Yesterday I teed off on a New Yorker profile of Hank Greenberg that I felt had provided cover to Greenberg's Israel-centered views of the Middle East. I don't keep up on the New Yorker, but a friend sent along the following critique of the magazine's Middle East coverage. I'm masking his/her identity because it's Hallowe'en, and cuz he/her wants me to:
Remnick learned Russian while at the Washington Post in order to become a correspondent there, and saw and described the breakup of the system; and he picked up, very late but at full strength, the American anti-Communist righteousness. As with Paul Berman and several others, I think he readily transferred the Totalitarian Enemy idea to "Islamo-Fascism"–happy to be among the wised-up, but insufficiently wary of the historical differences between any two historical things. He endorsed the Iraq war in 2003. None of the New Yorker reporting on Iraq has been anti-war, not even in the all-war-is-awful sense of Dexter Filkins in the Times. George Packer is always looking for uplift–evidence that somehow the Americans did some good after all, and that behind all our mistakes was not selfishness or or the will to power but sheer incompetence.
[Weiss again] Fascinating. I read this to James North today and he said that Andrew Sullivan's path is the most honorable one re Iraq: he's admitted he got it wrong and feels awful about it, end of story. He's shrived. Packer has never really done so. The New Yorker would help itself and its readers if it did a postmortem on its mistaken judgment here, in the greatest f.p. disaster of the last 30 years, including its decision to run Jeffrey Goldberg's "intelligence" from Kurdistan or wherever story, which provided a(nother) flimsy basis for what anyone with sense knew would be a huge mistake (including clairvoyant Steve Walt, here, in The New Yorker).
The loss is that during Vietnam, the New Yorker told privileged liberals how to think about the war. It was a leading voice against the war. This time it's a no-show in the antiwar movement or more significantly the How did we go wrong movement. To be hobbyhorsical for a moment (and this blog is nothing if not hobbyhorsical), I think it's a reflection of the new Jewish place in the Establishment. We've got neocons in our own families. It's hard for some to reject them outright.
