When It Raines It Pours, cont. When is a correction not really a correction? Several weeks ago, THE SCRAPBOOK took note of the New York Times’s increasingly strident campaign against the coming war on Iraq. The Times had reported, on its front page (August 16), that top Republicans had begun to “break with the administration on Iraq,” and had included in that group former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The good doctor had, in fact, written an essay in the Washington Post defending the Bush administration’s policy of preemption and offering numerous reasons to support the removal of Saddam Hussein. Wrote Kissinger: “The imminence of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, 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.” The Times repeated this mistake in an article on August 17. So THE SCRAPBOOK was heartened when the Times ran a “correction” of those stories last week. Kind of. The Times conceded that it should not have included Kissinger in the group of Republicans “who were warning outright against a war,” and even conceded that Kissinger “said that a war was justifiable.” But the Times didn’t stop there. Instead, they proceeded with what you might call an editorial-within-a-correction: “Republicans are in fact divided, both over the way Mr. Bush is preparing for the possibility of war and over whether the United States should attack Iraq.” And Kissinger, the Times added, “said that removing Mr. Hussein from power — Mr. Bush’s justification for war — was not an appropriate goal. He said an attack on Iraq should be directed toward a more limited aim, eradicating weapons of mass destruction.” So there! Except Kissinger does believe removing Saddam Hussein from power is an appropriate goal. In the interest of rallying as many countries as possible to our cause (and of discouraging other countries from regime-change adventure), he urged that “the objective of regime change should be subordinated in American declaratory policy to the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction from Iraq as required by the U.N. resolutions.” But Kissinger emphasizes that in the case of Iraq there is no practical distinction between the goals of removing Saddam and disarming Iraq. The one requires the other. So the Times’s notion that Kissinger favors one goal and disapproves of the other is simply false. Why the reluctance simply to admit error? Times executive editor Howell Raines provided some insight in a September 3 appearance on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour. He thinks this is the Vietnam war all over again, and that his paper can head off disaster before it strikes. Raines twice invoked the war in Vietnam as an analogue to the current discussions about Iraq. “I think we’re going to see some revisitations of journalistic history,” he predicted. “For example, as the Iraq debate plays out…I’m hearing a lot of echoes of the early ’60s, when people were saying it was unpatriotic to report the debate over Vietnam.” We can’t gainsay that Raines is hearing echoes — but we suspect this has less to do with the nature of the war on terror and more to do with the fact that the man works in an ideological echo chamber. A forthcoming study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs concludes that the Times’s reporting on Iraq has been measurably skewed. The group examined front page stories in the Times from July 1 to August 25. Two-thirds of them featured quotations evaluating the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. A mere 29 percent were favorable, and 71 percent unfavorable. Even among the Republicans cited by the paper, including Bush and members of his administration, only 42 percent were positive, and 58 percent were negative. In other words, if you read only the Times, you’d conclude that Republicans — and everyone else, for that matter — are against President Bush’s Iraq policy. Just so we’re clear on this point: No one doubts the New York Times’s patriotism (well, someone probably does, but we don’t). It’s their professionalism people increasingly wonder about. Ja wohl, mein General Inspector! Last week, the Times of London reported that Germany has revived its infamous General Staff as part of its military reorganization in light of recent actions taken by the army in Kosovo, Macedonia, and now in Afghanistan. German defense minister Peter Struck was careful to downplay its reinstatement. According to the Times, “the aim is clear: full authority for military planning will pass to senior officers rather than to the civilian Minister of Defence. Previously chiefs of the army, air force, and navy responded only to orders from the minister: now they have a general issuing commands.” Sounds harmless enough, despite previous general staffs’ responsibility for achievements like the Schlieffen Plan, Dunkirk, and Operation Barbarossa. The new head, however, to reassure the Germanophobes, will not be called “Chief of the General Staff and High Command” (Chef des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht), but rather “General Inspector” (Generalinspekteur) — a position filled by such predecessors as Count Helmuth von Moltke, Paul von Hindenburg, Nazi hack Wilhelm Keitel, and the ever-bumbling Colonel Klink (okay, the last one we made up). Still, who knows? Perhaps such restructuring can be put to good use this time around. Despite Chancellor Schr der’s firm opposition to invading Iraq, newly empowered military officers might be more inclined to see the merits of a Baghdad Blitz. The Great Firewall of China Our friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial page are hopeful that the free flow of information enabled by the Internet will one day subvert the Communist regime in Beijing. On balance, they argue, we shouldn’t complain when the likes of Yahoo! collaborate with Chinese authorities as the price of doing business in China. Let’s hope they’re right. In the meantime, though, it looks like Beijing is subverting the Net rather than the other way round. On August 31, Chinese users of Google began reporting error messages when they tried to access the popular Internet search engine. Less than a week later, AltaVista was blocked as well. A favorite in China thanks to its easy-to-use Chinese interface, Google has now joined the not-so-exclusive club of sites forbidden to the 45 million Chinese users of the Internet. Some speculate that the blocks may have been thrown up in preparation for the upcoming Communist party congress, at which China’s next leader is expected to be chosen. The congress convenes once every five years, and widespread access to information about the proceedings is the last thing the CP wants. Then again, maybe it’s just a coincidence, since no one in the Chinese government seems to know who threw up the blocks. The Ministry of Information Industry disclaims responsibility, as do the Public Security Ministry and the Foreign Ministry. The block on Google is particularly lamentable since Google not only provides links to web pages, but also stores copies of web pages, allowing access to them when their home servers are blocked. And no doubt it’s another coincidence that access to Yahoo!’s search engine has been unaffected by the outages. Funny thing: A search for President Jiang Zemin’s name on Chinese Google, by the way, turns up 156,000 hits. Yahoo! China fetches a measly 24 results, probably because of their agreement to make nice with the government. Some subversion.
