'The New Yorker' and Iraq--Still No Penance

Yesterday I teed off on a New Yorker profile of Hank Greenberg that I felt had provided cover to Greenberg's Israel-centered views of the Middle East. I don't keep up on the New Yorker, but a friend sent along the following critique of the magazine's Middle East coverage. I'm masking his/her identity because it's Hallowe'en, and cuz he/her wants me to:

On the mark about the New Yorker's politics in general; recall the shading of the profiles by [editor] David Remnick of Sari Nusseibeh and Avraham Burg--rigged for evenhandedness but they tended to make one feel, in the end, that the people who run Israel are intelligent and fair-minded, and awfully hard pressed, whereas their critics are excessively intellectual, posturing, and a bit absurd.

A similar motive was at work in the profiles of Olbermann and Huffington: the same profile done twice--again the caricature of eccentricity made into a substitute for judgment. The pieces expose the brazenness, loudness, self-publicity, etc. of their subjects, but the real animus here is that O and H on Iraq were anti-war as the New Yorker was not (and is not)...

Remnick learned Russian while at the Washington Post in order to become a correspondent there, and saw and described the breakup of the system; and he picked up, very late but at full strength, the American anti-Communist righteousness. As with Paul Berman and several others, I think he readily transferred the Totalitarian Enemy idea to "Islamo-Fascism"--happy to be among the wised-up, but insufficiently wary of the historical differences between any two historical things. He endorsed the Iraq war in 2003. None of the New Yorker reporting on Iraq has been anti-war, not even in the all-war-is-awful sense of Dexter Filkins in the Times. George Packer is always looking for uplift--evidence that somehow the Americans did some good after all, and that behind all our mistakes was not selfishness or or the will to power but sheer incompetence.

[Weiss again] Fascinating. I read this to James North today and he said that Andrew Sullivan's path is the most honorable one re Iraq: he's admitted he got it wrong and feels awful about it, end of story. He's shrived. Packer has never really done so. The New Yorker would help itself and its readers if it did a postmortem on its mistaken judgment here, in the greatest f.p. disaster of the last 30 years, including its decision to run Jeffrey Goldberg's "intelligence" from Kurdistan or wherever story, which provided a(nother) flimsy basis for what anyone with sense knew would be a huge mistake (including clairvoyant Steve Walt, here, in The New Yorker).

The loss is that during Vietnam, the New Yorker told privileged liberals how to think about the war. It was a leading voice against the war. This time it's a no-show in the antiwar movement or more significantly the How did we go wrong movement. To be hobbyhorsical for a moment (and this blog is nothing if not hobbyhorsical), I think it's a reflection of the new Jewish place in the Establishment. We've got neocons in our own families. It's hard for some to reject them outright.

Comments

[Glenn Condell]

'Andrew Sullivan's path is the most honorable one re Iraq: he's admitted he got it wrong and feels awful about it, end of story. He's shrived. Packer has never really done so.'

Apart from Sullivan, who else has?

Here in Australia, all the columnists and other intellectual trollops who sold the war are still at their perches, still tunelessly singing songs written in Washington the previous week. My local rag the Sydney Morning Herald has a particularly odious crew - Miranda Devine (a sort of provincial Maureen Dowd, or perhaps a more provincial Maureen Dowd, replete with 'strong father' fixation), Paul Sheehan (one of those impressionable nongs who wrote paeans of praise to Blair in 2002 while tearing 'immature' antiwar protestors like myself to shreds) and finally Gerard Henderson, head of the corporate think tank The Sydney Institute, who used to work for ex-PM Howard and who toes the establishment line with as much gusto as a droning hack like him can muster.

All still drawing big salaries for ticking the boxes of their constituencies rather than their readers. Parent company Fairfax (an Aussie media icon) like the Grey Lady, in deep financial waters without a paddle, or a clue. Serves them right.

Henderson wrote a piece the other day dutifully attacking an economist academic here called Steve Keen who has been forecasting the bursting of the housing bubble and a resulting depression for at least two years.

Lately Keen has been in high demand on TV, and his refusal to sugar coat his prognostications evidently got up Gerard's nose, because he got the full sneer as a 'lecturer from a suburban University' whose extreme claims have not been properly put under the microscope by the media.

Coming from someone whose own ridiculous parroting of claims about an al-Quaeda link to Saddam, or a meeting in Prague, or Colin POwell's WMD performance art at the UN etc etc could have been refuted AT THE TIME by anyone not emotionally buried in America's backside, this rebuke seems a tad presumptuous.

Maybe what really riles the old goose, who so far as I know has never been correct about anything important, is someone, probably a lefty at that, having the temerity to actually be right!

Packer may not have said sorry, but he has at least has written a fine piece in the New Yorker about the boonies in Ohio, which, like Blair's useless swanning around the ME and Powell's eventual endorsement of Obama, carries a whiff of penance about it.

Nice work if you can get it; get all the major questions of the age wrong, and just keep on truckin'.

[peters]

forgive me but remnick is jewish and so is george packer. isn't that the thread that keeps appearing in the people who supported the iraq war?

[peters]

forgive me but remnick is jewish and so is george packer. isn't that the thread that keeps appearing in the people who supported the iraq war?

[samuelburke]

one day all this will work its way into the mainstream.

http://antiwar.com/radio/2008/10/25/grant-f-smith/

Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and author of America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government, discusses the intrigue behind the AIPAC spy case, long rage patterns of neocon duplicity and criminality, the history behind the Logan Act, the complicity of the corporate media, the likely continuity of Mideast policy in an Obama administration and the War Party’s shutting down of much needed U.S. trade with the Mideast.

[anon]

Today the AIPAC spy case is again in the courts--see if anything appears on this issue in the USA media.

[anon]

The appeal issue due for court decision today is whether once again
there will be in essence, a lone exception to the law against treason:

http://nikiraapana.blogspot.com/2008/09/us-justice-departments-battle-to.html

It's all about burden of proof, in this case, meaning if it's a jewish
agency of any sort, the burden is much higher than for any other
group's activities.

Watch the goys cave for a paltry handout.