| Ouch. |
We don't blame C.J. Chivers, the Timesman who penned this opus. It was a tall order, and he did the best he could. He's cranked out something on the order of 10,000 words. We ran the whole dispatch through one of our favorite contraptions for the modern editor: The patented "Straight-talk Gasoline Operated High Volume Prose Compactor." We have the Tolstoy 100 model, which can handle stories twice the length of Chivers'. It summarized his piece this way: "Dang, we're angry at Mr. Bush for failing to tell us we found the weapons that he had warned were there and that the Times insisted weren't."
To cover its own bumbling of the story, the Times tries to blame Mr. Bush for the fact that a number of our heroic GIs were injured by poison from the weapons the Times had claimed were a fiction. "The secrecy fit a pattern," says the Times. "Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States' encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found."
You're telling us. Implication number one is that the Times ought to bring back Judith Miller and install her as its foreign editor. She was the reporter who got fired because she broke the story that we needed to go in there and get these weapons. For penance the Times could put her in charge of covering the war against the Islamic State. Number two is that the Times owes Ahmad Chalabi an apology. It has done nothing but libel him for inspiriting the Iraqi National Congress. It has suggested he purposely misled America, even though what he sought was a Free Iraq.
Finally it owes an apology to President Bush. He has devoted his post-presidency to inspiriting the GIs whom he sent into battle, particularly those who suffered life-changing injuries. He rides bikes and golfs with them, thinks about them all the time, keeps faith with them. He knew we couldn't withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, warning "they will follow us home." That's what they're fixing to do now that we have withdrawn from Iraq and are withdrawing from Afghanistan. Our advice to the Times is that before it goes into print attacking our President and our GIs, it would be wise to think through what kind of correction it's going to have to run ten years hence.