MSM Strikes Back

Regardless of which presidential candidate is victorious next Tuesday (or in December, if the lawyers have their way), one thing this election will be remembered for is that the major established media news organizations finally and decisively chose to be partisan organs. Monday saw the latest in a notable series of one-sided hit pieces in this election season.

As you no doubt heard, on Monday the New York Times published a story about the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives from an Iraqi military facility (Al Qaqaa). This is taken to be prima facie evidence of mismanagement of the war. Never mind that the Duelfer report counts ten thousand different sites having weapons or munitions at war's end, and that the coalition has destroyed 240,000 tons of explosives to date, and has consolidated an additional 160,000 tons awaiting destruction. For the Democrats, whose wartime leadership is (apparently) historically flawless, nothing less than perfection is good enough. The coalition has deprived Mideast tyrants of twenty Hiroshimas worth of conventional explosives? But one-tenth of one percent of that got away. Inexcusable!

Of course, the Times trips over itself in its efforts to imply that the explosives disappeared out from under the nose of George W. Bush, quoting every defensive official they could trick into thinking that the coalition dropped the ball.

One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official.

This to reinforce the standard story template that there were insufficient troops for the other story template of the poorly planned war. What the Times doesn't get around to admitting is that they really don't know when the explosives were moved out. The presence of the explosives hadn't been definitively checked since January of 2003, and no UN official was there after March, i.e., before the war. In fact, it was left to NBC to bring up the unfortunate fact (noted by its own embedded reporters) that the explosives were already gone before the first American soldier set foot on the site, merely a day after the fall of Baghdad. Someone should ask the Times how many invading soldiers would be necessary to secure explosives that are not there. Someone could also ask them how it feels to team up with CBS for yet another big story to be significantly debunked within 24 hours.

There are quite a few other good questions one can ask of critics on this occasion. If these explosives are as bad as everyone says, doesn't this just underscore how dangerous and treacherous Saddam always was? Does it not also illustrate once and for all the foolishness and impotence of the United Nations, which year after year consented to the continued existence of this mountain of explosives? Inasmuch as the runup to the invasion provided ample time for the explosives to disappear, are the critics ready to concede that the much-maligned "rush to war" maybe spent too much time on ineffectual diplomacy after all? And if we now agree that 380 tons of high explosives can disappear before the invasion, is it asking too much to be more open-minded about the possibility of a couple trailers of WMDs going missing as well? These are all natural questions that could have been raised with intelligence officials and politicians in conjunction with this news story. That such questions never occurred to the Times simply demonstrates that the writers are ideologues first and journalists during whatever time they have left over. A real journalist would see that a dictator who stockpiles four hundred kilotons of explosives while his citizens die of malnutrition is a monstrous threat to civilized nations.

But the Times got in its dig. The damage was done. Twenty four hours was all that John Kerry, Joe Lockhart, the DNC and a horde of sympathetic columnists needed to pound on the President. That there is little logical basis for their allegations of sloppiness or incompetence here is material insofar as their rhetorical attacks will ease slightly, awaiting the next news "gotcha". But the attacks themselves will be remembered more vividly than the refutation, and that is the point. As Churchill observed, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."