NYT’s strange hypocrisy on Miller and WMD
We wrote on this below, but that was before we discovered this great piece by Robert Kagan in the WaPo, showing that the NYT was among the publications most vocal in trumpeting Saddam’s having WMD year after year after year:
It is that the Times, along with The Post and other news organizations, ran many alarming stories about Iraq’s weapons programs before the election of George W. Bush. A quick search through the Times archives before 2001 produces such headlines as “Iraq Has Network of Outside Help on Arms, Experts Say”(November 1998), “U.S. Says Iraq Aided Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan”(August 1998), “Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort” (February 2000), “Signs of Iraqi Arms Buildup Bedevil U.S. Administration” (February 2000), “Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program” (July 2000). (A somewhat shorter list can be compiled from The Post’s archives, including a September 1998 headline: “Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported.”) The Times stories were written by Barbara Crossette, Tim Weiner and Steven Lee Myers; Miller shared a byline on one…..
Times editorials insisted the danger from Iraq was imminent. When the Clinton administration attempted to negotiate, they warned against letting “diplomacy drift into dangerous delay. Even a few more weeks free of inspections might allow Mr. Hussein to revive construction of a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon.” They also argued that it was “hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as his country’s salvation.” “As Washington contemplates an extended war against terrorism,” a Times editorial insisted, “it cannot give in to a man who specializes in the unthinkable.”…..
As we wage what the Times now calls “the continuing battle over the Bush administration’s justification for the war in Iraq,” we will have to grapple with the stubborn fact that the underlying rationale for the war was already in place when this administration arrived.
We quote again the strange anger from Bill Keller at the Times, who, we think, typifies the peculiar blend of Times’ hubris and radical chic that causes Timesmen to believe that the former newspaper of record had the power to somehow stop the Iraq war through the might of their pens:
Keller told Calame that “by waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, I allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, I fear I fostered an impression that the Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If I had lanced the WMD boil earlier, I suspect our critics — at least the honest ones — might have been less inclined to suspect that, THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of the reporter above the duty to its readers.”