[AGL] what's wrong here?

Tue Feb 28 21:19:36 EST 2006

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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.

By Greg Mitchell

  (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 at editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.