Bill Keller, the top editor at the New York Times since July
2003, has penned a
lengthy piece for this Sunday’s Times Magazine, which was
launched online today, as if the world could not wait another day for
it. This coincides with the end of Keller’s tenure at the top, with
longtime #2 Jill Abramson taking over, and his slide over to the job of
opinion columnist. He uses this timing to explain why, after more than
eight years, he is finally writing about that infamous period when (just
before he became editor) he served as a leading “liberal hawk” backing
the invasion of Iraq. Keller claims he couldn’t do this before, as
editor, but is free to do so now, as just another pundit.
There is so much wrong with this
explanation, and so much else in his piece, that one doesn’t know where
to start. In sum, it amounts to another “mini culpa” from
Keller. That’s the phrase coined by Jack Shafer, then at Slate,
describing Keller’s half-hearted editor’s note (neither correction or
apology) on his paper’s error-ridden coverage of the run-up to the Iraq
war. More on that later.
Here are some initial thoughts:
§ Keller sets the wrong contextual tone right from the start,
adopting as his headline “My Unfinished 9/11 Business.” Then he stoops
to citing the birth of his daughter shortly after 9/11 as a motivator
for his hawkishness, because now. "Something dreadful was loose in the
world, and the urge to stop it, to do something — to prove something —
was overriding a career-long schooling in the virtues of caution and
skepticism."
§ So, like George Bush, he turned his "attention to Iraq, a place
that had, in the literal sense, almost nothing to do with 9/11, but
which would be its most contentious consequence." Note the qualfier
"almost" noting to do with 9/11. What, exactly, did it have to do with
9/11 in the "literal sense"?
§ As noted, Keller claims early on that he couldn’t write about his
support for the war after he became editor. “I was obliged to keep my
opinions to myself lest they be mistaken for the newspaper’s agenda or
influence our coverage.” He admits he is “the last of the club to
retrace my steps.” First, that excuse is invalid. There was nothing,
besides lack of of guts and fear of mockery, to keep him, years later,
from revisiting his support for the war back in 2003.
Second, contrary to what he claims this week, he has
retraced his steps at length before, as long ago as June 14, 2003, in a Times
piece titled “The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz.” Here he defended/explained
his hawkishness on invading Iraq in several ways including: “I
supported it mainly because of the convergence of a real threat and a
real opportunity.” Saddam’s “brazen defiance made us seem weak and
vulnerable, an impression we can ill afford. The opportunity was a
moment of awareness and political will created by Sept. 11…” As for the
missing WMD, well, they might still show up, and: “Even if you throw out
all the tainted evidence, there was still what prosecutors call
probable cause to believe that Saddam was harboring frightful weapons,
and was bent on acquiring the most frightful weapons of all.” Much of
the intel gathering community does seem “corrupted” but this hardly
“invalidates the war we won.”
§ Keller, in the new piece, admits invading Iraq was a “monumental
blunder” but over and over rationalizes his support for it. His key
claim is: Sure, in retrospect, it was FUBAR, but “Whether it was wrong
to support the invasion at the time is a harder call.” In other words:
Cut me some (a lot of) slack here.
One of his explanations—“I could not foresee that we would mishandle
the war so badly”—makes him look like a fool, since so many others did
predict that. His second line of defense, “I could not have known how
bad the intelligence was” is equally damning. Note the use of “could not
have known” when a humble, honest man might have written, “I should
have known.”
§ Another way he rationalizes his behavior is to name and quote other
“reluctant hawks”—he calls them a “large and estimable” group—including
Tom Friedman, Richard Cohen, Jacob Weisberg. Andrew Sullivan, Paul
Berman, Fareed Zakaria and Kenneth Pollack. And he points out—no harm,
no foul?—that Bush and his cronies hardly needed permission from the NYT
to take out Saddam. Yet he then admits (in passing) that the
administration loved to cite the liberal hawks to prove the broad-based
nature of their support.
§ While he cites some of what he wrote in 2003, he omits this key
passage: “Bush will be able to claim, with justification, that the
coming war is a far cry from [a] rash, unilateral adventure…” He also
fails to quote from his December 14, 2002 column, where he wrote: "How
will Iraqis react to an invasion? (Many of them with an outpouring of
relief, wouldn't you think?" And he complained: "Why, aside from their
roots in the Vietnam antiwar movement, are human rights activists not
more open to the idea that America can use its unmatched muscle for
good?"
