HOME / other magazines: Summaries of what's in Time, Newsweek, etc.

Next Up for Regime Change?

By Julia TurnerUpdated Friday, April 11, 2003, at 12:56 PM ET

New Republic, April 21 and 28
Now that Saddam's regime has been shuttered, who's next? TNR contends that Syria's out because—even though the nation trades arms and oil with Iraq, supports Hezbollah, occupies Lebanon, and denounced the war—it's offered valuable intelligence help since Sept. 11. Though some in Defense think Syria should get out of Lebanon, State remains committed to the United States' current "blind-eye" policy, and a stalemate between the two departments will likely prevent immediate action. … Iran's out, too—Bush said so before the war started. Despite the fact that Iran's leaders have since welcomed Ansar al-Islam members fleeing northern Iraq and sent paramilitary groups to prop up Saddam, the administration has yet to change its tune. … The editorial slams Congress for attempts to keep France and other war haters out of Iraq's reconstruction, reasoning that the effort should appear multilateral. Plus, we'll need all the help we can get.

RSS

Economist, April 10
The cover story agrees that the United Nations should help rebuild Iraq, but notes that Bush should not cede total control. Since Bush's success in the war will likely be judged by how well Iraq's reconstruction goes, the mag argues, he'd better retain a hand in the outcome. (The article never explains why the world's fascination with Iraq's reconstruction won't subside as quickly as its interest in Afghanistan.) … The Economist joins the Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf fan club (launched this week by Slate's Chatterbox) and suggests that the Iraqi information minister deserves an Al Jazeera talk show when the war's over. … Why has Castro suddenly cracked down on dissent in Cuba? (He's jailed 78 opposition members in the past month.) Under Clinton, who took no truck with the anti-Castro Cuban-American lobby, Castro tolerated token dissent in hopes of a peaceful rapprochement with the United States. But under the anti-Castro Bush, the same dissenters are seen as a threat to Castro's regime.

BusinessWeek, April 14, and Fortune, March 31
BusinessWeek and Fortune share, along with most of the business press, a fairly optimistic outlook for the immediate postwar economy. … Fortune notes that oil prices are likely to drop, both in the short term (because current producers will face less uncertainty) and in the long term (because revitalized Iraqi oil production will increase world supply). … But BusinessWeek worries that increasing global uncertainty (they're talking terrorism and anti-Americanism) will prevent a return to the high productivity of the '90s because companies are reluctant to invest abroad and may elect costly-but-safe choices rather than risky, cheap ones. (The upshot: not so many factories in Pakistan or Malaysia.) … The Most Counterproductive Argument Award goes this month to the following paragraph in Fortune: "We're not saying this is a war for oil, as the tired antiwar slogans would have it. Trust us: There are easier and cheaper ways to get all the crude we need without touching a hair on Saddam's mustache. But the future of Iraq's oil reserves and their impact on world prices and U.S. economic expansion are among the most crucial elements of the present conflict." Wait, so we're not fighting to control oil, we're just fighting to lower oil prices? In Other Magazines generally finds the no-war-for-oil slogan less than convincing, too, but this semantic shuffle-ball-change makes her wonder.

Entertainment Weekly, April 11
Much has been made of the rivalry between US Weekly—Bonnie Fuller's vamped-up, razor-sharp tabloid—and People magazine—Time Inc.'s soft-focus weekly. But with its gossipy, snide tone, US has also quietly been stealing readers (at least this one) from the famously snarky Entertainment Weekly. … This week, EW freshens up its front-of-book section, introducing, among other things, a CNN-style entertainment-news crawl along the bottom of the page. (Most cryptic item: "Deodorant-ad ditty 'MakeLuv' tops U.K. charts.") … TV critic Ken Tucker, advocate of underdog shows, offers a welcome shot of attitude up front, defending CBS's now-canceled Robbery Homicide Division. … No matter how well you do in EW's "Great American Pop Culture Quiz," you're a loser. If you don't know that Suge Knight and John Wayne share the same first name—it's Marion—you lose. But if you've actually bothered to pack your brain with such useless info? Well … (And before any trivia buff hackles start to rise, please note that IOM would much prefer to be the second kind of loser. Sadly, she is the first.)

Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, April 7
While the Time and U.S. News cover stories offer overviews of the war, this week's Newsweek emphasizes the experiences of individual soldiers. The weeklies have struggled to pull together timely recaps of this closely covered conflict; is Newsweek rolling out a new strategy? Its cover story highlights last week's big news: the heart-tugging rescue of Jennifer Lynch. (Her rescue warranted only small sidebars in Time and U.S. News.) … And a piece titled "The Grunt's War" offers a soldier's-eye view of the rush toward Baghdad, presenting a handful of soldiers in the 3^rd Infantry Division as though they're characters in a play. There's a "tough-talking" lieutenant colonel and a 32-year-old private who gets called out—by name—as a "somewhat clumsy soldier" and "a particularly needy grunt."

Meanwhile, cover stories in Time and U.S. News focus on the upcoming battle in Baghdad, sketching out possible strategies for taking the city and capturing Saddam. Both mags cite coalition plans to set up camp just outside the capital and stage strategic attacks on the city, sector by sector. Possible snags: Time reports that Syrian and Lebanese soldiers are already in Baghdad, lending a hand to the Republican Guard; Newsweek's Jonathan Alter cites infiltration from Syria and Iran; and U.S. News warns that the difficulties British forces have faced in taking Basra may foreshadow the battle for Baghdad. Also, U.S. News reports that on the day the Army took Baghdad's airport last week, Marines planned to take Saddam City, an "ironically named" Shiite slum where anti-Saddam sentiment should run high. But Saddam seems to still have the power to mount localized resistance: Intelligence sources suggested that Saddam's regime had bolstered defenses in the neighborhood, and the plan was called off.

All three mags offer pieces on SARS. Time focuses on the science of identifying the virus and tracking its path of transmission; the virus seems to get less virulent as it is passed along, which may explain the lack of U.S. fatalities so far. U.S. News notes that travel to Asia will take the biggest hit.

Weekly Standard, April 14
Is Howard Dean the new John McCain? Not according to the Standard. This issue damns with faint praise, pegging Dean as the new Bill Clinton: a "gifted" politician with a "knack for making people forget themselves and swoon." The piece points out that Dean's anti-war stance won't help him when the war ends, but it won't hurt him either, and dubs him a "legitimate, first-tier candidate." … Stephen F. Hayes continues his reports on the activities of the Free Iraqi Forces; this one portrays the conflict these soldiers feel when confronted with a tepid reception from their countrymen in southern Iraq. (It would be even better if Hayes could bring himself to leave out sentences like, "Anyone who wonders what Iraqis think of the war of liberation need only listen to these men"; the Iraqi exiles fighting with U.S. troops are a fascinating microcosm but hardly the whole story.)

The New Yorker, April 14
Windows onto the rest of that story can be found in this week's New Yorker. In northern Iraq, Jeffrey Goldberg writes, the Kurds are well aware that their media moment has come. The two major Kurdish groups, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, are long-standing violent rivals; now they emphasize their current cooperation in order to win U.S. support. Goldberg describes a lunch meeting between the leaders of the two groups and a few journalists, and reports that the men also met that day with Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, and tried to persuade the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq—a Shiite resistance group not known for its pro-American stance—to join the resistance coalition. … Jon Lee Anderson reports from Baghdad, where he snags an impromptu interview with a few "tribal sheiks" visiting the city to declare their loyalty to Saddam's regime and receive instruction on resisting American forces.