Right before the United States invaded Iraq, Newsweek magazine published a remarkable story. Reporter John Barry revealed that former Iraqi weapons chief Hussein Kamel had told UN inspectors in 1995 that the country had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. As FAIR pointed out at the time, this was a remarkable discovery, especially considering that Kamel's words had be used so often by U.S. officials to serve the opposite point–that Iraq still posed a dire threat. As FAIR pointed out: According to Newsweek, Kamel told the same story to CIA analysts in August 1995. If that is true, [...]
Mar
19
2012
Bill Keller Remembers the Downing Street Memos (Sort Of)
By 16 Comments
Bill Keller's New York Times column (3/19/12) begins with what might be a bit of self-deprecation: "When you've been wrong about something as important as war, as I have…." You might take that as a cue to stop reading right there. But Keller's point is that people should think long and hard about signing on to the latest calls for war. He writes: Sometimes our leaders start with the answers and work backward, fixing the facts to the policy, as the head of Britain's MI6 said of the Potemkin intelligence used to sell the invasion of Iraq. As the link [...]
Mar
06
2012
The Iran Non-Debate, Continued…
By 13 Comments
Glenn Greenwald wrote recently of the extraordinarily limited media debate on Iran, which seems to consist of U.S. and Israeli officials making threats–attack now or attack later–alongside clinical discussions of the difficulties of bombing Iran. There is plenty missing–actual Iranians talking about what war would mean in human terms,legal experts discussing how preventive war (or even the threat of one) violates international law, and so on. Today's New York Times editorial (3/6/12) offers another illustration of just how limited this media discussion is. The paper states: Iran's nuclear appetites are undeniable, as is its malign intent toward Israel, toward America, [...]
Feb
22
2012
James Traub Bids a Fond Farewell to an Era of Constant Warfare
By 5 Comments
James Traub seemed a little bummed in a Sunday New York Times op-ed ("The End of American Intervention?," 2/18/10), that military cuts and changing priorities will mean fewer humanitarian interventions in America's future. So we must accept, if uneasily, the future which now seems to lie before us: We will do less good in the world, but also less harm. A leading advocate of "humanitarian intervention," Traub doesn't waste many words on the "harm" produced the by two decades of them, but he seems pretty sure about the "good." For instance, he writes that the post-Cold War period "raised the [...]
Feb
17
2012
Is Iraq Media Failure 'Coloring' Iran Coverage?
By 20 Comments
Huffington Post reporter Michael Calderone (2/17/12) has a fairly comprehensive lookat the way media are covering Iran (I wish he'd cited FAIR's long record on this; perhaps next time). The point is that Iran coverage looks a whole lot like Iraq coverage, circa 2002. Really bad, in other words. Calderone gets a pretty revealing comment from an insider: One national security reporter, who has covered the intelligence community and Iran but was not authorized to comment, says that pre-Iraq War coverage and recent Iran coverage are "terrifyingly similar." "I don't think we are falling totally back into where we were [...]
Feb
15
2012
Newsweek and the 'War on Christians'
By 71 Comments
A cover that declares a "War on Christians" is bound to get some attention. Writing in the February 12 issue of Newsweek, author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's argument is just as blunt. Enough with all this talk "about Muslims as victims of abuse," because really it's the other way around: A wholly different kind of war is underway–an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm. To suggest that a genocide is underway is, of course, a serious charge. And [...]
Dec
21
2011
Tom Friedman Not Sucking It on Iraq War
By 38 Comments
Today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/21/11) gives readers a sense of what the Iraq War was all about: Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track? Huh. A collaborative effort with the people of Iraq? [...]
Dec
15
2011
In Explaining Iraq War, WMD Hoax Becomes a Footnote
By 17 Comments
The Washington Post's Scott Wilson has a piece (12/13/11) looking back on the Iraq War, where he writes of the "arc of the American experience in Iraq" being "from hope to barbarity, from swaggering invasion to quiet departure." When it comes to the rationale for the entire war, things get a bit fuzzy. Like we pointed out recently about CBS Evening News, the main driver of the invasion–the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction–is reduced to something like a footnote: The premise was contested from the start, a new doctrine of preemptive war tailored to an era in which [...]
Dec
09
2011
A Son's Death Didn't Make a Critic 'Credible'
By 4 Comments
Over on Twitter, Glenn Greenwald recommended this USA Today profile of Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich, who has been one of the most prolific and incisive critics of U.S. foreign policy in recent years. Greenwald called it "surprisingly good," which is right. But one thing about the piece really bothered me–how it dealt with the death of Bacevich's son in Iraq. Reporter Rick Hampson tells that story via the classroom: The students knew that Bacevich had always opposed the war in Iraq. They may have known that his only son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was an Army officer there. [...]
Oct
28
2011
The Nonconspiratorial Worldview of Michael Gordon
By 17 Comments
In Wednesday's New York Times (10/26/11), Michael Gordon wrote a piece headlined "Papers From Iraqi Archive Reveal Conspiratorial Mind-Set of Hussein," about some Iraqi archives that give an inside-the-bubble picture of Saddam Hussein's rule. Not surprisingly, Hussein comes off as paranoid, incompetent and so on. Gordon begins the story noting that Hussein was troubled by the Iran/Contra story, interpreting the U.S. deal with his Iranian enemies as some sort of "conspiracy against Iraq." Gordon calmly explains, free of a conspiratorial mind-set, that Iran/Contra was just an operation "to open a private channel to the new leadership in Tehran and to [...]
Oct
26
2011
Iraq, Finally Learning to Ride Its Bike
By 19 Comments
Richard Engel on NBC Nightly News (10/21/11), speaking about the end of the Iraq War: The training wheels off, Iraq will have to succeed or fail without American troops on the ground to guide the way. That's quite a metaphor–invading and occupying a country for eight years as "training wheels." Engel's report includes this reference to the death toll: Iraqi deaths, almost 150,000, but many Iraqis believe it's a million. Of course it's not just Iraqis who believe this–the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB), which has worked for the BBC, the British Conservative Party and the International Republican [...]
Sep
14
2011
Bill O'Reilly Polices the 9/11 Boundaries
By 31 Comments
Fox host Bill O'Reilly knows a thing or two about boundaries. As he told his TV audience Monday night, some "far-left" radicals crossed the line on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a blog post about how some Republican politicians turned the attacks into a "wedge issue," and referred to George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani as "fake heroes." O'Reilly's reaction: Krugman is "insulting his country on the anniversary of 9/11. That is truly despicable." O'Reilly had a little left in tank, so he went after former Times reporter Chris Hedges for [...]
