From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, April 11, 2003 1:45 P.M. EDT

Censored News Network
Here's a journalistic scandal for you: In a New York Times op-ed, Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, acknowledges having covered up major news stories in Iraq for fear that the regime would kill its journalists or expel the network from Iraq:

I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails). . . .

I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us. . . .

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

This is nothing new to readers of this column; as we noted in October, The New Republic's Franklin Foer reported on the compromises CNN and other news organizations made to keep a presence in Baathist Baghdad. Foer's conclusion is worth repeating:

When I asked CNN's Jordan to explain why his network is so devoted to maintaining a perpetual Baghdad presence, he listed two reasons: "First, because it's newsworthy; second, because there's an expectation that if anybody is in Iraq, it will be CNN." His answer reveals the fundamental attitude of most Western media: Access to Baghdad is an end in itself, regardless of the intellectual or moral caliber of the journalism such access produces. An old journalistic aphorism holds "access is a curse." The Iraqi experience proves it can be much worse than that.

One cheer for Jordan for coming clean about his network's collaboration with a brutal fascist regime. And a question: What are CNN and other news organizations failing to tell us about other thuggish regimes, from communist Cuba to the Palestinian Authority?

Postwar, the Post Wants War
The Washington Post editorial page has generally been quite sensible on the Iraq issue, but an editorial today contains a rather stunning passage. In enumerating some possible mistakes America might make, the paper asks this question:

Will it rush to install an administration of exiles and other favorites, which will then be pressed to adopt policies most Iraqis would likely reject--such as the immediate recognition of Israel?

The Washington Post views the prospect of an Arab country making peace with Israel as something to be worried about.

You Don't Say--I
"Success in Iraq Helps Bush Politically"--headline, USA Today, April 9

Kinsley for President!
Political consultants often talk about the importance of a candidate staying "on message." For a good example of why they're right, consider the case of Sen. John "The Patriot" Kerry. He voted in favor of the war with Iraq, then denounced the president for getting us into a war, then demanded "regime change" in America, then raised questions about his own patriotism. All this served only to confuse voters and distract from the central theme of his candidacy, namely that he is uniquely qualified to be president because he served in Vietnam.

We don't know if Slate's Michael Kinsley was in Nam, but he should run for president. Here's a guy who knows how to stay on message. We know where Kinsley, unlike Kerry, stood on the liberation of Iraq: he was against it. And even though you'd think the quick near-victory and the jubilation in the streets of Baghdad would shake the ground under his position, in fact he's standing in exactly the same spot as a month ago.

"Victory in the war is not victory in the argument about the war," Kinsley argues, and he's prepared to argue against the war to the bitter end:

The serious case against this war was never that we might actually lose it militarily.

The serious case involved questions that are still unresolved. Factual questions: Is there a connection between Iraq and the perpetrators of 9/11? Is that connection really bigger than that of all the countries we're not invading? Does Iraq really have or almost have weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States? Predictive questions: What will toppling Saddam ultimately cost in dollars and in lives (American, Iraqi, others)? Will the result be a stable Iraq and a blossoming of democracy in the Middle East or something less attractive? How many young Muslims and others will be turned against the United States, and what will they do about it?

Political questions: Should we be doing this despite the opposition of most of our traditional allies? Without the approval of the United Nations? Moral questions: Is it justified to make "pre-emptive" war on nations that may threaten us in the future? When do internal human rights, or the lack of them, justify a war? Is there a policy about pre-emption and human rights that we are prepared to apply consistently? Does consistency matter? Even etiquette questions: Before Bush begins trying to create a civil society in Iraq, wouldn't it be nice if he apologized to Bill Clinton and Al Gore for all the nasty, dismissive things he said about "nation-building" in the 2000 campaign?

Unaccountably, Kinsley omits the biggest political question of all: Who will be his running mate in 2004? We suggest Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who serves as House minority leader and who, as the Washington Times notes, remains every bit as disdainful of Iraqi freedom as Kinsley:

"I have absolutely no regret about my vote on this war," she told reporters at her weekly briefing yesterday, saying the same questions still remain: "The cost in human lives. The cost to our budget, probably $100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less. The cost to our economy. But the most important question at this time, now that we're toward the end of it, is what is the cost to the war on terrorism?"

Pelosi also credited the coalition's military victory to . . . Bill Clinton. "This best-trained, best-equipped, best-led force for peace in the history of the world was not invented in the last two years. This had a strong influence and strong support during the Clinton years." She probably also credits Clinton for the Reagan economic boom of the 1990s.

Organic Pork
Those who argued that war in Iraq would be a "distraction" from the effort to restore the integrity of organic food standards have been proved wrong, thanks to Vermont's Sen. Patrick Leahy. The Brattleboro Reformer reports Leahy "led the Senate in a giant step toward restoring the integrity of organic food standards with an amendment slipped into a frenzied late-night session to approve President Bush's supplemental war budget."

