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This
conclusion dawned on me while reading The Record of the Paper,
a frustratingly rational, careful yet necessary critique of
the New York Times' criminal coverage of--and collusion in--the
march to war in Iraq.
Admittedly,
I didn't expect much from this book. It seems that everyone
with a DSL line and a livejournal page is a New York Times
critic these days. After reading the dry, legalistic introduction
to Record, I was even inclined to feel defensive on behalf
of the Times. Like, "Why'ncha guys pick on someone your
own size--you know, like a really small academic periodical!"
The
authors of The Record of the Paper, Howard Friel and Richard
Falk, are a pair of grim wonks straight out of the East Coast
Left. As left-rationalists, they take America's official propaganda
about our rational, Enlightenment-based culture very seriously.
Consequently, they believe that the New York Times a) has
a constitutional and civic responsibility to serve as a watchdog
against the government; b) directly influences policy decisions,
as its editorial page pretends to do; and c) is run by responsible
civic-minded professionals who are sensitive to rational debate
and will respond to criticism of the sort leveled at them
in The Record of the Paper.
So
rather than seeing the Times for the nest of Vichy collabos
that it is, Friel and Falk engage the beast with punishing
salvoes of rational argument. Their thesis is that by ignoring
international law, the Times has failed in its civic duty
to inform its readers of the government's mistakes, and therefore
allowed every awful, blood-soaked blunder from Vietnam through
Iraq II. The cause-and-effect aspect of this thesis is, in
its own harmless way, almost as loopy as the material they
cover. If the Times had given more consideration to international
law, they say, then the wars in Vietnam and Iraq might have
been prevented.
The
problem with this thesis is that it assumes that the New York
Times people are nice guys. But what if they're just a bunch
of fucking liars, and they know they're lying? How do you
present rational counter-arguments to powerful people who
lie intentionally solely in order to remain powerful?
You
can't. And that is why Friel and Frank come off as intellectual
Mr. Magoos in three-pointed hats, living in a world of rational
bliss, totally unconnected to the real, awful world where
the brutes and the maniacs murder, lie and plunder at will,
cheered on by a population that demands more lies and more
slaughter.
Americans these days don't respond to rational argument. Now
that I think about it, I don't think they ever have. They
respond to the brute who picks up the biggest stick and beats
it hardest on the ground, which is why the Right has had so
much success over the past 20 years. The Right is merely playing
catch-up with the base nature of Middle America, populated
by the descendents of the same mob feared by Alexander Hamilton.
After
My Lai broke, even after Americans knew exactly what had happened,
an overwhelming majority supported the leader of the unit
that carried out the massacre, Lt. William Calley, practically
forcing Nixon to intervene and soften his sentence. Indeed,
if Americans had their way, we'd probably still be bombing
Vietnam today. It took the Vietnamese whipping our asses to
bring some sense into the nation--not rational argument.
That's
why the Iraqi insurgents are saving us from ourselves. My
own sense is that the Times, like so many other media, trumped
up the war in Iraq not so much because they believed in it,
but because they knew that their brutish, bloodthirsty consumers--the
American newspaper-reading public--wanted war, any war.
Do Friel and Falk know this? Did they write the book to expose
and shame the Times, or just to remind those of us who remember
those jackbooted Times articles that we didn't imagine what
we read, that we're the sane ones, not they.
Which
brings me to the body of the book, the "evidence"
section, which makes for blood-pressure-rising reading. Michael
Ignatieff: That's a name I won't soon forget. An entire chapter
is dedicated to this human hagfish. Ignatieff, the director
of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy
School of Government, was not only one of the most vocal pro-Lebensraum
propagandists in the lead-up to the war in Iraq--in January
2003, he published a Times Magazine piece called "The
American Empire: Get Used To It"--but also, and most
hilariously, the following May he published a piece arguing
for reasonable levels of torture. I say hilarious because
his piece on torture was published on May 2, four days after
the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. It was too late for the Times
to stop publication.
But
then a funny thing happened. As in, nothing happened. Ignatieff
suffered no consequences whatsoever. In fact, eight weeks
later, he published an article in the Times Magazine denouncing
the Bush administration for allowing torture, crying out in
moral outrage that their actions at Abu Ghraib "left
you wondering if they had ever heard of the Nuremberg tribunal."
Just two months after writing, "Sticking too firmly to
the rule of law simply allows terrorists too much leeway to
exploit our freedom... A lesser-evil approach permits preventive
detention, where subject to judicial review; coercive interrogation,
where subject to executive control; pre-emptive strikes and
assassination, where these serve publicly defensible strategic
goals." He got away with it, as Friel and Falk point
out--which leaves me wondering again, what makes you think
that merely arguing well will stop this madness?
The
body of incriminating evidence against the Times--all Friel
and Falk had to do was cite that newspaper's articles and
editorials over the past five years--is so damning that you
wonder how it is that the organization hasn't been targeted
by the International Tribunal in the Hague for war crimes.
A
chapter called "Liberal Hawks" cites numerous examples
of shameless pro-war arguments repeated all over the Times
in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. In fact, "liberal
hawks" is not an appropriate description for the goons
who peddled war--"Squeamish Fascists" would be more
like it, given Ignatieff's and his entire newspaper's grotesque
abandonment of their hard pro-war line once the first IED's
started going off in Iraq.
As
far as I can tell, America today is dominated by two "opposing"
factions: the Incompetent Fascists of the Bush Right, and
the Squeamish Fascists of the center-Right, the sort promoted
in the Times. Which is why relying on mere rational argument
is a cop-out--much as the Times' own credo of "objectivity"
and centrism is a kind of cop-out on genuine journalism. If
the lesson of Vietnam taught us one thing, it's that the Squeamish
Fascists are in many ways more culpable than the Incompetent
ones. When the Squeamish Fascists support war--as they did
in Nam, Serbia and Iraq--the slaughter machine revs up. When
the Squeamish Fascists squeam, as they're doing now, the long,
slow, tortuous road to withdrawal and self-examination begins.
Without the Squeamers, the Incompetent Fascists have a much
more difficult time putting their plans into action.
At
the end of the book, the authors present a "constructive"
argument for how the Times could improve its coverage, urging
them to give full consideration to international law. Again,
this line of reasoning may go over well with the high school
civics teacher, but it has no basis in American reality. Rather
than being constructive, I would suggest we get far more destructive.
First, let's call the Times for what it is. Friel and Falk
won't say it, but they sure imply that the Times is guilty
of war crimes. In 1999, America bombed the main TV tower in
Belgrade and killed several Serbian journalists, citing the
Geneva Conventions articles that say that any organ propagandizing
for genocide is itself a legitimate target in warfare and
for prosecution of war crimes. Let the Geneva Conventions
be the basis for a similar argument against the New York Times:
It is guilty of war crimes in Iraq and Serbia. It deserves
to be punished accordingly, as the U.S. would punish any war
criminal anywhere.
As
for the Michael Ignatieffs, Judith Millers and David Brooks
and all the other Vichy collabos, rather than nerfing them
with well-presented arguments, they should be hunted down,
have their heads shaven, and paraded down Broadway with wire
signs around their necks reading "War Whore," on
their way to being sealed inside the walls of the ESPN center.
Don't ask them to consider international law in their work--apply
international law to them instead, based on their records,
and apply it roughly. That is the only language these people
understand.
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