With the flurry of congressional hearings, debates over nonbinding resolutions, strangely racist utterances by soon-to-be-ex-Democratic presidential hopefuls and the Libby case all roiling Washington this week, something’s bound to get lost in the shuffle. Sadly, that something seems to be the Senate’s confirmation hearings for the likely next head of the Central Command — which coordinates American military policy in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. (In other words, a damned important job.) Admiral William J. Fallon sat in front of the Senate Armed Forces Committee yesterday as the president’s nominee to head up CENTCOM, but the press’s treatment of his hearing has hardly done justice to the enormity of what the man might be tasked with: Running two wars while managing our increasingly intense stare down with Iran.
The New York Times made quick work of the confirmation hearings in two articles, including a front pager by Carl Hulse and Thom Shanker, and another (on page 11) by Helene Cooper.
Hulse and Shanker’s piece dealt primarily with the increasingly confusing congressional fight over the president’s escalation of troop levels in Iraq, and the attendant votes and proposed resolutions criticizing it, while referring to Adm. Fallon’s testimony only briefly, insofar as he commented on how Iraq is in bad shape.
Cooper’s piece revolved mostly around the hearings of John D. Negroponte, who has been nominated to be the next deputy secretary of state, focusing on the Iranian threat while briefly tying Adm. Fallon’s comments about Iran to Negroponte’s. In all, not a hell of a lot of information about where the Admiral stands on any issue beyond his suggestion that Iraq will be a tough row to hoe (shocker) and that Iran needs to be shown that the United States means business. Surprisingly thin soup, overall.
The Washington Post didn’t fare much better, burying the piece by Ann Scott Tyson and Glenn Kessler on page 11. The vast majority of their piece focused, again, on Iran, “turning to Iraq” only in the fourteenth paragraph, and then only to lightly sketch Adm. Fallon’s notion that it’s a messy place.
The Washington Times did a much better job of covering Adm. Fallon’s hearing, going big on the front page with a picture of him below the quote “I don’t know the details” — which is what he told Senate Armed Services Committee when asked how the new troops that are on deck for Iraq would be used. (We would have thought the Admiral’s loose grasp on the details in Iraq would raise more red flags in the press corps.) The story, by Rowan Scarborough and Charles Hurt, got the priorities right, dealing with Iraq first — we are actually in a shooting war there, after all — and Iran second.
The best job of capturing Adm. Fallon’s testimony, and putting both his and Negroponte’s comments into perspective, was done by the Los Angeles Times‘ Peter Spiegel, in a piece that was jammed way back on page 16. Poor placement aside, Spiegel hits all the important points that were blithely glossed over in other papers: Adm. Fallon’s lack of knowledge about how the new troops will be used in Iraq, his history of diplomacy with hostile nations, and his general support for dialogue with other countries in the Middle East. While Spiegel doesn’t dwell on Adm. Fallon’s apparent ignorance of the ground tactics in Iraq as much as Scarborough and Hurt, he does touch on Negroponte’s testimony and references a Brookings Institution report issued earlier this week “which issued a bleak report suggesting it may be too late to stop Iraq’s descent into civil war and instead called on policymakers to turn their attention to keeping the violence from spilling over into neighboring countries.”
As we said, by far the smartest, most nuanced take on yesterday’s events on the Hill.
What is perhaps most disconcerting about the Times‘ and the Post‘s coverage of Adm. Fallon’s hearing was their obsession with the Iranian question at the expense of exploring the Admiral’s views on Iraq. Iran is a huge story, there’s no doubt about it, and one that deserves all the coverage it’s been getting, but to push the war in Iraq into the background in order to concentrate on the “what ifs” surrounding Iran is eerily reminiscent of what happened in 2002, when the press forgot about Afghanistan in order to hype the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
And speaking of Afghanistan, one glaring omission on the part of everybody this morning — Spiegel included — was any mention that the U.S. is still very much involved in a shooting war in Afghanistan, and one that is showing signs of getting worse. But with Iran making so much news, and the Bush administration intent on pushing the Iran story in order to drown out the disaster in Iraq, who’s got time to worry about the 20,000 American troops currently serving on one of the two wars the Unites States is waging?
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.