No antiwar voices in NYT 'debate'

The New York Times offered a look back at the Iraq War in its March 16 "Week In Review" section that leaned heavily towards pro-war voices. The Times explained to readers: "To mark this week's fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked nine experts on military and foreign affairs to reflect on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and to comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the prewar debate." The "experts" who were asked to weigh in were all more or less supporters of the Iraq War, most of whom evinced no regret about their errors. The neoconservative American Enterprise Institute provided three columnists: Richard Perle, Fred Kagan and Danielle Pletka, all of them among the strongest advocates for the invasion. The Times also gave space to the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack, another strong supporter of the invasion. Featured as well were former Iraq envoy L. Paul Bremer and Paul D. Eaton, a retired general who served as a trainer of the Iraqi military early in the war. Former Marine Nathaniel Fick of the Center for a New American Security, who took part in the invasion of Iraq as a platoon leader, also weighed in. Another columnist was Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who served as an on-air defense analyst for ABC News. Cordesman often warned of planning or logistics problems with the invasion, but nonetheless supported the Iraq War: "I endorse this war, but I do so with reluctance and considerable uncertainty," Cordesman declared in testimony prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (2/12/03). The other columnist was Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, generally considered a "liberal hawk." Like Cordesman, Slaughter was less supportive of the Iraq War than other hawks. But in a column for the New York Times just prior to the invasion ("Good Reasons for Going Around the UN," 3/18/03), Slaughter argued that the Bush administration's decision to bypass a Security Council vote could work out once weapons of mass destruction were found, and the Iraqi people rallied behind the US-led intervention. None of the commentators selected by the Times to look back on the fifth anniversary of the war had been actual opponents of the invasion. And none of them conclude that the United States ought to stop occupying Iraq. Pletka's piece begins, "The mantra of the antiwar left--'Bush lied, people died'--so dominates the debate about the run-up to the Iraq war that it has obscured real issues that deserve examination." But the "debate" in the New York Times In a separate piece for the Times, reporter John Burns completely excludes the antiwar perspective, left-wing or otherwise, wrote that "only the most prescient could have guessed...that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well nearly 4,000 American troops; or that America's financial costs, by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008, on their way to perhaps $2 trillion if the commitment continues for another five years." But the "debate" in the New York Times completely excludes the antiwar perspective, left-wing or otherwise. Actually, one did not have to be unusually prescient to think that the Iraq War would be costly and would likely kill many thousands of civilians and combatants; millions of people around the world marched against the invasion to call attention to these very dangers. But by focusing the post-war debate so squarely on what pro-war "experts" think these days, one could certainly get the impression that no one knew better. New York Times op-ed page editor David Shipley (7/31/05) has described the op-ed page as "a venue for people with a wide range of perspectives, experiences and talents," writing that he aims for "a lively page of clashing opinions, one where as many people as possible have the opportunity to make the best arguments they can." It's hard to see how Shipley can argue that his assembly of pro-war voices for the war's fifth anniversary merits that description.