During the surreal months leading up to our disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, the American media was awash in unchallenged government falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction, the Hussein regime’s ties to the still fresh 2001 terror attacks, and all manner of other hokum. Much of it was obviously nonsense, even at the time, but a collective war fever had gripped the nation, stoked in no small part by our obsequious media’s stenography of official government fearmongering. We couldn’t let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud, after all.
As the war went quagmire and the various lies disintegrated (no banned weapons found, hardly the greeting expected by liberators), a few media outlets offered mea culpas for their hysterical pre-war gullibility, including The New York Times. Led by the since disgraced Judith Miller, the Times had swallowed a number of pieces of fairly obvious government bullshit and printed them as well sourced fact. The official story matched the media moment and that was enough for The New York Times, at least in 2002-2003.
Now it is 2011, and the long Mesopotamian bloodletting is, for America at least, potentially coming to an end. It’s been seven years since the paper of record admitted it screwed the pooch on Iraq, but some lessons apparently haven’t been fully learned. On the front page of nytimes.com (Thursday) and in the paper as the lead story in the International Section on page A4 (Friday), was a story titled, “In Shadow of Death, Iraq and U.S. Tiptoe Around a Deadline”. While not in the league of Miller’s greatest hits, it carries the unmistakable air of government wishful thinking which the Times has eagerly regurgitated as fact.
The premise of the article is very simple: even though the American and Iraqi publics want American troops out, both governments want them to stay. It’s framed around the recent – ahem – surge of violence against U.S. troops, yet ignores the fact that both attacks on Americans and non-violent protests have increased only since the idea of us staying past the December 31st deadline began to be publicly considered. But that’s not its most glaring problem, not what gives it the whiff of 2003.
The article features quotes from three American military officers but nary an Iraqi. It also makes mention of remarks by Leon Panetta to the effect that if the Iraqis don’t start doing a better job of security, American forces will begin combat again. The only two quotes from Iraqis are from spokesmen, one each for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and cleric/militia leader Moktada al-Sadr. Both strongly reject Panetta. There is neither a quote (anonymous or otherwise) nor a citation of any kind from an Iraqi source to support the assumption in the opening sentence:
The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is privately telling American officials that it wants their Army to stay here after this year.
There is literally not a single word of evidence to back that up in the entire rest of the article.
Almost as bad, the article mentions that any extension will require the consent of the Iraqi Parliament, but fails to mention that a) al-Sadr is in government with al-Maliki or b) that al-Sadr has publicly stated that his militia will resume attacks on Americans if they stay in Iraq past the deadline. In other words, not only is no evidence presented that the Iraqi government actually wants American troops to stay, but for it to happen, al-Maliki would need to form a completely new Parliamentary coalition. The entire piece rests on nothing more than the gee whiz thinking of the U.S. Government.
Thankfully, it is no longer 2003. Instead of being obsessed with Iraq, the American media hardly ever mention it. The Obama Administration has evinced some tepid interest in staying in Iraq; the Bush Administration was dead set on invading no matter what appeared in the pages of The New York Times. But, for this article at least, the Times showed the same kind of naive blindness that once made it so catastrophically wrong.
