The NYT goes to war
David Broder reports the curious incident
Last Tuesday’s Times contained a remarkable story at the top of Page 1. The headline was only mildly arresting: “U.S. Warns Iraq That Progress Is Needed Soon.” The first three paragraphs described the message delivered to Maliki by Adm. William J. Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command: You need to make “tangible political progress by next month to counter the growing tide of opposition to the war in Congress.”
Then, in the fourth paragraph, came this shocker: “The admiral’s appeal…was made in the presence of Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq…and this reporter” — Pentagon correspondent Michael R. Gordon.
Later in the article, Gordon explained that he was allowed to sit in on the session, adding that “it was only at the end of the meeting that American officials agreed that it could be on the record.”
Remarkable. Not only does the admiral invite the New York Times to what would normally be a private meeting, thus signaling to Maliki that the pressure will be publicized around the world, but then the American officials — no reference to agreement on Maliki’s part — tell Gordon, “Go ahead and quote everybody directly on the record.”
From an administration known for its secrecy, this deviation means only one thing: So desperate is the need to push Maliki into action that even the Times becomes a lever. But still Maliki balks, writing in the Wall Street Journal that Americans should understand from our own Civil War how deep the divisions within a country can be. What Maliki forgets is that President Abraham Lincoln raised his own army to battle the Confederate forces. He didn’t ask the outside great powers to do the fighting for him.
In the course of the WSJ piece that Broder alluded to, Maliki said this: “We are training and equipping a modern force, a truly national and neutral force, aided by our allies. This is against the stream of history here.” It is a curious feature of this war, and the creation of an effective and so-called “neutral” force, in the Western manner, that such an enterprise whould be something novel, given the Arab way of war. Can it be done? What would be the ideological underpinnings of such a Western style force — surely not sharia? And there’s the rub in our current situation, where the United States elected, among other things, not to install a strictly secular government in Iraq. It is too late to guess if that might have even been possible three or four years ago.
The traditional inability to create effective, professional, well-ordered, disciplined and entrepreneurially led armies has been one of the reasons that many thoughtful commentators half-dismiss Islamic paramilitary and terrorist units. But recent history has shown, as it did in the day of Churchill (The River War), the real destruction that can be unleashed, as in Gaza, by the young, bloodthirsty, and religiously hopped-up, who come to love the frenzy of wanton destruction. If such men enjoy their days of slashing throats, shooting the random bypasser, and raping and pillaging and then retire back to families and villages that welcome and house and feed them, what, ultimately, is the alternative to razing those villages? (In the absence of destroying the ideology itself that powers this destruction, we have never heard an a plausible alternative answer to this question.)