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RE: virus:Wiliam F. Buckley Throws in the Towel on Iraq. Now what will newspaper editors do?
« on: 2006-03-02 02:36:35 » |
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[Blunderov] Whither the press? Well yes, that does seem to be the problem.
(Present company, of course, excepted.)
Best regards.
http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_c
ontent_id=1002074217&imw=Y
By Greg Mitchell.
Wiliam F. Buckley Throws in the Towel on Iraq
Now what will newspaper editors do? As the situation worsens in Iraq, one
wonders what it will take for editorialists in this country to endorse the
notion of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. A look back at critical editorials on
the eve of invasion shows how timidly editors have acted since.
(February 23, 2006) -- One wonders what it will take for newspapers in this
country to endorse the notion of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq starting, oh,
how about now? I'll take speedy (the Murtha plan) or slow and steady (the
realistic idea). But some-time-in-our-lifetime (the default position)
doesn't quite cut it, especially after the events of the past few days in
Iraq.
Readers will likely not respond to a call for withdrawal by canceling
subscriptions or making crank calls to editors. A Gallup poll this week
revealed that 55% of adult Americans now call the war "a mistake"--up 4%
since the end of January. And that was before that mosque got its head blown
off in Samarra.
Conservative icon William F. Buckley in a Friday column throws in the towel
on the war, saying bluntly that our "mission has failed....different plans
have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat. "
Bill Buckley can say that, and great moderate and liberal newspapers can't?
Also on Friday, the Pentagon announced that the one Iraqi battalion capable
of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded to a level requiring
them to--you guessed it-- fight with American troops backing them up. The
battalion, made up of 700 to 800 Iraqi Army soldiers, has repeatedly been
offered by the U.S. as an example of the growing independence of the Iraqi
military.
As regular readers, or avoiders, of this column no doubt know, I have pushed
newspaper editorialists to promote a phased withdrawal for more than two
years now. I won't repeat the arguments, except to observe that from the
beginning I have reasoned that newspapers owe a special debt because of
their failure, by and large, to probe the administration's faulty evidence
for the need for war.
Yet very few papers have endorsed a pullout or deadline, not even The New
York Times, which has been extremely critical of the waging of the war. The
papers that have called for an early exit range from the dovish Minneapolis
Star-Tribune to the hawkish Pitttsburgh Tribune-Review, but not much in
between (The Seattle Times, a few others).
This is all the more surprising, and disturbing, since so many leading
newspapers were lukewarm, at best, about the war right up to the time of
attack, almost three years ago. I'm sure that if anyone had asked those
editors if they thought it possible that the U.S. would still have 130,000
troops in Iraq almost three years later -with more than 2000 American lives
lost and thousands more damaged for life-they would have laughed. Yet they
still support the war today. And it's no laughing matter, especially with
civil war brewing.
This paradox becomes plain when you consider editorials on the eve of the
war. Contrary to conventional wisdom ("everyone wanted this war at the
start"), Gallup surveys showed that half the country opposed our invasion
and editorial pages were severely divided. I was reminded of that earlier
this week when I reviewed E&P's coverage from that period. Here is most of
an article that I wrote with Ari Berman on March 19, 2003.
*
For apparently the first time in modern history, the U.S. government seems
poised to go to war not only lacking the support of many of its key allies
abroad but also without the enthusiastic backing of the majority of major
newspapers at home, according to E&P's fifth and (presumably) final prewar
survey of the top 50 newspapers' editorial positions.
Following Bush's 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, newspapers on Tuesday
took their last opportunity to sound off before the war starts. Of the 44
papers publishing editorials about the war Tuesday, roughly one-third
reiterated strong support for the war, one-third repeated their abiding
opposition to it, and the rest -- with further debate now useless -- took a
more philosophical approach.
But, in the end, the majority agreed that the Bush administration had badly
mishandled the crisis.
Most papers sharply criticized Washington's diplomatic efforts, putting the
nation on the eve of a pre-emptive war without U.N. Security Council support
-- and expressed fears for the future despite an inevitable victory. The
Houston Chronicle said it remained "unconvinced" that attack was preferable
to containment, and The Orange County Register of Santa Ana, Calif.,
declared it was "unpersuaded" that the threat posed by the "vile" Hussein
justified military action now.
The San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News wrote, "War might have been avoided, had
the administration been sincere about averting it."
There was always in our surveys a group of roughly a dozen papers that
strongly supported regime change as the only acceptable vehicle toward
Iraq's disarmament. They included The Wall Street Journal, New York Post,
New York Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, and Boston Herald. They continued
their praise of the president this week and celebrated the fact that "the
regime of Saddam Hussein is doomed," as The Kansas City (Mo.) Star put it.
The Washington Post, while backing the attack, observed: "The war will be
conducted with less support than the cause should have commanded. The Bush
administration has raised the risks through its insistence on an accelerated
timetable, its exaggerated rhetoric and its insensitive diplomacy; it has
alienated allies and multiplied the number of protestors in foreign
capitals."
The majority of papers, however, are even more deeply troubled. Large papers
such as the Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian in Portland, and Newsday of
Melville, N.Y., which have long advocated (or at least accepted) using force
to disarm Hussein, criticized their President as he prepared to send young
men and women into battle.
"The road to imminent war has been a bumpy one, clumsily traveled by the
Bush administration," The Buffalo (N.Y.) News wrote. "The global coalition
against terror forged after the atrocities of 9/11 is virtually shattered.
The explanation as to why Iraq presents an imminent threat requiring
immediate action has not been clear and compelling."
"So the United States apparently will go to war with few allies and in the
face of great international opposition," the L.A. Times said. "This is an
uncharted path ... to an uncertain destination. We desperately hope to be
wrong in our trepidation about the consequences here and abroad."
At the same time, some editorials pages, once equivocal about the war, now
got straight to the point. "This war crowns a period of terrible diplomatic
failure," The New York Times argued, "Washington's worst in at least a
generation. The Bush administration now presides over unprecedented American
might. What it risks squandering is not Americans' power, but an essential
part of our glory."
Other papers were even more blunt. The Sun of Baltimore, consistently one of
the most passionate dissenters on the war, began their editorial with the
sentence, "This war is wrong. It is wrong as a matter of principle, but,
more importantly, it is wrong as a matter of practical policy." USA Today
asked Bush to finally disclose risks and costs of establishing a democratic
government for Iraq.
****
One of the chilling quotes in the original article was this, from Newsday:
"At this point, we can only hope that the U.S. military campaign in Iraq is
better coordinated and implemented than the hamhanded diplomatic maneuvers
that led to it."
We all know how that turned out. Why won't newspapers now show some of that
eve-of-war fire, three years later, and help get us out of this disaster?
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.
---
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