Democracy Now! talks to John "Rick" McArthur of Harper's magazine and Craig Unger, author of House of Saud, House of Bush, on the now-infamous NYT story by Michael R. Gordon about Iran's alleged supplying of bombs to Iraqi insurgents.
RICK MACARTHUR: I always read the New York Times the way Sovietologists used to read Izvestia, the government newspaper, and I half-kiddingly always ask the question: is the New York Times playing the role of Izvestia or the role of Pravda, which was the party newspaper? The New York Times owes its success, its long-term success, economic and otherwise, to being close to the government, to being sort of the semiofficial government newspaper and giving the administration line to the public fairly unfiltered. And Michael Gordon is just a tool. He’s just a conduit for this policy that the paper has been pursuing for decades.
So, what’s interesting about Michael Gordon is that when he did the reporting on the phony aluminum tube story with Judith Miller four years ago, he somehow escaped unharmed and is now thriving. He has a book out, as you saw, and he’s doing very well, and he's going around acting like he’s an expert on Iraq, when, in fact, he’s still playing the role of conduit for the official line, the Army line or the government line, depending on who he’s talking to on what day.
Now, what’s interesting is the play that they gave his story on Saturday, the Michael Gordon story about the exploding canisters, or whatever they’re calling them. The canisters are called EFPs. They put it on the top of the front page, and it was the lead story, actually, in the Saturday paper. And not far down in the story, you find a paragraph -- actually, this was in the Monday story -- you find a paragraph where they say -- and this is very interesting -- that they don't have any real evidence, any direct evidence, that any of this is true. All they have is the say-so of the military, of briefers, or the National Security briefers. There’s one who is unnamed, who’s clearly been brought in from the civil side of the government to help buttress the case. Well, if they don't have direct evidence, why is it on the front page? Why is it the lead story?
Just to give you a comparison, Newsday, a perfectly respectable newspaper, puts “US: Iran is Arming Shia” on page 22 on Monday. That is, yesterday. They do a story. They report what the military officials are claiming, but in the second paragraph, they say the military command in Baghdad denied, however, that any newly smuggled Iranian weapons were behind the five crashes of US military helicopters since January 20th, four confirmed as having been shot down by insurgent gunfire. So that is what journalism is, contrary to what Michael Gordon says. It’s putting the story in perspective, pointing out that the guerrilla movement, whatever you want to call it, in Iraq is broad-based, it’s dominated by Sunni, not by Shia.
And the most damning omission in the story, if you want to talk about overall perspective, is complete lack of perspective on who’s fighting whom, who’s shooting at whom in Iraq. Does the Iranian government really have an interest in destabilizing what’s now a Shiite-dominated government? Doesn't make any sense. If it does make sense to the administration that the Iranians want to destabilize a Shiite-dominated government, when they’re a Shiite-ruled nation, then they should explain it. But there's no logic to it, and there’s just this massive omission. ...
AMY GOODMAN: Craig Unger, you have been working on this piece that you did in Vanity Fair for many months, "From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq," looking at the same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq war, who have been using the same tactics, alliances with shady exiles, dubious intelligence on WMD, to push for the bombing of Iran, as President Bush ups the pressure on Tehran. Is he planning to double his Middle East bet? And then, this all explodes this weekend, as your piece comes out. Did this surprise you?
CRAIG UNGER: No. In fact, it was very much in line with the narrative that I’d started. And I would just add to all this, if this really was about who is killing Americans there, the vast, vast majority of American deaths in Iraq have been in the Sunni-dominated areas. So the real question should be, where are they getting their weapons from? But what you see has happened is that our policy has had extraordinary unintended consequences. We have inadvertently tilted towards the Shiites and empowered Iran. Now, we seem to be tilting back towards the Sunnis, and you see this Sunni-Shiite civil war within Iraq potentially spreading throughout the entire region. So we don't want to alienate our Sunni allies, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, who may be helping the Sunni insurgency. ...
AMY GOODMAN: By the way, AP reported in December, private Saudis supplying money for arms to Sunnis, including anti-aircraft arms.
RICK MACARTHUR: Again, I urge people to read other newspapers and to read the Associated Press. The Associated Press, which I used to make fun of, I’ll admit, as a former UPI man, has become the alternative source of information in the United States, along with the BBC and a couple of British papers. The AP has gotten very good. And if you just read a straight Associated Press story on any of these stories -- Iraq, Iranian meddling, alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq, and so on and so forth -- you would get a straighter story, a better understanding of what’s going on than you would get from the New York Times.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Craig Unger, I’ll give you the last word, since your book was called House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties.
CRAIG UNGER: Well, I mean, I think the scary thing is, will this happen again? Will we repeat history? I mean, it’s hard to forget events that just happened three years ago. If it happens again with Iran -- it’s been a catastrophe in Iraq. If it happens again with Iran, I think the consequences are much, much greater, potentially. That is, you can see Iran easily blockading the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, which would cut off about 40% of the oil in the world, and oil prices would go up to at least $125 a barrel. That could precipitate sort of a meltdown of the whole Western economy and almost a global oil war. Iran is very close to China, in terms of China is the biggest customer there. You effectively would have a war going on in three of the world's biggest oil-producing countries -- Iran, Iraq and potentially Saudi Arabia.