how Bush sells his strategy to allies" -- or, as Krauthammer implies, that Kissinger's only note of dissent concerned "the difficulties and the importance of the post-war settlement." Those are certainly two of Kissinger's caveats. But, more significantly, Kissinger also says the U.S. should seek a new international inspection system before resorting to military action, a war-delaying protocol the Bush administration has pooh-poohed. The key Kissinger sentences:
It is necessary to propose a stringent inspection system that achieves substantial transparency of Iraqi institutions. Since the consequences of simply letting the diplomacy run into the ground are so serious, a time limit should be set. The case for military intervention will then have been made in the context of seeking a common approach.
It's also possible, as Todd Purdum and Patrick Tyler's initial NYT story argued, that those in the administration who oppose the war --e.g. at the State department -- have decided to make a fuss about the shape of a post-war settlement as a means of delaying the entire project (just the way those who oppose welfare reform make a fuss about lack of child-care funding!). If that's true, then Kissinger was serving the anti-war cause more than it might seem on the surface. ... P.S.: Purdum and Tyler did at least seemingly try to present Kissinger's position in all its lugubrious complexity. They failed, lumping Kissinger with Brent Scowcroft as someone who says "that the administration has not shown that Iraq poses an urgent threat to the United States." That's more or less the opposite of what Kissinger says in his op-ed. But then the Times's editors can't be expected to demand too much precision -- they've got a war to stop (and a story to hype)! ... And, of course, Kissinger was crudely, without qualification, listed as an anti-war voice in subsequent NYT stories. . .. P.P.S.: Not that we should care all that much what Kissinger thinks! ... Piece now: Thanks to kf reader L.V.O. for that Kissinger piece link. How does the Houston Chronicle get to post it but not WaPo?. ... Backfill: John Judis, guest-blogging on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo the day Kissinger's op-ed was published, interpreted it as so heavily qualified that it amounted to a dissent from Bush policy (couched in language designed to let Kissinger "remain a player in the Republican party"). But on Meet the Press on Sunday, Kissinger basically said the same things he says in the op-ed -- qualified support for an Iraq strke, as weapons-control measure more than a "regime change" -- while giving less detail (e.g. no discussions of trying out a new inspection system first). He explicitly disagreed with Scowcroft's outright opposition to a war, making it very hard to justify the NYT's overall treatment. ... . 1:17 P.M.
Saturday, August 17, 2002 Where's the NYT editorial following up on Nina Bernstein's front-page scare story on the rise of "child-only" welfare cases? (See somewhat extended comments below.) Could it be that the NYT's editorial board, too, realizes how bogus the story was? ... 11:15 P.M.
Doesn't today's NYT scoop -- revealing that U.S. advisers secretly helped Saddam Hussein more than we'd known in Iraq's 1981-88 war with Iran -- rather aggressively hide the difference between Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran's military, which arguably we knew about and then somewhat hypocritically condemned, and Iraq's gassing of civilians (its own civilians) at Halabja, which there's no evidence we knew about. While national security adviser Condoleezza Rice mentioned both sorts of chemical attacks as grounds for pursuing "regime change" in Iraq, the civilian attacks would seem to be the more important part of that case. By lumping both uses together as "Iraq's use of gas" or "use of chemical weapons," the NYT's Patrick Tyler manages to obscure this distinction until a brief mention in the 17th graf -- thereby giving the impression that his story has undermined more of the case for "regime change" than it really has. ... Fence-straddling disclaimer: I'm not necessarily in favor of attacking Iraq. But I'm against the NYT distorting a story as part of what looks to almost everyone (not just kf) like a coordinated anti-war campaign. ... The American people need both the convenient and the inconvenient truths about Iraq from their newspapers, but it turns out there are powerful forces standing in their way! ... 10:59 P.M.
John Podhoretz makes a good Vulgar Marxist point about the Anybody But Gore movement:
It should be noted that political professionals have a profound personal interest in dislodging Gore. If there is a serious contest for the nomination in 2004, hundreds of millions of dollars will be spread around different consultants, pollsters, media buyers and the like.
I say let a hundred consultants bloom!... P.S.: It's becoming CW that Gore's populism can't have been all bad because (as Podhoretz puts it) "it was only when Gore seized on populism that his campaign began to surge in the summer of 2000," after the convention. My impression was that Gore's convention speeech helped him a lot-- but mainly because it was well-delivered, introducing Gore as a sane, vigorous successor to Clinton, and not because of its invocation of dark "powerful forces ... standing in your way." ....2:30 P.M.
Friday, August 16, 2002
I join my fellow substance-starved bloggers in linking Virginia Postrel's useful counter to bogus anti-globalization rhetoric about how the "gaps in income between the poorest and richest countries have continued to widen." Postrel notes that, if you look at individuals, not countries, inequality has gone down while prosperity has gone up. But it seems to me Postrel has missed the main rhetorical chance, which is to point out that, even on a country vs. country comparison (which is hardly illegitimate), developing countries like China and India have quite obviously closed the gap with the U.S. and Europe. ... The big problem, as Postrel points out, is the very "poorest" countries, which is to say African countries, whose economies have retrogressed because they haven't been able to participate effectively in globalization . ... P.S.: Has Postrel also given away too much when she concedes that income inequality is growing within the "rapidly advancing" nations like China and India (even as their general standard of living rises)? It's pretty clear that free trade makes for money inequality in the developed world, as unskilled jobs go overseas. But what about the countries that get the unskilled jobs? Is the Chinese "Gini coefficient" really rising? More geeky stats, please! ...Update: Postrel says, yes, Chinese incomes are growing more unequal. The geeky stats are here, at least one that shows the income share of the top Chinese quintile rising and that of the bottom quintile falling. But India, which is also prospering but isn't starting from a Communist income distribution, doesn't show this inequality trend.. ... 1:51 A.M.
