"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."
-Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed
Perhaps if I had met Judith Miller in a hotel bar back in our single days I would have bought her a drink and ended up in her room, acting out one of those scenes that so colorfully embroider Scooter Libby's fiction.
"He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him..."
It could have been a great May-December romance, with Ms. Miller alternately forging her neoconservative vision for the Middle East and helping me study for my poli-sci finals. Hegemony, I'd learn, was a powerful aphrodisiac.
Perhaps she would have taken me out West, where the aspens "turn in clusters because their roots connect them." I'd flatter her by simply refusing to believe she had graduated from high school in 1965.
I'd understand that it simply wouldn't do for her to bring me to certain functions, though she'd pout when I - in turn - didn't take her to the Delta Psi Oktoberfest party.
But, sadly, unlike her pal and Vanity Fair writer-at-large Marie Brenner, I've never had the pleasure of meeting Judith Miller. So my feelings toward Ms. Miller - as with all other reporters I've never net - are based entirely on her reporting. Her rather unfortunate reporting.
In Ms. Brenner's April Vanity Fair piece, a 15-page Potemkin village so bereft of new revelations it seems to have been constructed entirely to provide Ms. Miller with a parapet from which to fire on her critics, Judy airs her feelings and takes aim at... the blogs?
She is quoted as saying to Times editor Bill Keller, "Why do you give a shit about the blogs? They do not know anything."
On that point, isn't it less dangerous to have an ill-informed blogger like myself trumpeting unedited opinion as unedited opinion than having a Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter trumpeting the calculated lies of unreliable sources as fact? One would think.
As for bloggers not knowing anything, how many times have I longed to produce Josh Marshall (Annie Hall-Marshall McLuhan-style) to wage an argument for me? That dude is a genius. And funny too. And probably not widely reviled by his coworkers and subordinates, though I think he has only two. But I digress.
Ms. Miller also told Brenner, "The bloggers were without editing, without a way for people to understand what was good, what was well reported..."
In this way, I suppose, blog readers were a lot like New York Times readers. As a friend, one has to assume that Ms. Brenner had the good graces not to laugh when Ms. Miller complained about the inaccurate reportage of the blogosphere.
Ms. Miller added, "I was appalled... by my colleagues who believed what they read on the blogs."
Wow. You gotta admit, that takes big brass ones. Impugning the credulity of others when you've swallowed and regurgitated Ahmad Chalabi's lies for your reading public. How dare your colleagues be so gullible! Of course part of the reason they may have believed the blogs is that bloggers would seem to have less of a motive to lie about Judith Miller than, say, the Iraqi National Congress might have to lie about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. Just a thought.
To her credit, Ms. Miller was like a dog with a bone - or rather a dog without a bone, searching for one in the sand - when it came to W.M.D.
She said, "I wanted to find out how the intelligence services had gotten this so wrong," dutifully placing the blame where the administration wants it.
C'mon. Really, Judy? You have no idea how the intelligence services could have blown this? Any theories? Perhaps some insight might be gained by noodling on Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans.
The Office of Special Plans, on which Ms. Miller would rely (as they would come to rely on her), might as well have been called the Office of Special Math, charged with finding evidence that proved 2+2=5. Perhaps other branches of the intelligence services were likewise, er, encouraged. Soon enough, it became a "slam dunk."
For all I know, despite the 50 or so stories I've read to the contrary, Judith Miller is a delight. She sure smiles a lot in her interviews. And God knows I'm easily charmed by smart older women, especially when they have a genuine pottymouth like Ms. Miller.
Maybe had we met in that bar, I'd see her as the First Amendment martyr she'd like to be known as and not as the neocon shill whose shoddy reporting contributed to the selling of the Iraq war and badly damaged her newspaper.
This isn't the first time a New York Times reporter has allowed personal opinion to influence their coverage of a war. David Halberstam's heroic reporting in Vietnam reflected his opposition to that tragic waste of tens of thousands of young lives. Conversely, Ms. Miller presumably saw the inevitable loss of life in Iraq as an acceptable cost of regime change.
But it would seem to me when a reporter pushes the cause for war in her reporting, she and her newspaper bear a much bigger responsibility, a responsibility that stretches from the physical therapy rooms of Walter Reed to the cemeteries of America and Iraq.
I'm not worried about Judith Miller. She'll land on her feet. Or her knees, depending on the demands of her source.