Presswatch: Madeleine's War
Corry, John
lingers. In America, who cares? In part, that's due to the particular character of American hegemony. John Foster Dulles said that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. With a surging...
...The Pentagon said the KLA was not a viable military force...
...sense and common decency demanded now that it negotiate and make peace...
...It purported to examine allegations that Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear weapons scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, had passed classified information on to China, but it was really about Zia himself...
...I can recall no time in the past 3o years when American foreign policy was in worse shape...or in less competent hands," Peter F. Krogh, the dean emeritus of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, wrote in the Journal...
...The Establishment discovers in them what it thinks, or what it will begin to think in a while...
...If the T-shirt was made in China, as it most likely was, I wonder if the 70-an-hour factory worker gave a little chuckle as she sent it on its way...
...In other words, Albright's self-conscious bellicosity may delight her feminist and media supporters, but it disturbs serious policy thinkers...
...He argued that the allegations had arisen because Lee was of Chinese ancestry, and he said that same fate had befallen him, too...
...But after the Star Wars cover ("EXCLUSIVE PICTURES from the movie"), with Obi-Wan Kenobi and QuiGon Jinn in robes, holding light sabers, and looking determined, there was the Madeleine Albright cover ("EXCLUSIVE: Behind the scenes with the Secretary of State as she pushes for victory in Kosovo...
...Though I was not involved in fundraising and had no personal ties to the Chinese government," he wrote, "I was named as a possible link to China by far-right publications like The American Spectator...
...Relations with China and Russia have deteriorated...
...Actually Time was defending one of its own...
...Like the president, we're too distracted by what's in our lap—Dunkin' Donuts, large pepperoni, supersize shake —to give our attention to foreign affairs...
...The sole evidence was my Chinese ancestry...
...Then, less than a month later, Owen Harries, the editor of the National Interest, doubled Krogh's estimate on the time frame...
...The Post, after all, is the house organ for the Beltway A-list, and while it prides itself on knowing its secrets, it also extends a certain benevolence to its most prominent members...
...They give us what we want, we give 'em what they want...
...What's more worrying is that he may be an apter embodiment of the general citizenry than we could ever have contemplated...
...The third letter said Zia was obviously a victim of McCarthyism...
...With a surging Dow, America is on a roll and has no desire to found an empire...
...The other day in the New York Times Thomas Friedman advised the president to issue a challenge to those in Congress and the press kicking up a fuss about Beijing...
...Timmerman also told the Times that Commerce Department memos, State Depailment cables, e-mail messages, and interviews with Zia's old colleagues all documented his ties to China...
...When Clinton nominated Albright as secretary of state, Time, along with other big news organizations, had suspended all its critical faculties and adopted her...
...The Times seemed to say it would...
...Time was serious, and corporate policy probably forbids it from making fun of itself, anyway...
...But the war continued, and induced more deaths and confusion...
...Zia was, and is, the chief counsel for export administration in the Commerce Depai [went...
...Newsweek had asked, and thencarried on admiringly about her cojones...
...Its ineptitude, he wrote, had led only to chaos and horror, and good Albright's reputation has been in decline ever since the first bomb fell...
...As of this writing, though, the Times has not published a letter from Timmerman, although it has published three letters from people who read the op-ed piece...
...Albright might be discredited, but "Madeleine's War" went on nonetheless...
...Krogh declared that "Madeleine Albright, for her part, appears to be trying to prove that she is tougher than the men with whom she is dealing...
...inspectors to monitor the American super-computers that had been exported there...
...One said we probably should tighten security at Los Alamos, and another said Jews, Russians, and East Europeans also had faced ethnic bias...
...Intimations of racial bias, especially when practiced by "right-wing" publications, stir its juices...
...Albright's reputation has been in decline ever since the first bomb fell, and it is now beyond redemption...
...Meanwhile Timmerman pointed out that Zia, in a sworn deposition, had admitted that when he left the Commerce Depai intent at night, as well as during his free time on week-ends, he would turn up at the Democratic National Committee and do "voluntary work" for fundraiser John Huang...
...Saddam Hussein has grown stronger...
...Taiwan, too, come to that...
...That applies to armies, and it also applies to alliances...
...But nor am I in favor of living in a world dominated bythe only dictatorship that's managed to find a form of Communism that's economically viable...
...Next time you see the flag on a proud American chest, remember: These colors don't run...
...Come on, he said, out with it: Are you in favor of full-scale war with China...
...The Establishment was striking back...
...If the Chinese are happy to go on making all those cuddly toys and souvenir knickknacks we buy at Disney World's "Main Street USA," why begrudge them the odd nuclear secret...
...Forget now whether that was true or not (actually, it was), the significant thing was that it appeared in the Post...
