To his and the paper’s credit, the Public Editor of the Times today attacks the decision to hire Bill Kristol as a columnist. Clark Hoyt says Kristol shouldn’t have gotten the job because he once called for the Times to be prosecuted for publishing national secrets. Not because Kristol was wrong about Iraq. His reasoning was "broader" than weapons of mass destruction, Hoyt says, so Kristol is off the hook. And Hoyt continues to identify Kristol only as a "conservative." Why let these guys off the hook? A few years back Kristol was everywhere known as a neoconservative. He edited a book called the Neoconservative Imagination, all about his father Irving’s mental processes. Now no one wants to be called a neoconservative because it’s like a stupid sticker.
I don’t get this. It’s not that Bill Kristol was wrong about Iraq, it’s that he and his fellows have never come clean on why they wanted to capture an ancient Arab capital. It’s obvious that Israel’s security played a central role in their ideas, just as it played a central AND EXPLICIT role in his father’s calls for a strong American military back in the 70s. Not explicit this time round. But so far they’ve been able to play the antisemitism card when anyone brings it up. (Though fellow Times columnist Tom Friedman, whom Hoyt identifies as a "liberal," justified the war by saying that we had to put a stop to suicide bombers in Tel Aviv pizza parlors. Wait, that’s not my country).
The issue isn’t Kristol and the neocons’ opacity about their own motivation as much as it is the Times’s failure to anatomize the bad thinking behind this war. With Vietnam, the Times gave us the Pentagon Papers, David Halberstam, Gloria Emerson, and Neal Sheehan. Anatomizers of a disaster. This time ’round they’re providing cover to one of the disaster’s planners. Shouldn’t they just be interviewing him?