Then, from February 22, 2003: "[W]hat the antiwar camp offers as an
antidote to fear is a false sense of security. In the short run, war is
perilous. In the long run, peace can be a killer, too"
§ Keller claims that the often brave and excellent NYT
coverage of the Iraq war as it unfolded made up for its role in
promoting the same war, with unfathomably deadly and tragic results. He
actually uses the phrase “made amends.” It’s like a father tossing his
kid in a raging river and then bragging about how he then rushed in to
try to save him.
§ Keller falsely claims full and broad “consensus” that Saddam had
WMD, and finds the ludicrous claims “understandable” given Saddam’s
history. He puts a lot of blame for this on Colin Powell and his UN
speech, barely mentioning, for example, the Knight Ridder reporters and
others who raised serious questions about the WMD intel long before that
(not to mention the millions in the streets marching against the war
and all those countries that refused to be part of the coalition of the
“willing”). In a January 25, 2003, Keller himself noted: "The polls that
show support for war steadily dwindling are not likely to get better"
And they didn't.
§ Keller then makes this humiliating admission, after noting that
reporter Fred Kaplan quickly dropped out of the hawk camp: “The rest of
us were still a little drugged by testosterone. And maybe a little too
pleased with ourselves for standing up to evil and defying the
caricature of liberals as, to borrow a phrase from those days,
brie-eating surrender monkeys.” (No wonder he waited until this week to
write this column.)
Keller also makes the embarrassing admission: “I wanted to be on the
side of doing something, and standing by was not enough.” But don’t
look for any heartfelt apology attached to that—beyond the unavoidable
“I was wrong”—even though Keller admits that Kaplan’s predictions about
chaos in postwar Iraq made him a “Nostradamus.” Again, this is
revisionist history from Keller: Kaplan was hardly alone in making those
claims.
§ Keller barely refers, near the
end, to the criminally wrong reporting by Judy Miller and others at his
paper in the runup to the war—and fails to recall his May 2004
“mini-culpa” on these blunders. He took over a year to admit the
mistakes, then put the relatively brief note inside the paper (on page
10); failed to name names, and refused (apparently) to punish anyone.
In a revealing interview that day in the Washington Post, the
notoriously thin-skinned Keller attacked “overwrought” critics of the
WMD coverage. He also revealed that the only reason he ran the note was
because criticism had become a “distraction. The buzz about our coverage
had become a kind of conventional wisdom.” In a note to his staff,
Keller explained that he had no intention of blaming reporters “for not
knowing then what we know now.” Of course, the problem was that some
reporters ignored evidence “we know now” but was also available when
they wrote their false stories.
§ Keller, of course, also took years to push Judy Miller out—and
compounding his earlier mistakes by backing her fully during the Libby
case, when he even failed (he eventually admitted) to ask her for her
notes on her chats with him about Valerie Plame. His paper's probe of
the entire affair concluded that Keller had killed stories related to
the case for fear of hurting Miller's case, which "humiliated" Times
reporters and caused wide in-house dissension.
§ Keller blames “the left” for claiming that the paper’s coverage by
the likes of Judy Miller and Michael Gordon fed the suspicion that the
paper was “not to be trusted.” Imagine that! He even quotes John Burns
slamming the critics: “We were all liars, warmongers, lapdogs of Bush
and Cheney and so forth.”
§ Keller mentions Paul Wolfowitz in passing but fails to note his
lengthy profile of the war architect in the Times magazine from
Sept. 22, 2002. Sample quote: "Paul Wolfowitz, who is interesting and
complicated, has been cast since Sept. 11 in the role of zealot... .
The shorthand version of Paul Wolfowitz, however, is inadequate in
important ways. It completely misses his style, which relies on patient
logic and respectful, soft-spoken engagement rather than on
fire-breathing conviction." Keller described three "important" things
Wolfowitz "brings to the table," including "something of a reputation
as a man who sees trouble coming before others do, his long anxiety
about Iraq being one example." Another "striking thing" about
Wolfowitz: "an optimism about America's ability to build a better
world."
If you think I'm being overly critical, check out Times'
readers responses to the Keller piece here.
It's’s clear that Tony Judt’s label for Bill Keller and other liberals
who backed the war -- “useful idiots” for Bush and Cheney -- is still
apt. Former Bush press spokesman Scott McClellan, kn his memoir, called
journalists like Keller "enablers" for the war. "The collapse of the
administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after
our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise," McClellan
recalled. "In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its
reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."
Greg Mitchell’s books include So
Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed
on Iraq. His latest book
and e-book is Atomic Cover-Up: Hiroshima
& Nagasaki & The Greatest Movie Never Made.
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