Coloniality Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
The right to get it wrong, regardless of the consequences, runs through the New York Times' Middle East failures — and last summer's Harper's Letter
You don’t need me to tell you what was wrong with the now-discredited New York Times “Caliphate” series — because the brilliant Rafia Zakaria has done that for all of us, starting more than two years before “the paper of record” acknowledged the fraud. But the debacle did remind me that it’s worth thinking about what may be some underlying reasons the Times can screw up in this way — after all, grand and sometimes deadly fictions seems to have been a feature rather than a bug in New York Times coverage of the Middle East over the years.
Of course, this is a paper that wants us to believe that the South Park-worthy parody pundit Tom Friedman has insights of value. You might think his “suck on this” cheerleading of the Iraq invasion, or his wet-kiss profile of a Saudi Crown Prince best known as the author of the bone-saw dismembering of a Saudi critic, or so many more earnest nonsenses might give pause, but, perhaps, Friedman is a symptom rather than the cause of the paper’s Middle East malaise.
The New York Times got Iraq spectacularly wrong — not just the fictitious WMD, but the underlying assumption that they’d have made a sound case for invading and occupying a pivotal country of the Arab world. (As I’ve previously argued, even if the US had found chemical and biological weapons in Baghdad in 2003, the decision to invade Iraq would have been no less of a cataclysmic debacle — France and Germany knew that, which is why they vehemently opposed the war even though they shared the US suspicion that Saddam had some residual stocks of unconventional weapons.) But even when its failures were glaringly obvious, the Times wasn’t about to ask whether those errors may been grounded in the paper’s relationship with power, and with a colonial mindset in which expeditionary warfare is a routine tool of social engineering and maintenance of a particular set of global power arrangements.
How often did those of us who worked in mainstream US news media in the months preceding the invasion hear the phrase, “What are we going to do about Saddam?” Seriously. And, here, I mean spoken by journalists rather than by imperial securocrats, the we signaling the former’s desire to collapse any distinction with the latter — as in Malcolm X’s derisive “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?”
The Times’ official “oops” on Iraq in 2004 seemed to mainly blame what was clearly a shocking institutional failure on one Judith Miller.
More instructive, though, was the awkward mea culpa by former Times editor Bill Keller, who offered us some insight into the mindset and sociology of the (almost all white, and all male) media sages who evangelized for an illegal invasion, which as we know triggered a chain of events that destroyed millions of Arab lives:
I remember a mounting protective instinct, heightened by the birth of my second daughter almost exactly nine months after the attacks. Something dreadful was loose in the world, and the urge to stop it, to do something — to prove something — was overriding a career-long schooling in the virtues of caution and skepticism. By the time of Alice’s birth I had already turned my attention to Iraq, a place that had, in the literal sense, almost nothing to do with 9/11, but which would be its most contentious consequence. And I was no longer preaching “the real-world vigilance of intelligence and law enforcement.”During the months of public argument about how to deal with Saddam Hussein, I christened an imaginary association of pundits the I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might. It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations, including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack, the former C.I.A. analyst whose book, “The Threatening Storm,” became the liberal manual on the Iraqi threat. (Yes, it is surely relevant that this is exclusively a boys’ club.)
A long and meandering appraisal follows, in which Keller accepts that invading Iraq was “a monumental blunder” and that he “got it wrong”.
What Keller doesn’t address — obviously — is how this “boys’ club” imagined for itself, and for the global military behemoth to which it composed odes of aggrandizement, the right to make a mistake that destroyed millions of Arab lives (oops!) and then to suffer no consequences. Look at that list of fellow travelers Keller cites, and ask where they are now. Did any of them suffer any professional consequences for selling the U.S. public on the deadly scam that was the Iraq invasion? Of course not. On the contrary, for years it seemed as if having been wrong on Iraq was a precondition for being taken seriously as a mainstream media foreign policy pundit.
Thus the coloniality of the Times and allied titles and institutions in which the Tom Friedmans and the Jeffrey Goldbergs have continued to fail upward. Let’s just say that for centuries, people of color have paid an epic price for the arrogance of an imperial order run by white men “getting it wrong”.
Seems like a good moment to revisit Rafia’s astute observations of how the sociology of liberal mainstream media culture enables these disasters, and also Pankaj Mishra’s writings on violent social engineering in the Western “Enlightenment” tradition. (I also highly recommend Mishra’s excellent LRB podcast conversation with Adam Shatz on the malaise of Western journalism and punditry following the end of the Cold War). And before them, of course, the late, great Edward Said. I’ve nothing to add, except perhaps to note how many of the “liberal hawks” cited by Keller — and how many other enthusiasts of the Iraq invasion — were also signatories of that Harper’s letter demanding, among other things, the right to “get it wrong” in the name of free speech.
Es, Mein Kind
(A Totally Unconnected Recipe)
So although my father was born in a town on the then-contested border between Poland and the Belarus SSR and, when I was growing up, we ate plenty of standards from the area (stuffed cabbage, borscht etc.) it wasn’t until I first moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early ‘90s that I encountered mushroom-barley soup — thanks to a pre-hipster Polish diner called Kasia’s. It was the winter warmer you needed on a budget, and it’s been a standard of my own winter repertoire since then. And winter is here, so this was last Wednesday’s dinner.
It’s really straightforward — onions, carrots and celery softened in butter/oil, throw about a pound of mushrooms sliced and chopped (half and half, to vary the texture), 1.5 to 2 cups of dry pearled barley, stir to coat, a splash of dry sherry (my secret ingredient, definitely not traditional), about eight cups of chicken stock, some fresh thyme and dill (more dill to sprinkle on top to serve) and there you go.…