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13 July 2007:

Complicity at the New York Times.

In a column that appeared on Wednesday, Maureen Dowd mentioned mortar attacks on Baghdad's Green Zone, the American citadel in Iraq. I thought that that was pretty big news, but Ms Dowd's colleagues must have thought it was a big yawn. Although I didn't scan every paragraph of the paper in the following days, I have found no mention of the strikes in the print version of the paper. (An Associated Press story appeared at the papers Web site at some point today.)

Can someone explain why mortar attacks on the Green Zone are not front-page news, important enough to contest the President's highly-publicized bid for patience and fortitude? Why is the Times cooperating with the Administration's strategy of redefining our Iraqi Misadventure in such a way that the manifold disasters wind up on the editing room floor? A story that did run in the print paper today, about the death of two Reuters newsmen in an American airstrike (Alissa J Rubin's '2 Iraqi Journalists Killed as US Forces Clash With Militias"), ends with the assertion that, according to the United Nations Appeal (a source that the Administration would not dispute so much as ipso facto ignore), about two thousand Iraqis abandon their homes every day. Iraq has been engulfed by a civil war that the American presence may be slowing down - but if we are slowing it down, that is only to intensify the hatred. Shiite and Sunni Iraqis have a very legitimate quarrel, as do that Kurds and their several neighbors. There is nothing that a foreign power can do to minimize the rancor of these contests.

Several people - no Americans - have been killed within the Green Zone. It is conceivable that Americans will be driven out of Baghdad by increased mortar fire. Then what? Will that make the front page of the Times?

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