A postmodernist at the Times. Richard W. Stevenson inhabits a rigorously postmodern world from which the notion of fact has been excluded. In Stevenson's world, there are only statements, made by officials and their critics, and no one, certainly not Richard Stevenson himself, possesses the authority to make independent judgements of them. [I've noticed this Stevensonian tendency in passing before, towards the end of this post; Zachary Roth at CJR's Campaign Desk has a good brief takeout on it here.]

Actually, Stevenson gets a little excited at the start of his hapless news analysis today, on the much ballyhooed 9/11 Commission staff report (with its much, and pathetically*, ballyhooed dismissal of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection), and allows what almost looks like an irruption of fact into his world, but he recovers quickly enough:

In questioning the extent of any ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the commission weakened the already spotty scorecard on Mr. Bush's justifications for sending the military to topple Saddam Hussein.

Banned biological and chemical weapons: none yet found. Percentage of Iraqis who view American-led forces as liberators: 2, according to a poll commissioned last month by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Number of possible Al Qaeda associates known to have been in Iraq in recent years: one, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose links to the terrorist group and Mr. Hussein's government remain sketchy.

That is the difficult reality Mr. Bush faces 15 months after ordering the invasion of Iraq, and less than five months before he faces the voters at home. The commission's latest findings fueled fresh partisan attacks on his credibility and handling of the war.

""With 9/11 Report, Bush's Political Thorn Grows More Stubborn""

With "partisan attacks," Stevenson lands on safe ground: you can imagine him breathing easy again. [It appears that not only is there no fact in Stevenson's world, there's no press, either. Would it be at all out of place for him to have noticed that practically the entire mainstream media, including Stevenson's own paper, have reacted to the 9/11 report as if it were the starting bell in a great big Iraq-Al Qaeda gang-bang?]

Stevenson puts the "hapless" in his hapless news analysis when he comes around to reviewing that matter of Zarqawi, and Bush's latest assertions about the Administration's most favoritest putative Al Qaeda operative:

The president has repeatedly asserted that there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, a position he stuck to on Tuesday when he was asked about Vice President Dick Cheney's statement a day earlier that Mr. Hussein had "long-established ties with Al Qaeda."

Mr. Bush pointed specifically on Tuesday to the presence in Iraq of Mr. Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist who sought help from Al Qaeda in waging the anti-American insurgency after the fall of Mr. Hussein, and who has been implicated by American intelligence officials in the killing of Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old American who was beheaded by militants in Iraq in March.

The White House said Wednesday that there was a distinction between Mr. Bush's position and the commission's determination that Iraq did not cooperate with Al Qaeda on attacks on the United States.

The commission's report did not specifically address that distinction or Mr. Zarqawi's role.

And yeah, that's the sum total of Stevenson's discussion of the question. With no statement from the commission about Zarqawi, obviously there's nothing more for Stevenson to say on the subject! The fact that every informed observer—a category that obviously excludes the Boy Churchill (as it excludes William Safire, by the way)—has long since concluded that Zarqawi is useless for demonstrating any link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the fact that Bush's statement is thus off-topic and a lie by indirection: Stevenson obviously feels no responsibility to those facts, as he feels no responsibility to clarify them for his readers. (If Stevenson intends his failure to elaborate on that no doubt contentless "distinction"—patently a fig-leaf "clarification" offered by the White House press office to clean up after Dubya—as some kind of subtle disendorsement of Bush's claim: well, too subtle by half, Richard.)

But facts, as St. Ronnie taught us, are stupid things. By the end of his "analysis" Stevenson is gleefully chucking them all down the memory hole:

Democratic strategists said there was now no question that Mr. Bush would be dogged through the rest of the campaign by questions about whether the war was necessary, justified and sufficiently well planned. But Mr. Bush's supporters said that in political terms, the amazing thing was how well he had weathered the problems thrown at him by Iraq.

"If you look at the last eight months at the White House and in particular the last 90 days, I've never seen more negative stories come out in a concentrated period," said Sig Rogich, a veteran Republican advertising consultant and fund-raiser. "Yet despite all that, the president is still even with John Kerry or, if you count the Electoral College votes in the battleground states, ahead." ...

James M. Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations, who studies the interplay between foreign policy and domestic politics, said the issue now was less whether Mr. Bush was wrong in asserting a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda than whether he could stabilize Iraq and show progress in bringing American forces home.

Words all but fail me here. Is it really too much to ask that we be allowed to remember, just for a bit, that the "problems thrown at [Bush] by Iraq" are entirely problems of his own making? And thus, that his ability to weather them is utterly beside the point? That those problems are not merely problems of execution, but written into the very determination to prosecute this war? That the "issue" is not, and never has been, whether Bush was merely "wrong in asserting a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda"—but that the assertion, which was demonstrably false long before the 9/11 commission said it was, was used to bully the nation into supporting Bush's war?

But there I go again, asserting facts on my own authority, just because I know them to be facts. While, unencumbered, Richard Stevenson and his Republican pals spin blithely off into the next in our ever-extending series of New Dispensations.

*God knows I enjoy anything that discomfits the Bush Administration—but my gob rises at today's little free-for-all on the falseness of the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. One senses a feeling of release in the Times and elsewhere—at last, we can say what we know about it! Is there anything more craven than the institutional press treating itself to one of these feeding frenzies? You knew it all along, you cowardly sons of bitches—why wouldn't you tell the public about it when it would have made a difference, maybe kept us out of a disastrous war? No, you had to wait for a commission report to provide cover. Stevensonism writ large.

posted by michael  7:02:37 PM  
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