"This fight to keep the standards strong is another watershed moment for organic agriculture," says a Leahy statement. "Getting the organic standards right was a long and difficult process, but it was a turning point for the industry. It shows that organic producers and consumers want the organic label to mean what it says."

If the organic label doesn't mean what it says, the terrorists will have won.

Jihad-Beens
"It was a phenomenon of Arab brotherhood," reports the Associated Press from Cairo: "From across the Mideast and even farther afield, hundreds of young men made their way to Iraq to fight the U.S. and British 'invaders' ":

But with the fall of Baghdad and the absence of Iraqi leadership, some volunteers are returning home, disillusioned and angry at the failure of their jihad, or holy war.

"We volunteered to defend Baghdad," said Firas Ali Abdullah, who returned to Syria with seven other Syrians and Lebanese on Wednesday. "Instead of giving us weapons to fight, they used us as human shields."

It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by this tragic tale of broken dreams. On the other hand, some Arab fighters did attain martyrdom; the Washington Post reports that "dozens of bodies of non-Iraqi Arab combatants went down" around a Baghdad mosque from which they had been firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Palestinian Bluster
Saddam-loving Palestinian Arabs have been down in the dumps about their hero's overthrow, but the Jerusalem Post reports some of them are looking on the bright side:

Fatah's top West Bank operative, Hussein al-Sheikh, also expressed his great disappointment at the collapse of the Saddam regime, describing the event as an earthquake. He and many Palestinians said they could not understand how a city like Baghdad surrendered almost instantly, while the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been tirelessly fighting against Israel for more than two years.

"This earthquake makes us proud of ourselves as people who have been resisting and fighting for 100 years," Sheikh said. "We are very sad to see an Arab capital falling so easily, while the small Jenin refugee camp, inhabited by a few thousand Palestinians with modest capabilities, resisted the massive Israeli war machine longer than Baghdad and inflicted more casualties on the enemy."

Of course, if the massive Israeli war machine set out to dismantle the Palestinian regime the way the coalition has done in Iraq, it could do so in no time. It is only because of Israeli restraint that Hussein al-Sheikh--unlike Iraq's "information minister"--is available for comment.

What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Saddam's Fall Alters Israel's Strategic Situation: Experts"--headline, Jerusalem Post, April 11

Permanent Student
Coalition officials trying to find Saddam henchman Tariq Aziz might check with the admissions offices of American universities. The Washington Post reports that among the items found at Aziz's Baghdad home was "Princeton Review test preparation book, titled 'Cracking the GMAT,' . . . marked with notes in the margins."

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports soldiers have destroyed the mosaic likeness of President Bush's father on the al-Rashid hotel's lobby floor, which the regime put in as an insult to the former president. The AP dispatch concludes:

Now, as people in Baghdad rush through the streets yelling "Bush! Bush!" and thrusting thumbs in the air, at the al-Rashid Hotel a decade-long insult has been removed--by a military commanded by a son who waged a second war on Iraq and insisted it wasn't personal.

This smirk from a wire service that insists it isn't biased.

The World's Smallest Violin
The South African Press Association reports from Stockholm on some of the war's littlest victims: Swedish children. That's right, Swedish children:

They may be thousands of kilometres away from the fighting in Iraq, but children in Sweden are haunted by a war which stokes their worst fears about the world they live in, psychologists fielding calls on a war hotline said.

"The global state of affairs affects children as individuals. If parents in Iraq don't have the ability to protect their children, to stop this violence, then it can come to anybody," Sevil Bremer, psychologist at the Save the Children crisis centre in Stockholm, told AFP.

Now, it's true that "peace" entailed exposing Iraqi children to conscription, imprisonment, rape, torture and murder at the hands of Saddam's regime. But isn't that a price worth paying for the peace of mind of Hans Blix's grandkids? After all, Sweden's children are Sweden's future.

Where Did They Bury the Survivors?
"Israeli Forces Fire Missiles at Cemetery, Wounding Seven: Palestinians"--headline, Jerusalem Post, April 11

You Don't Say--II
"Medical Examiner: Eviscerated Man Was Murdered"--headline, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 10

Say What?
"GOP Rams Compromise Budget Through House"--headline, Associated Press, April 11

A Literal Lawyer
"A lawyer who chased and abused two paramedics has been found guilty of offensive behaviour," reports the Herald Sun of Melbourne, Australia:

But Rosemary Brondolino had charges of reckless conduct endangering life, reckless conduct endangering serious injury and unlawful assault dismissed in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court yesterday.

The court heard Ms Brondolino, 54, of Ivanhoe, followed an ambulance to the scene of a drug overdose in Peel St, Collingwood, angry that it had nearly caused her to have an accident.

She then yelled at the paramedics as they tried to treat a patient, demanding their names so she could make a complaint, the court heard.

Paramedic Joanne Selby told the court Ms Brondolino also tried to force open the back door of the ambulance to speak to her.

Seems to us Brondolino's real problem is that she took the term "ambulance chaser" too literally. Lawyers, of course, are also called "sharks"; we hope she doesn't end up drowning.

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