Gray Lady Down

by William McGowan

  The Vietnam lens was also held up to the so-called “Haditha Massacre” of 2005. As Bob Herbert described it in one column, “Marines are suspected of slaughtering 24 Iraqis, including women and children, in the western town of Haditha last November” after the detonation of an IED killed a lance corporal. The case, wrote Herbert “in its horror, if not its scale, recalls the My Lai massacre of Vietnam.” Paul von Zeilbauer filed at least three dozen stories on the alleged slaughter of innocents in Haditha after the incident first came to light in July 2006. As TimesWatch noted, when the case for calling it a “massacre” was eroding in late 2007, von Zeilbauer sounded rueful, writing: “Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of Marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.”

  The Times’ massive investment in the My Lai analogy came to naught when the whole case fell apart. The one Marine who did go to trial was acquitted in June 2008. News of the trial’s outcome was carried in four short paragraphs deep inside the paper, just as earlier instances of dropped or reduced charges had been truncated and buried.

  If von Zeilbauer and his editors hadn’t been so anxious to uncover a new My Lai in Iraq, they might have seen details about the Haditha incident that would have raised caution flags. As the blogger Bruce Kessler pointed out, the Iraqis killed were hardly innocent, having known about the IED; there were contradictory stories from Iraqis about what really happened, and “forensics that did not support a massacre.” Yet even after the prosecutions were abandoned or downgraded, the reality that there was no war crime had difficulty penetrating the Times’ institutional skull. Reviewing a British film about Haditha in May 2008, Manohla Dargis called it a “massacre” committed by “quick-triggered Marines.” In its March 2010 cover story, the Times Book Review referred to Haditha as a crime in line with Abu Ghraib.

  The battle for Fallujah, which some military analysts believe will join Belleau Woods and Iwo Jima in the Marine Corps epic, was subjected to the same sullen scrutiny. During the first and second battles for that insurgent stronghold, in April and in November 2004, some reporters and columnists accurately conveyed the barbarity of the insurgents and the bravery of the U.S. Marines. Thomas Friedman saluted the scores of wounded Marines who insisted on returning to duty. Dexter Filkins, embedded with a Marine unit, wrote of “the Marines’ near-mystical commandment against leaving a comrade behind.” But other reporters and commentators fell back on old stereotypes.

  In “The War’s Lost Weekend,” Frank Rich wrote gleefully about images of Marines “retreating” from Fallujah—a term as inaccurate as it was pejorative. Edward Wong, probably the most antimilitary reporter the Times sent to Iraq, filed one dispatch headlined “Breaking a City in Order to Save It,” a play on the old Vietnam cliché of “destroying the village in order to save it.” Wong wrote that “Shelled buildings, bullet-riddled cars and rotting corpses proved one thing: that the Americans are great at taking things apart. What comes after the battlefield victory has always been the real problem for them during their 19 months in Iraq.” Wong saw Fallujah as the war’s defining slog, akin to what the battle for Hue represented in Vietnam.

  By 2005, pressure was building among largely Democratic opponents of the war. The Times gave them a boost by lionizing John Murtha, a Democratic congressman and ex-Marine who had initially voted for the war in Iraq but changed his position. As Eric Schmidt reported in November 2005, Murtha believed that “after more than two years of combat, American forces had united a disparate array of insurgents in a seemingly endless cycle of violence that was impeding Iraq’s progress toward stability and self-governance. He said the 153,000 American troops in Iraq should be pulled out within six months.” Allowing Murtha, and himself, the gratuitous “editorial needle” that Abe Rosenthal was always watching out for, Schmidt quoted Murtha’s derisive response to Vice President Cheney’s call to stay the course: “I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war and then don’t like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done.” For those who didn’t get the reference, Schmidt added: “In the Vietnam era, Mr. Cheney had five deferments and did not serve in the military.”

  Ironically, the talk of withdrawal, so enthusiastically supported by the Times, resulted in the surge of 2007, sending an additional 30,000 troops into insurgent areas of Baghdad and other violent cities to establish order and public safety. The plan for the surge enraged the Times, and those who supported it were chastised publicly. When the military correspondent Michael Gordon maintained on Charlie Rose that the troop increase was a chance worth taking, the comment set off a firestorm in the newsroom. The public editor Byron Calame wrote that “Times editors have carefully made clear their disapproval of the expression of a personal opinion about Iraq on national television by the paper’s chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon.” In a kind of weird, second-hand Maoist self-criticism, Gordon’s editor, Philip Taubman, told Calame, “I would agree with you that he stepped over the line on the ‘Charlie Rose’ show. I have discussed the appearance with Michael and I am satisfied that the comments on the Rose show were an aberration.... He agrees his comments on the show went too far.’”

