Correspondence
Correspondence AXIS AND ALLIES The more people write against Brent Scowcroft's misleading Wall Street Journal article, as William Kristol does in "Axis of Appeasement" (August 26/Sep-tember 2),...
...Indeed, an editorial published in the Baltimore Sun on January 20 of this year ("Long, hard road to victory," Jonathan Frerichs) actually argued: "He corroborates accounts and keeps his figures conservative...
...Just don't upset the Arab Street...
...It is interesting to note, by the way, that another study, produced by a team of AP reporters on the ground in Afghanistan, who suggested civilian casualties in the mid-500s, has not received nearly as much attention, and none in the national prestige press...
...PETER G. BYRNES JR...
...RICHARD A. CURRIE Staten Island, NY THE MEDIA ARE DOING THEIR BEST to roll out any bit of opposition to a forward-looking foreign policy regarding Iraq...
...Once Saddam falls and the mullahs of Iran are picked off, and perhaps even the House of Saud and the Assads of Syria, the world will be a much, much safer place...
...Correspondence AXIS AND ALLIES The more people write against Brent Scowcroft's misleading Wall Street Journal article, as William Kristol does in "Axis of Appeasement" (August 26/Sep-tember 2), the better...
...And the more people recognize and make noise about Colin powell's strange stewardship of the State Department, the better, too...
...These organizations and individuals are so quick to criticize the administration's treatment of al Qaeda operatives, but care little for the faceless Iraqis who live under Saddam's oppression...
...Muravchik states, "Herold's claims have been little reported in the United States...
...We have a big hole in the New York skyline to remind us how successful all of that has been...
...Interestingly enough, the debate is framed around the "Arab Street," not human rights...
...It's much more like a back alley, in that there are only two things that are respected there —hard currency and crushing force...
...CORI DAUBER University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill SCOTT DEATHERAGE Northwestern University...
...eagle...
...one inaccuracy should be corrected, however...
...After all, nobody wants to protect a penniless bad guy...
...High time we had a president who recognizes, as Ronald Reagan did with the Soviets, that "business as usual" has been a failure, and that we'd better try something else before it is too late...
...our emphasis...
...Among other outlets, this dossier has been cited as a serious report or study, with no mention of the controversy it has elicited, in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (January 4 and January 27, 2002), the Boston Globe (January 19, 2002), which notes Herold uses the Afghan Islamic Press, but does not explain the significance of that fact, and even the New York Times (February 10, 2002...
...However, it is not a "street...
...Multiple critiques of this work have already been circulated...
...They do not sanction invasion of countries simply because we do not like their foreign policy or their military capability...
...Apparently the elite media are so enamored of their belief that a sustained bombing campaign could not have taken place without high civilian casualties that they would prefer to believe a dossier based on methods that appear "peculiar" (Muravchik's word) rather than less incendiary estimates from their own colleagues working in the field...
...suffice it to say we believe it difficult to produce an accurate count of civilian casualties in Afghanistan from New Hampshire...
...They, of course, care even less for the American casualties that Saddam will unleash with weapons of mass destruction...
...If Kristol's logic is applied, we can expect president Bush (and his lap dog The Weekly Standard) to want to move into Saudi Arabia and other nations that fail to cower under the claw of the U.S...
...J.L...
...SCHALLERT Cambridge, WI WILLIAM KRISTOL ATTACKS those who think a preemptive attack on a nation that poses no military threat to the continental United States is an appalling example of 21st-century American imperialism...
...Brent Scowcroft is right when he says in his Wall Street Journal column that Saddam Hussein has no interest in the United States except insofar as we thwart his ambitions to control oil policy in the Middle East, an oil policy that currently favors America...
...As part of a project analyzing media coverage of the war on terrorism, we have been carefully tracking the use of Professor Herold's work, which we believe to be the original source of the (clearly incorrect) factoid "as many innocent civilians died in the bombing as died in the World Trade Center...
...The only kind of morality in the Bush plans is a monstrous immorality that the world rightly condemns...
...osama bin Laden and his lieutenants will have no more money to run their operations, and they'll be easy to spot...
...American principles respect the rights of other peoples and nations to live and order their lives as they see fit...
...Severn, MD LET ME COUNT THE WAYS WE WERE INTERESTED to read Joshua Muravchik's account of the way Marc Herold's "dossier" on civilian casualties has been used in the foreign press ("The Prof Who Can't Count Straight," August 26/September 9...
...The closest any of these articles comes to a critique is to note that other studies of media sources had produced lower numbers...
...I should hate to have the president suddenly converted to their way of thinking, and subject us all to several more years of "containment" and "dialogue" and those interminable "peace processes" which have masqueraded as foreign policy in the Middle East for as long as I can remember...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 1