...nd now a story about another kind of op-ed piece: In May, the Times ran a deceptive and entirely self-serving op-ed article by Hoyt Zia, a Commerce Department official...
...PRESSWATCH by John Corry Madeleine's War N o, it was not a parody...
...It also had a gushing contest with Newsweek...
...Why should Bosnia, Kosovo, you name it, regard themselves as U.S...
...No official evidence was ever given to support those offensive falsehoods, but the damage to one's reputation from accusations of disloyalty are irreparable ....I will forever have to explain to prospective employers why my loyalty as an American was called into question...
...Meanwhile Krogh and Harries both indicated that Albright made them nervous...
...To understand this, What matters is where you figure on the A-list...
...protectorates...
...In Washington terms, then, the dismissal of Albright as a jumped-up hostess was serious stuff, too serious, in fact, to be handled by anyone in Washington, or anyone connected to the Post...
...The American Spectator • July 1999 51...
...Time had admired them, too, but it out-gushed Newsweek by descending into girl-speak...
...The Middle East peace process is expiring, and North Korea still exports missiles...
...During the congressional investigations into improper campaign financing, Zia wrote, he had been interviewed by both congressional investigators and people from "self-appointed watchdog groups...
...And NATO was united as never before, of course, even as its members conducted public feuding...
...Right now...
...Enter Norman Mailer, who, in a savage, intelligent, and literary op-ed exposed not only Albright and the A-list, but the stupidity and immorality of the Clinton White House as well...
...50 July 1999 • The American Spectator however, you must turn not to conventional news stories, but to the less inhibited articles on op-ed pages, in particular the ones in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal...
...Rosenthal recently described him on the Times op-ed page—and it was based on industrious reporting...
...Zia, however, had shaded the truth considerably...
...The Chinese declined to do so, but on Zia's return to the U.S, the Commerce Department approved more computer exports...
...then it seemed to waver...
...Albright was in a bomber jacket, talking into a cell phone, looking determined, and apparently calling in F-16s...
...Chinese T-shirt technology has improved almost as spectacularly as Chinese nuclear technology...
...They were in old-fashioned black and white, not color, and meant to link Albright with the past: JFK and Cuban missiles, Johnson and Vietnam, even Bobby and Bed-Stuy...
...We knew Bill Clinton's a pudgy sensualist who keeps Yasir Arafat waiting in the outer office because he needs some instant gratification from Monica...
...But they do slowly, remorselessly, fade away...
...It spread Zia's long article across four columns, crowned by a jokey headline: "Well, Is He A Spy—Or Not...
...Harries said more pointedly that "Madeleine Albright's protestations to the contrary, in all but the most dire of circumstances, some strategic assets are better possessed than used...
...In one of Zia's trips to China, Timmerman noted, Zia was supposed to persuade the Chinese to allow U.S...
...What makes Madeleine Albright so tough...
...And as Timmerman also had reported in TAS, Zia had the prime responsibility for granting export licenses to Motorola, Loral, and Hughes, all of them now cited in the Cox Report...
...The Times liked that, of course...
...Madeleine Albright has never been the type to sit by her phone knitting, waiting for guys to call, unless the guy is the president and the date is with History," it said in the very first sentence of its story...
...Apache helicopters were not operating, but what about the C-i3o gunships...
...The Spectator piece had been written by Kenneth Timmerman—"one of the experts read by other experts," as A.M...
...In the story inside, managing editor Walter Isaacson JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent and regular Press-watch columnist...
...This administration's foreign policy team is surely the worst in 6o years," he wrote in the Times...
...Ground troops would not be used, although all options were still open...
...wrote that Albright seemed "touchingly eager for approval," and "anxious" about how the story would turn out, but that he told her "rest assured—the pictures are good," and certainly from an Establishment perspective that was true...
...Time wanted to confirm that no matter what anyone thought, Albright was still one of the boys...
...Consequently Timmerman asked the Times to publish a letter from him rebutting Zia's accusations...
...Meanwhile the Washington Post: An op-ed piece there said Albright had risen to her current eminence as "a hostess charming up the Beltway's A-list...
...The urge to demonstrate cojones helped pave the road to Kosovo...
...Albright has conducted foreign policy by mixing threats, bluffs, and empty moralizing, and the result has been a series of disasters...
...And then, of course, there is Kosovo, or "Madeleine's War," as Time called it in an appropriate headline with the first big black-and-white picture...
...then it said it was...
...Well, er, no, not really...
...Yes or no...
...The coverage was absurd at the time, and since then it has looked even sillier...
...At that Memorial Day parade, one of my neighbors turned up with a popular T-shirt displaying the Stars and Stripes and bearing the slogan "These colors don't run...
Vol. 32 • July 1999 • No. 7
