WHEN IT RAINES IT POURS There’s nothing subtle about the opposition of the New York Times to President Bush’s plan for military action to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This bias colors not just editorials but practically every news story on the subject. Consider the front-page, above-the-fold piece on August 16, declaring that top Republicans “break with Bush on Iraq strategy.” True, a handful of Republicans have heartburn over Bush’s intentions in Iraq–but only a handful. The list grows thin after Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel in the Senate, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. The placement of the Times story, though, suggests a mass repudiation is taking place. It’s not–far from it. That’s the distortion part of the story. The inaccurate part involves former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom the Times names as a critic of military action against Iraq. Not so. He’s an ally of Bush. Kissinger laid out much of the case for invading Iraq to achieve regime change in an August 11 op-ed in the Washington Post. He explicitly endorsed Bush’s policy of preemption: removing a threat before it strikes. The inviolability of the nation-state is no longer the rule, he wrote: “The terrorist threat transcends the nation-state; it derives in large part from transnational groups that, if they acquire weapons of mass destruction, could inflict catastrophic, even irretrievable, damage.” That’s not all Kissinger wrote. He insisted “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity for mass destruction is extremely strong.” He said containment and deterrence worked against the Soviet Union but “are unlikely to work against Iraq’s capacity to cooperate with terrorist groups.” And he said wiping out Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction “would have potentially beneficent political consequences.” He concluded: “The imminence of proliferation of WMDs, the huge dangers it involves, the rejection of a viable inspection system and the demonstrated hostility of Hussein combine to produce an imperative for preemptive action.” Kissinger’s only qualm was how Bush sells his strategy to allies. The Times also added an unprofessional touch. It couldn’t confirm the rumor that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, had met with Bush to air their anxieties about attacking Iraq. In fact, both the White House and State Department said they were “unaware” of such a meeting. So how did reporters Todd Purdum and Patrick Tyler get the rumor into their story? They quoted Hagel as saying it happened. Since when did Hagel become the last word on who did or didn’t meet with Bush? Since last Friday in the Times. A further sign of professional lapses in the service of editor Howell Raines’s crusading obsessions came later that same day in Elisabeth Bumiller’s dispatch from Crawford, Texas, posted on the Times’s website. Her story referred to “the growing chorus of concern among Republicans,” repeating the paper’s erroneous conceit that the “chorus” includes Kissinger. More embarrassingly, she reported that Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, had made the administration’s case for a strike against Iraq “in London, where she was delivering a message aimed at tamping down European opposition.” Actually, Rice made her comments on August 1 in her Washington office, where she was interviewed by the BBC. Our advice to the Times: Take a break from trying to manipulate American foreign policy, and concentrate on Who, What, When, Where, and Why. DENIAL OF EGYPT THE SCRAPBOOK notes with satisfaction President Bush’s letter to Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak last week denying a requested increase in aid because of the imprisonment of pro-democracy intellectual Saad Eddin Ibrahim. It seems Cairo will have to settle for $1.9 billion from Washington this year (the aid we’ve delivered as promised for the past two decades under the Camp David accords), forgoing an extra $130 million it had sought. About time there were consequences for so recklessly biting the hand that feeds you. Ibrahim, a naturalized American citizen with an American wife, has held a position at the American University of Cairo for years. He used to be something of a favorite of the regime–a dissident whose work in favor of free elections, fairness for minorities, and an end to corruption could be cited to show that Egypt was tolerant and pluralistic. Now a prisoner of conscience–at the age of 68, sentenced to 7 years for such absurd offenses as harming Egypt’s image abroad–he proves the regime is nothing of the kind. As our colleague Claudia Winkler mentioned in a piece on our website at the time of Ibrahim’s sentencing (“Egypt’s Sakharov,” July 31), President Bush has called liberty and justice the “birthright of all people”–not just those who live outside the Middle East. It’s good to see Bush taking on the massive challenge of translating this fine principle into action. REPEAT OFFENDER Like history, plagiarism tends to repeat itself. As readers will remember, THE WEEKLY STANDARD early this year exposed several passages in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys” that were either close paraphrases or direct lifts without attribution from three previous books by other authors. One case was egregious enough that Goodwin and her publisher, to head off a lawsuit, agreed to trade a laudatory paragraph of acknowledgment, 40 extra footnotes, and a “substantial” pile of cash for the aggrieved author’s silence. Goodwin offered to pull the book from the shelves and reprint a version with correct bibliographic citations, all the while assuring readers that the “mistake,” as she called it, was solely a result of writing in longhand and not using the “footnote key” on a computer–a work process that she said she had changed immediately after publication of “The Fitzgeralds.” Footnote key or no, Peter H. King reports in the August 4 Los Angeles Times that the same problems also crop up in Goodwin’s most celebrated work, her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1994 volume “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.” The Times, King reports, retained an independent researcher to check a “half-dozen or so” books cited in Goodwin’s history. The researcher turned up “three dozen” suspect passages. For example: HUGH GREGORY GALLAGHER in “FDR’s Splendid Deception”: “FDR had made it a rule, during his first campaign for governor, that photographers were not to take pictures of him looking crippled or helpless. . . . It was an unspoken code, honored by the White House photography corps. If, as happened once or twice, one of its members sought to violate it and try to sneak a picture of the President in his chair, one or another of the older photographers would ‘accidentally’ knock the camera to the ground or otherwise block the picture.” GOODWIN: “If, as occasionally happened, one of the members of the press corps sought to violate the code by sneaking a picture of the president looking helpless, one of the older photographers would ‘accidentally’ block the shot or gently knock the camera to the ground.” The footnote cites the word “accidentally” as taken from Gallagher. Goodwin’s response? “There are thousands of footnotes in the book . . . and they are really good footnotes.” As for language swiped from other authors? “I took the notes,” she told King. “And they were in my longhand. And then, when they got into the text, that was the mistake.” The “mistake,” Goodwin still insists, occurred because a researcher didn’t “cross-check” the quotations with the original material, but she doesn’t want to blame someone else. “That was her responsibility to cross-check it, but she didn’t. But that doesn’t matter. It’s mine. I’m the one.” So it was the researcher’s responsibility to make sure she didn’t plagiarize, but it was Goodwin’s book? Got it.
