Posted on 06/02/2003 6:05:09 AM PDT by frithguild
A NOT-SO-BEAUTIFUL MIND Paul Krugman begins his May 30 New York Times op-ed by recounting the plot of the 1997 film, Wag the Dog, in which he says,
"An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program... The war drives everything else — including scandals involving administration officials — from the public's consciousness. ...If you don't think it bears a resemblance to recent events, you're in denial."
Recent events? Maybe it's just me, but Wag the Dog evokes nothing but memories of the time in August 1998 when Bill Clinton deployed cruise missiles against what turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, on the same day that Monica Lewinsky delivered her most damning grand jury testimony.
Krugman's column itself evokes another movie altogether -- the parallels are truly eerie. Remember the most horrifying scene in A Beautiful Mind when John Nash -- an economist, and Princeton-based no less! -- is descending into madness? His long-suffering wife throws open the doors of Nash's isolated workshop and discovers a room papered floor to ceiling with layer upon layer of clippings from magazines and newspapers with seemingly random passages highlighted, connected together with push-pins and tangled bits of yarn -- the encoded evidence in Nash's disturbed brain of a vast plot to destroy America. If you don't think Krugman's latest column is that room, you're in denial.
Let's trace the yarn in Krugman's column, from clipping to clipping, to see the evidence assembled in Krugman's not-so-beautiful mind that the war in Iraq was a Wag the Dog fake staged by the Bush administration.
First there's the completely unsubstantiated accusation that the war's "Kodak moments — the toppling of the Saddam statue, the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch — seem to have been improved by editing." TimesWatch conjectures that
"Krugman appears to rely on an April 9 column by cartoonist and left-wing columnist Ted Rall. (Rall has also wondered if Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash, was assassinated by the Bush administration.) Krugman’s Lynch rescue allegation apparently rests on a now-discredited BBC report."
Follow the yarn to the next push-pin -- this one attached to a clipping from the Financial Times. As I've pointed out (here and here), the FT has been on an anti-Bush shooting spree, and Krugman now loves to quote it. This time he says,
"It's now also clear that George W. Bush had no intention of reaching a diplomatic solution. According to The Financial Times, White House sources confirm that the decision to go to war was reached in December: 'A tin-pot dictator was mocking the president. It provoked a sense of anger inside the White House,' a source told the newspaper."
Why is anyone surprised? President Bush himself had already declared his military resolve way back in September, in his address to the United Nations -- but that doesn't mean, and the May 26 FT story that Krugman cites does not contend -- that subsequent diplomatic efforts were fraudulent, as Krugman suggests.
But Krugman suggests more than that, when he pulls that particular quote from the FT story -- "''A tin-pot dictator was mocking the president. It provoked a sense of anger inside the White House.'" Krugman is trying to make it seem as though Bush just plain old lost his Texas temper, and that the commitment to war was nothing more than personal pique. But go read the whole story, and you'll see that Krugman's pulling that quote out of context is as vicious a fraud as his colleague Maureen Dowd's infamous May 14 New York Times column in which she elided a Bush quote to make it seem that the President was boasting that Al Qaeda had been completely eliminated.
In the FT story the quote is directly preceded by this paragraph:
"...Mr Bush was briefed on the contents of Mr Hussein's 12,000-page declaration responding to the charges of possessing, or attempting to produce, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The president's advisers said it was 'not even a credible document'. Mr Hussein, they concluded, had made a 'strategic decision' not to co-operate."
The "mocking," then, is Saddam Hussein's abrogation of the diplomatic process -- and the White House's "anger" is because Saddam left it no choice but to pursue costly and hazardous military options.
The next clipping we find pinned to the wall of Krugman's demented workshop is from an as-yet unpublished issue of Vanity Fair, containing a seemingly damning quote that suggests the Bush administration was insincere about its belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction:
"Administration officials are now playing down the whole W.M.D. issue. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize W.M.D.'s had been taken for 'bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.'"
Apparently Vanity Fair published a press release last week announcing an interview with Paul Wolfowitz by reporter Sam Tannenhaus. I haven't been able to obtain the actual press release, but it seems the Wolfowitz quote was presented just that way -- ellipsis and all -- at least that's how it was picked up on Wednesday in USA Today, which may be where Krugman found it. But he should have checked his sources, instead of just reporting on the media reporting on the media. By Thursday, the day before Krugman's column was published, the Pentagon had posted the entire 9,999-word Wolfowitz interview, and -- surprise, surprise, surprise! -- that quote was both inaccurately transcribed and taken entirely out of context, and it completely reversed Wolfowitz's intent.
