Gray Lady Down (34 page)

An editorial in July baldly accused the Bush administration of “misleading the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Qaeda.” But it added, with uncharacteristic humility, that if the country wanted Bush to be candid about his mistakes, “we should be equally open about our own.” The
Times
had not listened carefully enough to people with dissident points of view, the editorial continued. “Our certainty flowed from the fact that such an overwhelming majority of government officials, past and present, top intelligence officials and other experts were sure that the weapons were there.... We had a groupthink of our own.”

These
mea culpas
were careful to insist that the faulty WMD reporting was “institutional,” sidestepping Miller’s personal responsibility. This line was shredded mercilessly by Maureen Dowd in a now-notorious October 2005 column headlined “Woman of Mass Destruction,” written in the shadow of Miller’s involvement in Plamegate, which had prompted some at the
Times
to accuse Miller of protecting her White House sources. Dowd said that Miller’s stories about WMD “fit too perfectly with the White House’s case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq.” In closing, Dowd reported that if Judith Miller returned to the newsroom as planned to cover “threats to our country . . . the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.”

The
Times’
apologies for Miller’s credulous WMD reporting initiated a change in the paper’s reporting on the Iraq War: from now on, it embraced a simple-minded antagonism. After 2004, its coverage displayed a hostile readiness to read negativity into military events and developments where the actual facts did not warrant it. Much of the paper’s war reporting since Keller’s dark
night of the soul seems animated by the need for penance, to regain “our moral compass” as Paul Krugman wrote. Indeed, the paper has seen the specter of rising fascism on the home front along with imperial overreach abroad—fruit from the same rotten tree. One 2005 editorial asserted that “one of the greatest harms from the Iraq conflict has been the administration’s willingness to define democracy down on the pretext of wartime emergency.”

A reflexive opposition to the broader War on Terror grew so steadily in the years after 9/11 that in the early summer of 2009 the
Times
actually condemned a “secret” CIA plot to kill Osama bin Laden, because it had not been reported to Congress. Never mind that most of the public would have been shocked if such a program had
not
existed and would have demanded that one be instituted. The
Times
had decided long since that it wasn’t marching anymore.

Besides caustically criticizing the administration’s many policy miscalculations, diplomatic stumbles and military failures, the
Times
threw a negative light on stories that did not merit such a baby-with-the-bathwater approach. This added up to a body of skewed reportage and commentary on developments in the war zone—all calculated to undercut the war’s legitimacy, to make the United States seem incompetent and morally corrupt, to insist that Iraq was a quagmire similar to Vietnam, and to cast “the surge” of 2007 as a failure long after it was an acknowledged success. The
Times
has given short shrift to the heroism of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and defamed their character by painting them mostly as killers of civilians and abusers of prisoners.

A preview of what would become the paper’s impulse to exaggerate almost any military misstep or setback and preemptively declare a “quagmire” was provided in Afghanistan soon after 9/11 by the paper’s legendary R. W. “Johnny” Apple. In a news analysis under the headline “A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam,” Apple lead with: “Like an unwelcome specter from an
unhappy past, the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.” After a negative assessment of the effects of American bombing on the Taliban, Apple complained about the inability of U.S. Army Special Forces to capture the pivotal town of Mazar-i-Sharif. Yet just after his complaint, Northern Alliance troops with their U.S. advisors overran Mazar-i-Sharif, beginning a swift, almost apocalyptic rout of the Taliban. Apple, finger to the wind, changed his tune—almost comically so. “What a difference a week makes,” his lede said, as he blamed “armchair Clauswitzes” and other “pessimistic prophets” of doom, failing to note that he himself had been one of them.

In the Iraq War’s earliest days, as U.S. forces rolled toward Baghdad, the
Times
continued to be vigilant for failure. In the estimation of TimesWatch’s Clay Waters, it seemed like the paper’s headlines were being “edited by the Saddam Hussein propaganda machine.” Week one featured headlines such as “The Goal Is Baghdad, but at What Cost?” and “Bush Administration Frustrated by War Doubts.” An editorial that week headlined “Diminished Expectations in Iraq” cited a small-arms attack on fifteen U.S. Apache helicopters and said, “It was the latest evidence that some of the initial hopes—even assumptions—that Iraqi resistance would quickly crumble seemed not to be panning out.” Of course, that initial resistance in Baghdad did quickly crumble, although it would later be reconstructed as the “insurgency.”

The readiness to present the news in Iraq negatively and to look for symbols of disaster showed in how the
Times
covered the looting of the Baghdad Museum. Ian Fisher filed a story quoting an Iraqi archeologist: “A country’s identity, its value and civilization resides in its history. If a country’s culture is looted, as ours has been, our history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation.” According to Frank Rich, the alleged ransacking of the museum constituted “the naked revelation of our worst instincts at the very dawn of our grandiose project to bring democratic values to the Middle East.”

