THE WASHINGTON POST’S sense of priorities has me scratching my head. Yesterday morning it ran one of the great scoops of our soon-to-be-a-year-old War on Islamism, under the headline Al Qaeda Deputies Harbored by Iran.
The New York Times’s own big scoop–“U.S. Troops Focus on Border’s Caves to Seek Bin Laden”–couldn’t match it. What can you possibly find out by reading the Times story? Bin Laden is either alive or he isn’t. Either we’re on his trail or we’re not. As soon as someone knows something definitive, we’re not going to care about the “focus” of our searches. Until then, we don’t know anything to speak of. And if you read down in the story, you find the Times correspondents, Ian Fisher and John F. Burns, admitting as much: “The hunt for Mr. bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has proved to be as murky as the silted rivers flowing through these inhospitable mountains.” Well, isn’t that literary? I think I’ll wait to pay attention until the hunt has become as sharp and well-honed as the jagged rock promontories that seem to loom, hauntingly, over the Afghan landscape. Either that or pour myself a beer that has a taste as big and fresh as a mountain stream.
The Post story, by contrast, had all sorts of stuff in it, the kind of stuff that provokes reflection, including:
(1) Two top lieutenants of al Qaeda are being hidden, along with lots of other terrorist operatives, in eastern Iran. The Post even names the towns. This casts the Iranian “cooperation” with our war on terror in a different light. Yes, they’re extraditing the occasional small fish to Saudi Arabia, but apparently the better to throw Western public opinion off the trail. This also means that the Khatami-ite “reformers” in Iran have considerably less sway than we’ve been led to believe.
(2) One of the holed-up terrorists, the religious leader Abu Hafs, is someone our government had reported killed in January, throwing into question how much we really know about whom we’ve neutralized, and whom we haven’t.
(3) The Post cited multiple intelligence sources, “who are outside Saudi Arabia and did not want their names or countries disclosed.” Why was Post reporter Peter Finn so quick to exclude–but not quite exclude–the Saudis? Note that he said his sources were “outside Saudi Arabia,” not that they weren’t Saudi Arabian. The Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, had spent the previous day in Crawford, Texas. That’s outside Saudi Arabia. Was the House of Saud offering us an intelligence bundle as a good-faith gesture? “You’re on your own against Saddam and his poison gas,” seems to be the message. “But here’s a good piece of gossip.”
(4) The Post also implied that Ayman al-Zawahiri is probably still with bin Laden. Why does al-Zawahiri’s role seem to expand the more we know about al Qaeda? Does anyone else have the feeling that when the definitive story of al Qaeda is written, bin Laden will turn out to have been kind of a hands-off CEO, leaving the details to al-Zawahiri and the late Muhammad Atef, while he pursued whatever the Islamic fundamentalist equivalent of golf is?
But none of these is the big shocker of the Post story. The big shocker is that it ran in the middle of the front page, below a story about how Washington, D.C.’s bid for the 2012 Olympics had failed. You cannot get more parochial than this. The Post gets the scoop of the year and buries it under a human-interest story that wouldn’t make page one if it had occurred in Jefferson City, Missouri (“Show-Me State’s Olympic Dreams Dashed”). Did anyone seriously think D.C. had a chance? Apparently, because Anthony Williams was shown with his head in his hands crying tears . . . well, crying tears as salty as the broad Atlantic across whose roiling waters his fond hopes of Olympic glory had been swept.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
