Even though almost everyone knew by Wednesday exactly what the president’s prescriptions for Iraq were going to be, there was a feeling of anticipation as we waited to hear the words actually form on his lips, and to see exactly how he was going to explain the escalation he had planned.
Because of the level of exaggeration, obfuscation (remember those sixteen words), and obscuration that have come to characterize this administration’s relationship with the public, particularly on Iraq, the press had the important role of parsing Bush’s words. It’s one of those tasks newspapers still do better than any other medium. And we were gratified to see in the New York Times today that this responsibility was taken with appropriate seriousness. The paper gave Anthony Cordesman, an oft-quoted expert on the situation in Iraq, a red pen and instructions to sift through the president’s speech and offer rebuttals or clarifications, or point out falsehoods. The exercise (and the excellent on-line graphic accompaniment) are very useful. There’s only one problem: the Cordesman annotation appears on the op-ed page.
Reading through it, it’s immediately obvious how important it is for this type of fact checking to appear in the news pages as a regular feature – and not as some quirky afterthought on the opinion pages. A few examples will suffice:
In the third paragraph of his speech, Bush offers the most compelling justification for the “surge” — to support and sustain the democratically elected government that Iraqis chose in elections last year, elections the president refers to as a “stunning achievement.” Cordesman helpfully reminds us that the elections were “anything but a ‘stunning achievement.’ The system used virtually ensured that Iraqis would vote by sect and ethnicity and that the outcome would further divide Sunni Arabs and Shiites, compounding the tensions created by American efforts to make Iraqis draft a new constitution.”
Bush also claimed that the greatest obstacles so far to bringing calm to Baghdad have been a lack of American and Iraqi troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of insurgents, and too many restrictions on the troops stationed in the capital. This, Cordesman says, “is simply untrue. Other factors — which could also destroy the president’s new plan –have been more important. The real reason previous operations did not succeed was that the Baghdad government would not confront the Shiite militias and Iraqi forces were largely ineffective when they did fight. This forced American troops to act alone, and the result was often a substantial local backlash.”
Cordesman’s meticulous scrutiny of the president’s words – the novelty, in fact, of having every word examined – is worth reading to appreciate. He punches large holes in Bush’s argument. The president takes it for granted that the Maliki government is serious and able to do its part in this new venture. Cordesman points out that the Maliki government might be too beholden to the powerful Shiite forces of Moktada al-Sadr. The president talks of holding the Iraqi government to certain benchmarks. Cordesman reminds us that there “is no real schedule here and no clear picture of what the United States will do if the Iraqi government proves unwilling and untrustworthy.”
Part of the excitement of seeing such a thorough parsing comes from the sad realization that it is only seldom done. Take the New York Times’ own analysis pieces. The day after the speech, Thursday, there were two articles that attempted to place the new plan in two very distinct contexts, political and military. Sheryl Gay Stolberg managed to put the spotlight political risks of the president’s plan, even comparing this moment to Nixon’s 1970 decision to invade Cambodia. And Michael Gordon examined the feasibility, from a military perspective, of carrying out the new proposal.
Both are worthy efforts that break down the implications of the plan, but neither quite captures the same fact-checking spirit of the annotation. Gordon, for example, feels forced to hedge his analysis in a he said-she said format, writing, for example, that “Critics of the troop-increase plan have complained that 17,500 more troops are too few to control a capital of six million people. Supporters say that by concentrating these soldiers in crucial neighborhoods, along with the 15,000 American troops already involved in the operation, the reinforcement can be effective.” Cordesman simply points out the value of previous troop increases, noting that there is not much reason for hope in such a relatively small number of additional troops. Where Gordon cautiously posits that “the performance of the Iraqis” is “an unknown variable,” Cordesman asserts without equivocation that “the Iraqi Army units still have major effectiveness problems. The police still have ties to Shiite militias and death squads, and often are corrupt and poorly trained and equipped.”
We could certainly use more of the type of line-by-line analysis that Cordesman offers. Some may argue that he is expressing his own opinion and so the piece is in its rightful home. But he is an expert, and a more non-partisan one then many. And we would argue that, as long as an analysis like this is backed up with facts, there is nothing wrong with expressing a distinct point of view. His annotation allows us to take a step back from the rhetoric and actually dissect what we are hearing. This is invaluable in an age of truthiness and the word play at which the Bush administration has been so adept. And employing the Internet and its interactive capabilities to present this type of parsing is an excellent use of this new tool. Healthy skepticism of authority is the press’s most valuable currency and there is no time when it is more needed than when our leaders provide justifications for sending more young people off to war. The Times — and the press generally — should apply the same good sense that informed its decision to present this op-ed and make these annotations a regular feature anytime it is warranted by a speech of such life-or-death relevance.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.