  This was nothing compared with the anti-surge rhetoric from columnists and editorial writers. In early February, Frank Rich opined, “What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began.” Doubling down on his mistake, Rich wrote another column a month later declaring, in a burst of wishful thinking, that while Moktada al-Sadr’s militia appeared to be melting away, it was actually preparing a Tet-like surprise comeback. Nicholas Kristof argued that “Keeping troops in Iraq has steadily increased the risk of a bloodbath. The best way to reduce that risk is, I think, to announce a timetable for withdrawal and to begin a different kind of surge: of diplomacy.” Maureen Dowd invoked Vietnam: “So many died because of ego and deceit—because L.B.J. and Robert McNamara wanted to save face or because Henry Kissinger wanted to protect Nixon’s re-election chances. Now the Bush administration finds itself at that same hour of shame. It knows the surge is not working. Iraq is in a civil war, with a gruesome bonus of terrorists mixed in.” In another column, Dowd called Iraq a “giant Doom Magnet.” Finally, there was Paul Krugman, writing in mid September, when the troop increase was beginning to bear fruit: “The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia.”

  Times editorials were equally gloomy. One in March 2007 maintained that “Victory is no longer an option in Iraq, if it ever was. The only rational objective left is to responsibly organize America’s inevitable exit.” In April, the editorial page concluded, “There is no possible triumph in Iraq and very little hope left.” The most egregiously defeatist editorial about the surge—about the whole Iraq War, for that matter—came in early July 2007. Headlined “The Road Home,” it said that “additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything” and that “it is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.” The editorial board did acknowledge that Iraq might be consumed by political chaos, maybe even genocide, and could become a terrorist platform in the future. “Yes, withdrawal might lead to Bosnian-style partition,” the Times admitted, but “that would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes.”

  When General David Petraeus testified before Congress in September 2007, Paul Krugman shaped the battlefield by asserting that the general “has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters.” The editorial page took up the standard by indicting General Petraeus’s testimony as filled with “empty calories,” and hoped that Congress was not fooled by “the silve
r stars, charts and rhetoric of yesterday’s hearing. Even if the so-called surge has created breathing room, Iraq’s sectarian leaders show neither the ability nor the intent to take advantage of it.”

  What was most disrespectful toward the general, however, was a full-page ad that the paper allowed the antiwar group MoveOn. org to run on the day of his testimony. Under a bold headline, “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” with the subhead “Cooking the Books for the White House,” the ad claimed that “every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed,” and that “Iraq is mired in an un-winnable religious civil war.”

  For this, the Times was denounced by politicians on both sides of the aisle and deluged with more than four thousand emails calling the ad despicable, disgraceful and treasonous. When it was rumored that MoveOn.org may have received a discount for the ad, the Times media reporter Katherine Seelye duly reported a company spokeswoman’s denial. But in a postmortem on the controversy, the public editor Clark Hoyt determined that MoveOn.org did indeed get a price break to which it was not entitled. He also argued that the ad violated the paper’s own written standards barring “attacks of a personal nature.” It was clear from Hoyt’s comments that the ad certainly didn’t bother Sulzberger, who told him, “Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people.”

  The surge certainly did not solve all of Iraq’s problems, but it did provide security and psychological reassurance, and, most importantly, it kept the United States from suffering a humiliating defeat at a time when opponents across the world were watching for a sign of weakness or diminished resolve. Yet it took the Times quite a while to acknowledge the success of this audacious political and military move. Finally, on November 20, 2007, it ran a piece headlined “Baghdad’s Weary Start to Exhale as Security Improves,” where Damien Cave and Alissa Rubin wrote: “Even though the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question, Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country. The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real.”

  Although the Times editorial page did express relief that those who served in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan were not demonized as Vietnam veterans had been, the paper has nevertheless routinely disparaged the U.S. military, representing it as mainly lower-class, uneducated and institutionally misogynistic, as well as disproportionately minority—in effect, a mercenary force of false consciousness.

  In 2005, Bob Herbert wrote that there was something very, very wrong with a situation in which “College kids in the U.S. are playing video games and looking forward to frat parties while their less fortunate peers are rattling around like moving targets in Baghdad and Mosul, trying to dodge improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades.... If the war in Iraq is worth fighting—if it’s a noble venture, as the hawks insist it is—then it’s worth fighting with the children of the privileged classes. They should be added to the combat mix. If it’s not worth their blood, then we should bring the other troops home.”

  In a February 2006 piece on efforts to recruit Latinos, Lizette Alvarez wrote that “Critics also say that Latinos often wind up as cannon fodder on the casualty-prone front lines,” and that “Hispanics make up only 4.7 percent of the military’s officer corps.” Sewell Chan did essentially the same piece in 2008, quoting an anti-Bush activist who claimed that “Latinos have been disproportionately represented among service members who have fought and died in Iraq.”

