This is something I feel the need to pass on. The New York Times was instrumental in the run up to the Iraq war. It served as a both a conduit and a legitimizer of the war. The administration would feed information to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, who would dutifully print it, and then would cite the Times to support their assertions.
It’s happening again, sans Miller. Gordon is going it alone. This morning he served up a dish of uncorroborated talking points designed to spur a war with Iran. According to the Bushies, the Iranians are training Iraqi Shiite militias. But as Kevin Drum points out, they get a bit vague about precisely which militias the Iranians are training:
However, Laura Rozen points out something that also tickled my brain cells when I first read Gordon’s article. Picking up on a comment at Abu Muqawama, she notes that “the Gordon piece strikingly doesn’t tell us WHICH militia the captured Shiite militants who had trained in Iran belonged to.” That’s true. Here are the descriptions scattered throughout Gordon’s piece:
Iraqi militia fighters….four Shiite militia members….Iraqi militia fighters….Iranian assistance to the militias….militia groups….Iraqi militias….small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants….other groups of Iraqi militants….Shiite militias.
That’s nine separate references, all of them purposefully vague. We’re obviously meant to believe that Iran is exclusively training and supplying Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, not the Badr militia associated with the Iraqi government, but if that’s the case then why not just say so? There hardly seems to be any reason to leave this detail out unless it’s not actually true.
You see, the Iranians have maintained relations with all the Shiite militia, but they appear to be leaning toward Maliki’s militia. That means there is a good possibility that they are training the militia aligned with the government that we are supporting.
Imagine being an American soldier in the midst of this mess, required to prop up a government that is propping up a militia that is being propped up by Iran, a country that is supposedly a member of the Axis of Evil, determined to destroy the United States and all that is good and true.
It looks like Bush is determined to manufacture a pretext for war in time for the election. It would be in the interest of either Bush or Clinton to call them out early and often on this, because only be warning against it can they stop it. The odds are not good that either of them will do so.
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