Scrapbook
Scrapbook When It Raines It Pours, cont. When is a correction not really a correction? Several weeks ago, The Scrapbook took note of the New York Times's increasingly strident campaign against the...
...The Ministry of Information Industry disclaims responsibility, as do the Public Security Ministry and the Foreign Ministry...
...Two-thirds of them featured quotations evaluating the Bush administration's Iraq policy...
...Despite Chancellor Schroder's firm opposition to invading Iraq, newly empowered military officers might be more inclined to see the merits of a Baghdad Blitz...
...resolutions...
...A favorite in China thanks to its easy-to-use Chinese interface, Google has now joined the not-so-exclusive club of sites forbidden to the 45 million Chinese users of the Internet...
...Times executive editor Howell Raines provided some insight in a September 3 appearance on Jim Lehrer's News Hour...
...The congress convenes once every five years, and widespread access to information about the proceedings is the last thing the CP wants...
...Instead, they proceeded with what you might call an editorial-within-a-correc-tion: "Republicans are in fact divided, both over the way Mr...
...He said an attack on Iraq should be directed toward a more limited aim, eradicating weapons of mass destruction...
...It's their professionalism people increasingly wonder about...
...Except Kissinger does believe removing Saddam Hussein from power is an appropriate goal...
...Some speculate that the blocks may have been thrown up in preparation for the upcoming Communist party congress, at which China's next leader is expected to be chosen...
...He thinks this is the Vietnam war all over again, and that his paper can head off disaster before it strikes...
...The group examined front page stories in the Times from July 1 to August 25...
...Even among the Republicans cited by the paper, including Bush and members of his administration, only 42 percent were positive, and 58 percent were negative...
...Wrote Kissinger: "The imminence of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the huge dangers it involves, the rejection of a viable inspection system and the demonstrated hostility of Hussein combine to produce an imperative for preemptive action...
...Yahoo...
...The new head, however, to i reassure the Germanophobes, will not be called "Chief of the General Staff and ; High Command" (Chef des Oberkom- ; mandos der Wehrmacht), but rather "Gen- ; eral Inspector" (Generalinspekteur)—a ; position filled by such predecessors as Count Helmuth von Moltke, Paul von ; Hindenburg, Nazi hack Wilhelm Keit- ; el, and the ever-bumbling Colonel Klink (okay, the last one we made up...
...Bush is preparing for the possibility of war and over whether the United States should attack Iraq...
...A mere 29 percent were favorable, and 71 percent unfavorable...
...According to the Times, "the aim is clear: full authority for military planning will pass to senior officers rather than to the civilian Minister of Defence...
...So the Times's notion that Kissinger favors one goal and disapproves of the other is simply false...
...I think we're going to see some revisitations of journalistic history," he predicted...
...But the Times didn't stop there...
...We can't gainsay that Raines is hearing echoes—but we suspect this has less to do with the nature of the war on terror and more to do with the fact that the man works in an ideological echo chamber...
...Bush's justification for war—was not an appropriate goal...
...Ja wohl, mein General Inspector...
...On balance, they argue, we shouldn't complain when the likes of Yahoo...
...Previously chiefs of the army, air force, and navy responded only to orders from the minister: now they have a general issuing commands...
...Kind of...
...Several weeks ago, The Scrapbook took note of the New York Times's increasingly strident campaign against the coming war on Iraq...
...And no doubt it's another coincidence that access to Yahoo!'s search engine has been unaffected by the outages...
...Hussein from power—Mr...
...Why the reluctance simply to admit error...
...Last week, the Times of London reported that Germany has revived its infamous General Staff as part of its military reorganization in light of recent actions taken by the army in Kosovo, Macedonia, and now in Afghanistan...
...Perhaps such ; restructuring can be put to good use this time around...
...Just so we're clear on this point: No one doubts the New York Times's patriotism (well, someone probably does, but we don't...
...A forthcoming study by the Center for Media and public Affairs concludes that the Times's reporting on Iraq has been measurably skewed...
...So there...
...And Kissinger, the Times added, "said that removing Mr...
...The one requires the other...
...The Times had reported, on its front page (August 16), that top Republicans had begun to "break with the administration on Iraq," and had included in that group former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger...
...Less than a week later, AltaVista was blocked as well...
...In the interest of rallying as many countries as possible to our cause (and of discouraging other countries from regime-change adventure), he urged that "the objective of regime change should be subordinated in American declaratory policy to the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction from Iraq as required by the U.N...
...In the meantime, though, it looks like Beijing is subverting the Net rather than the other way round...
...For example, as the Iraq debate plays out . . . I'm hearing a lot of echoes of the early '60s, when people were saying it was unpatriotic to report the debate over Vietnam...
...But Kissinger emphasizes that in the case of Iraq there is no practical distinction between the goals of removing Saddam and disarming Iraq...
...The Times conceded that it should not have included Kissinger in the group of Republicans "who were warning outright against a war," and even conceded that Kissinger "said that a war was justifiable...
...In other words, if you read only the Times, you'd conclude that Republicans—and everyone else, for that matter—are against president Bush's Iraq policy...
...Then again, maybe it's just a coincidence, since no one in the Chinese government seems to know who threw up the blocks...
...Let's hope they're right...
...Sounds harmless enough, despite previous general staffs' responsibility ; for achievements like the Schlieffen j Plan, Dunkirk, and Operation Bar- ; barossa...
...Still, who knows...
...The Times repeated this mistake in an article on August 17...
...Funny thing: A search for President Jiang Zemin's name on Chinese Google, by the way, turns up 156,000 hits...
...China fetches a measly 24 results, probably because of their agreement to make nice with the government...
...collaborate with Chinese authorities as the price of doing business in China...
...So The Scrapbook was heartened when the Times ran a "correction" of those stories last week...
...On August 31, Chinese users of Google began reporting error messages when they tried to access the popular Internet search engine...
...The good doctor had, in fact, written an essay in the Washington Post defending the Bush administration's policy of preemption and offering numerous reasons to support the removal of Saddam Hussein...
...Raines twice invoked the war in Vietnam as an analogue to the current discussions about Iraq...
...German defense minister Peter Struck was careful to downplay its reinstatement...
...Some subversion...
...The block on Google is particularly lamentable since Google not only provides links to web pages, but also stores copies of web pages, allowing access to them when their home servers are blocked...
...The Great Firewall of China Our friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial page are hopeful that the free flow of information enabled by the Internet will one day subvert the Communist regime in Beijing...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 1
