NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 15, 2003
Me? Make mistakes?
Having written the last two Sundays on aspects of the current revolution in journalism -- in particular how weblogs are changing the way the news is sought presented and checked -- it occurs to me to turn the revolutionary impulse upon my own work. Looking back over the war in Iraq and the long months leading up to it was there anything I wrote that I would like to take back now? I hate reading my old columns -- they rarely induce pleasant feelings of nostalgia -- and yet I have faithfully posted everything I've written in newspapers since 9/11 on my "davidwarrenonline.com" website warts and all. Journalism is called "the first draft of history" and were I an historian I would never take a single statement published in a newspaper at face value. This is not because journalists lie -- though some of us sometimes do like some people in other professions -- but because in the conditions under which breaking news is obtained it is quite impossible to get everything right let alone supply the context accurately. No it's worse than that: journalists seldom entirely know what we are talking about. There is the occasional genius with a clairvoyant ability to project himself into unfamiliar territory. The only other exceptions are old-fashioned beat reporters who if left in their trenches long enough eventually get the hang of them. Among that special class of beat reporters called foreign correspondents I have noticed it takes at least two years for an average reasonably intelligent human being to get some idea what is happening around him in a foreign country. A typical foreign posting is for about two years. So what to say about the "pundit" like myself -- the "armchair general" as my more facetious correspondents like to call me. I've been trying to make sense of events unfolding simultaneously in at least 20 countries. Did I get everything right? Let us generously overlook a number of little mistakes I've spotted or more often had spotted for me. For example I confused the Iraqi towns of Najaf and Nasiriyah in one article (the Shrine of Ali is in the former). In another I promoted the Iranian president Mohammad Khatami from "hojatoleslam" to "ayatollah" and absent-mindedly ayatollah'd a former leader who wasn't even a cleric. Through faulty arithmetic I inflated the peak death rate of soldiers landing on Normandy beaches for the sake of a comparison with casualties in Iraq. (The comparison still works after dividing that number by 10.) Such mistakes are embarrassing rather than consequential. No one should ever apologize for the way he spells Arabic names in English. It is one of those things that just can't be done consistently under any system. Just choose the form likeliest to be recognized at the moment and flinch. On balance I think my old columns stand up to fairly careful scrutiny and may do even better as more facts are confirmed. But I can't be sure. The fog of war tends to persist and some of it never clears. In several cases where I had no choice but to go out on a limb I still don't know whether it was the right limb I went out on. But I am now fairly sure I made two substantial mistakes. The first has to do with those "weapons of mass destruction" that the allies were so confident of finding. While I notice checking back that I was self-protectively cautious in giving specifics I left an overall impression that I too expected quite a haul. I believe there are several discoveries not yet reported in the media and a few more genuine mysteries about sites that appear to have been recently cleared. The fact the Americans have been unable to locate Saddam Hussein himself or a dozen more members of the innermost core of his Tikriti clan suggests the incompleteness of the evidence. I wasn't however expecting any ambiguity. I knew that not only the CIA but the intelligence services of Britain France Germany and Italy and by inference those of Russia and Iran were all persuaded there would be a rich harvest. Iraqi defectors and underground sources working with and for Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress were all saying the same things. I now begin to suspect that as part of his dance to remain in power Saddam went to considerable effort to convince foreign intelligence that he was hiding weapons he had actually got rid of and continuing research programmes he had abandoned. It was a deadly game in which he had ultimately to convince his own people and neighbours that he remained armed and dangerous while preventing the U.N. from finding anything that could serve as the pretext for an invasion. My other significant mistake was also less of fact than of judgement. I wrote an article a month ago about the Baghdad blogger Salam Pax which has since got me deluged by e-mail from his fans. In the article I alleged that Salam (his real first name) is the scion of a prominent Iraqi family up to its ears in compromise or worse with Saddam's regime. I even dropped hints of who his father and grandfather were and mischievously suggested that for all we knew Salam himself had served or might still be serving "the other side". I should have written this less sloppily for I left most readers with the impression I had leapt to these conclusions from reading Salam's blog alone whereas I had supplementary information which I still believe to be true. My point lost in the confusion was that we should be extremely sceptical of information coming from any source emerging from under the old regime. Salam himself has since directly denied that his father was a Baath party member. I still think I know who the man is and that Salam is being less than candid. On the other hand I am now persuaded both from things he has written and more I have learned that Salam is not anybody's agent except his own; and that his survival under Saddam as Iraq's only blogger was not due to Mukhabarat conspiracy but rather to Mukhabarat incompetence. I therefore owe him one-half of an apology with the other half waiting for the day he decides he can safely supply checkable information himself. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top