A sharp friend makes an interesting observation about Roger Cohen's important op-ed about Iran that appeared in the New York Times on March 1:
It goes very far in challenging the MSM and high establishment gospel that Iran is an irredeemably totalitarian country on a par with Hitler's Germany.
Something curious: Here is another version of the same piece that appeared in the International Herald Tribune. Five paragraphs from the end, where Cohen talks about the Jewish community center bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994, he writes:
have not been committed, like the bombing of the Jewish community
center in Buenos Aires 15 years ago, for which Argentina and Israel
have accused Iran.
Notice the qualification; Cohen treats the Buenos Aires charge as an allegation, and not yet proved. Now look at the Times version of the same paragraph:
have not been committed, like the Iran-backed bombing of the Jewish
community center in Buenos Aires 15 years ago.
The Times version doesn't just remove the qualifying clause, it alters the grammar of the allegation to create an ostensible fact.
I (Weiss) emailed Roger Cohen to ask how the change had come about. He told me that the Times version was actually the first version of the story, but he changed the piece for publication in the IHT. Thereby improving it.
Oh well: There goes my and my friend's theory that the Times editors altered the Iranian claim to make it palatable to the carnivorous American elite!
So why am I even posting about this? Because, as my friend points out, the factual discrepancy here is a loaded one; and the difference between what NYT readers are getting and what IHT readers are getting is–whatever the cause–lamentable. Writes my friend:
The bombing was a key exhibit in the Perle-Frum imperial war blueprint,
An End to Evil; they deployed it in chapter 1 to prove that (a) Iran
was fanatically anti-Semitic, and (b) Iran had already insulted the
U.S. and violated the Monroe Doctrine, by an attack on civilians in our hemisphere:
killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at a Jewish Community
Center in Buenos Aires–and our government did worse than nothing: It opened
negotiations with the murderers. Mullahs and imams incited violence and
slaughter against Christians and Jews–and our government failed to acknowledge
that anything important was occurring."
Perle has repeated this charge in other settings, and has been the
keenest of the neoconservative war brokers in pressing the U.S. to bomb
Iran. As recently as January 2007, at the Herzliya conference
(in a speech reported in Haaretz), Perle did it by assuring his
audience that the bombing of Iran would be carried out "if it becomes
clear to [Bush] that Iran is set to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities while he is still in office."
Obviously, the more bombing Iran has already done, the more bombing it
is likely to do. That is why the chimerical accusation regarding Buenos
Aires is important to Perle and why it is important to the New York Times.
It seems possible that Cohen has read Gareth Porter's article in The Nation, later adapted for the Huffington Post, which took pains to examine the charge itself, the motives of those who made it, the part the Mossad may have played, and the lack of any substantial reason for believing that Iran had anything to do with the bombing. Cohen is reading forbidden materials now and arriving at unwelcome conclusions. Skepticism about Buenos Aires can open many paths of further skepticism and rational surmise. (Not only travel has changed his mind.)