Tannenhaus admitted in the interview that "...I type as we speak, which is one reason I'll want to see the transcript just so I don't make errors. I'm reliable, but I'm not a letter-perfect typist." He must not have bothered to follow through, or perhaps he liked his version better -- but here's that same sentence, according to the Pentagon's transcribed recording:
"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but...[Wolfowitz broke off mid-sentence to take a phone call]"
In the true version it's no longer Wolfowitz confessing that the hunt for WMDs was just an institutional expedient -- he's talking about the process of complex institutional decision-making. But more important is this sentence's context. The conversation both before and after it concerns several other reasons for action against Iraq, including links to terrorism, the cruelty of Saddam's regime, and the desirability of being able to withdraw US troops from Saudi Arabia. Wolfowitz is hardly "playing down the whole W.M.D. issue" -- he's saying it's the key issue about which everyone could agree! And elsewhere in the interview Wolfowitz makes it clear that he fully believes that Saddam had WMDs -- to Wolfowitz, the only mystery is why Saddam didn't use them in the war.
But for Krugman, it's simply an established fact now that "No evidence of the Qaeda link has ever surfaced, and no W.M.D.'s that could have posed any threat to the U.S. or its allies have been found." David Hogberg refutes that on his blog Cornfield Commentary:
"The only serious response to the charge of 'no evidence of the Qaeda link' is 'HUH!?!?' How about the capture of an al Qaeda terrorist in Baghdad on April 28? Or the capture Iraqi official Farouk Hijazi who has admitted that he met with Osama bin Laden in 1994 (and may have met with him in 1998)? For more on those links, see this article by Stephen Hayes."
Wolfowitz -- in a part of the interview naturally not seen as fit to print by Krugman -- adds, "...we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around." Back to Hogberg:
"As for WMDs. Krugman might consider taking a look at the news stories about the two mobile bio-labs that have been discovered. Or other stories showing that of the 1000 potential WMD sites, only the 'most likely'—about 100—have been searched thus far."
Or we could just follow the yarn back to a Krugman column published just two weeks ago, in which he blamed the Bush administration for "...an orgy of looting — including looting of nuclear waste dumps that, incredibly, we failed to secure. Dirty bombs, anyone?" Now is it just me, or does a dirty bomb sound like something that could pose a "threat to the U.S. or its allies"?
And, inevitably, the tangled yarn finally leads to a clipping from Krugman's favorite source for war news -- the BBC.
"This week a senior British intelligence official told the BBC that under pressure from Downing Street, a dossier on Iraqi weapons had been 'transformed' to make it 'sexier' — uncorroborated material from a suspect source was added to make the threat appear imminent."
But it turns out that Krugman's version of the BBC story is what's uncorroborated -- by the actual content of the BBC story, that is. Hogberg found John H. Hinderaker of the Power Line blog has tracked down the BBC story, "Iraq Weapons Dossier 'Rewritten'". Hinderaker writes,
"Even the BBC's own anonymous source concedes that 'Most things in the dossier were double source.' In fact, there is only one fact stated in the dossier that the BBC's anonymous official questions: the statement that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could be 'ready for use within 45 minutes.' This statement was based on information from only one source, who was not considered reliable by the BBC's informant
"That's it. Everything else in the British dossier is conceded to be correct: '[T]he official said he was convinced that Iraq had programme to produce weapons of mass destruction, and felt it was 30% likely there was a biological weapons programme. He said some evidence had been 'downplayed' by chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix."
Why does Krugman go on like this, clipping his clippings and linking them together and searching endlessly for the key to the secret code that will reveal the truth about the Bushie plot to hijack America? Is he just plain nuts -- or does he think if he follows in John Nash's footsteps that someday he, too, will get the Nobel Prize in economics? If that's his plan he's going to learn that there are a couple of very real differences between himself and Nash. First, Nash made a fundamental contribution to the science of economics. And second, Nash lived out his paranoid delusions in private -- not every Tuesday and Friday on the pages of the New York Times.
Posted by Donald Luskin at 5:45 AM | link
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Damn!
You mean the emperor... er columnist is nekkid?
People are actually getting wise to the technique of publishing bogus "accounts", easily shot down and discredited, which then last forever being quoted and reinforcing each other?
Works for environmentalism, second-hand smoke and global warming. So why not?
I am impressed either by the stupidity of these writers, or by the stupidity of their readers.
Perhaps both?
I'd like to know what distortion you see in this piece... Luskin (and his friends in the "Truth Squad") has been doing a terrific job of dissecting the dissembling of Paul Krugman and this edition appears to be another masterful job. This technique of taking quotes from other sources -- quotes that are out of context or complete frauds -- is just the latest sinister methodologies of the leftwing media that is finally getting the exposure it deserves. Luskin provides an opportunity on his blog for you to respond and point out his "distortion" so I'll look forward to seeing your dissertation.
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