  There were plenty of experts contradicting the Times’ view of the voluntary forces as minority, ill educated and poor, but their views had trouble penetrating the paper’s news pages. A Heritage Foundation report, for instance, found that “The average American enlistee is more educated—not less—than the average young civilian. The civilian graduation rate is seventeen percentage points lower than that of military recruits. Wartime recruits also come from wealthier neighborhoods than their civilian counterparts, on average. And the force has been trending towards wealthier troops and smarter troops since the war in Iraq began in 2003.” The report added that the one hundred Zip Codes with the highest proportions of African Americans were actually underrepresented among military enlistees in 2005. In fact, Pentagon enlistee data “show that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 13.7 percent in 2005.”

  According to the Times, the face of the military is also pock-marked with alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, domestic violence and criminal pathology. In “War Torn,” a series that ran from January to July of 2008, Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez reported on what they claimed were unacknowledged cases of violence committed by veterans after they returned from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories all seemed calculated to delegitimize the war, while also demonizing veterans.

  The most controversial piece in the series was the first, which ran on January 13. Headlined “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Wars,” it was about veterans who either had been killed or had killed others after coming home. The article ran to almost 7,000 words, and the Sunday front page was almost entirely given over to a montage of twenty-four veterans, all male, some in military uniform and some in prison stripes. Relying on local news reports and court records, along with interviews of veterans and their families, victims’ families and law enforcement officials, the reporters said they had found 121 such cases of violence. Many appeared to involve “combat trauma and the stress of deployment—along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems.” Speculating that their research “most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases,” Sontag and Alvarez said they had found “a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

  The editor, Bill Keller, called the series “an important public service that explores in riveting detail the emotional stresses war places on this important community and the problems the military faces in coping with those stresses.” But critics quickly dubbed the first piece the “Killer Vets” story and pounced on its methodology. According to Ralph Peters, a military analyst, “to match the homicide rate of their [nonmilitary] peers, our troops would’ve had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007,” which was six times the 121 cited in the Times. Peters said the paper was trying to cast veterans as “freaks from a slasher flick.” Professor John D’Lulio of the University of Pennsylvania examined U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics and found that the homicide rate among vets is far lower than in the general population—a detail the Times missed. Others pointed out that many of the cases showed no connection between the stresses of combat and the nature of the crimes, which included car accidents and handgun accidents, as well as legitimate self-defense.

  One of the harshest spankings came from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which denounced what it called “The ‘Wacko Vet Myth.’” The Times didn’t try to establish a causal relationship between war service and homicide, the Journal maintained. It didn’t even try to establish a correlation. Rather, the Times was “purporting to test a media stereotype by measuring its prevalence in the media,” through heavy use of anecdotes in local news reports. More bluntly, the Journal concluded that “the Times hasn’t necessarily proved that the stereotype is true—only that it is a stereotype.” The Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, described the report as “analytically shaky.” Hoyt also revealed that the head of the computer assistance unit might have flagged the report’s dubious statistics, but had not read the story before it ran.

  The paper’s effort to color the services as misogynistic came in the form of reports alleging widespread sexual harassment and abuse, especially in theater. One of these was a March 2007 Sunday magazine cover story abou
t post-traumatic stress among women who had served in Iraq, but it backfired. At the time, more than 160,000 female soldiers had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the article explained, a huge increase compared with Vietnam and even the Gulf War of 1991. “One of every 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq is female,” the article said, and claimed that female veterans returning from Iraq have much higher levels of post-traumatic stress than males, some of it from greater susceptibility to combat exposure, but some a result of sexual trauma. “A 2003 report financed by the Department of Defense revealed that nearly one-third of a nationwide sample of female veterans seeking health care through the V.A. said they experienced rape or attempted rape during their service,” the article said. “Of that group, 37 percent said they were raped multiple times, and 14 percent reported they were gang-raped.”

  A theme of the piece was the indifference of a “male-dominated military culture” to women’s concerns. One of the main subjects was Amorita Randall, a Navy construction worker or “Seabee” who said she had been raped once while stateside, and again in Guam while awaiting deployment to Iraq in 2004. “You just don’t expect anything to be done about it anyway, so why even try?” Randall said. Compounding her trauma, Randall said her Humvee in Iraq was hit by an IED, killing the soldier who was driving and leaving her with a brain injury.

  Three days after the article had gone to press, the Navy called the Times to say that Amorita Randall had never been in Iraq. Only part of her unit was sent there; Randall served with another part of it in Guam. The Navy claimed that Times fact-checkers had not given it the time to verify Randall’s account. But even by deadline, there was information available “to seriously question whether she’d been in Iraq.” Within a week, the Times issued another embarrassing correction: “Based on the information that came to light after the article was printed, it is now clear that Ms. Randall did not serve in Iraq, but may have become convinced she did.”