In truth, the museum was not ransacked; and much of its most priceless collections had simply been secreted away. Pejorative information about America allowing the looting came from former Baath officials, who had a self-interest in representing the U.S. military as the culprit in the cultural “crime of the century.” In the
Washington Post,
Howard Kurtz wrote, “We’re used to journalists being misled in the famous fog of war, but this is ridiculous.” According to Kurtz’s sources, the actual number of stolen items was thirty-three. But the
Times
was addicted to the narrative of a looted heritage. When the museum reopened in late February 2009, Steven Lee Myers reported that “thousands of works from its collection of antiquities and art—some of civilization’s earliest objects—remain lost.” Myers failed to mention the controversy over how much was looted in the first place.

On occasion, the
Times’
defeatist impulse could be risible. The day before Saddam was captured in December 2003, the paper ran an editorial headlined “The Story Gets Worse.” It began, “Isn’t this about where we did not want to be at this point? The news from the American-led occupation is looking like a catalog of easily predictable, and widely predicted, pitfalls.”

It’s often said that generals are always fighting the last war. But in Iraq it was journalists, especially from the
Times,
who seemed to be re-enacting the past, forcing the conflict into the mold of Vietnam. In a news analysis headlined “Flashback to the 60’s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam,” Todd Purdham wrote that “a range of military experts, historians and politicians” agreed that parallels between Vietnam and Iraq were entirely valid. “Nearly two years after the American invasion of Iraq, such comparisons are no longer dismissed in mainstream political discourse as facile and flawed, but are instead bubbling to the top.”

It was the columnists, principally Bob Herbert and Frank Rich, who most often hit the Vietnam replay button. In a 2004 column headlined “Powell, Then and Now,” Herbert wrote, “in yet another echo of Vietnam, American commanders are begging for more troops. It was ever thus. Commanders thrust into these un-winnable wars against foreign insurgencies always believe
that just a few thousand more troops will turn the tide. Americans were told again and again that there was light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam. The troops sent into that nightmare would dryly remark that the light was coming from an onrushing train.” Also in 2004, Frank Rich dilated on “The War’s Lost Weekend,” writing:

Vietnam was the prism through which the
Times
saw the Iraqi elections in January 2005, noting that the elections that had taken place in South Vietnam in 1967—which it implied were similar—had been an empty sham. John Burns’ analysis on the eve of the vote cited an Iraqi exile: “I would like to believe that we could still somehow reclaim the Iraq we lost in the 1950’s, but holding elections in these conditions will be a calamity. They will set a course on which we can easily drift into civil war.”

The Vietnam lens was also held up to the so-called “Haditha Massacre” of 2005. As Bob Herbert described it in one column, “Marines are suspected of slaughtering 24 Iraqis, including women and children, in the western town of Haditha last November” after the detonation of an IED killed a lance corporal. The case, wrote Herbert “in its horror, if not its scale, recalls the My Lai massacre of Vietnam.” Paul von Zeilbauer filed at least three dozen stories on the alleged slaughter of innocents
in Haditha after the incident first came to light in July 2006. As TimesWatch noted, when the case for calling it a “massacre” was eroding in late 2007, von Zeilbauer sounded rueful, writing: “Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of Marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.”

The
Times’
massive investment in the My Lai analogy came to naught when the whole case fell apart. The one Marine who did go to trial was acquitted in June 2008. News of the trial’s outcome was carried in four short paragraphs deep inside the paper, just as earlier instances of dropped or reduced charges had been truncated and buried.

If von Zeilbauer and his editors hadn’t been so anxious to uncover a new My Lai in Iraq, they might have seen details about the Haditha incident that would have raised caution flags. As the blogger Bruce Kessler pointed out, the Iraqis killed were hardly innocent, having known about the IED; there were contradictory stories from Iraqis about what really happened, and “forensics that did not support a massacre.” Yet even after the prosecutions were abandoned or downgraded, the reality that there was no war crime had difficulty penetrating the
Times’
institutional skull. Reviewing a British film about Haditha in May 2008, Manohla Dargis called it a “massacre” committed by “quick-triggered Marines.” In its March 2010 cover story, the
Times Book Review
referred to Haditha as a crime in line with Abu Ghraib.

The battle for Fallujah, which some military analysts believe will join Belleau Woods and Iwo Jima in the Marine Corps epic, was subjected to the same sullen scrutiny. During the first and second battles for that insurgent stronghold, in April and in November 2004, some reporters and columnists accurately conveyed the barbarity of the insurgents and the bravery of the U.S. Marines. Thomas Friedman saluted the scores of wounded Marines who insisted on returning to duty. Dexter Filkins, embedded with a Marine unit, wrote of “the Marines’ near-mystical commandment against leaving a comrade behind.” But other reporters and commentators fell back on old stereotypes.

In “The War’s Lost Weekend,” Frank Rich wrote gleefully about images of Marines “retreating” from Fallujah—a term as inaccurate as it was pejorative. Edward Wong, probably the most antimilitary reporter the
Times
sent to Iraq, filed one dispatch headlined “Breaking a City in Order to Save It,” a play on the old Vietnam cliché of “destroying the village in order to save it.” Wong wrote that “Shelled buildings, bullet-riddled cars and rotting corpses proved one thing: that the Americans are great at taking things apart. What comes after the battlefield victory has always been the real problem for them during their 19 months in Iraq.” Wong saw Fallujah as the war’s defining slog, akin to what the battle for Hue represented in Vietnam.