From Whole Cloth - You've

From Whole Cloth - You've seen the stories; the looting, or the "Saving Private Lynch" pieces where reporters repeat, ingenuously, stories that, even to the casual observer at home, have vast gaping holes.

You wait a day, maybe less. Then a blogger - the info-age equivalent of an inventor tinkering in a basement shop - who happens to have some knowledge of the area, or an off-the-wall contact, writes a piece correcting the major-media story. People read the blog, and more people add more details to the debunquement, which soon starts to snowball into an unstoppable juggernaut of accuracy, which is distilled three weeks later into a two-line correction on page B-17 of the Times.

Roger Kimball in the Journal, with an excellent article about the press' susceptibility to anti-American fantasies:

In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd skirled about coalition forces "guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry building while hundreds of Iraqis ransacked and ran off with precious heirlooms and artifacts from a 7,000-year-old civilization." Oh dear. Everywhere one turned, the major media had the same story: Thousands upon thousands of rare, priceless, irreplaceable artifacts had been "taken or destroyed by looters." One hundred thousand objects, according to some reports; 270,000, according to one story in the London Observer.

The Iraqis were looting themselves, but responsibility for the outrage was placed squarely at the feet of the Americans. On April 13, the Washington Post grimly informed readers that "it has become increasingly clear that the looting that was sparked by the fall of Saddam Hussein's government--largely unchecked by U.S. forces--has wreaked more damage on Iraq's civilian infrastructure and economy than three weeks of U.S. bombing." The Post went on to quote an Iraqi museum official who keened: "Our heritage is finished. Why did they do this? Why? Why?"

Why, indeed?

Kimball continues:

That story plays brilliantly but, as the London Guardian reported June 10, "it's nonsense. It isn't true. It's made up. It's bollocks." It wasn't the crazed Iraqi populace that denuded the museums but careful Iraqi curators, who spirited the swag away into vaults and secret storerooms before the war even began. Yes, there have been a few important losses. But there weren't 270,000 items missing, or (the most frequently reported number) 170,000. One museum official put the number at 47 items, but that was later revised down to 33. Meanwhile, the museum that was supposed to have been destroyed is scheduled to reopen next week. Stay tuned for further reductions.

Read it all, of course.

And print it out to give to your DFLer cube-neighbor who was kvetching last month about the "Fact" that US troops were securely garding the Iraqi Oil Ministry as looters paraded hauled off swag like the Museum was throwing the ultimate blue-light special.

Then, ask them; how much longer do you think the "The Administration Lied About WMDs!" story is going to last?

Posted by Mitch at June 12, 2003 09:09 AM