Tom Ricks

Tom Ricks of the Washington Post is ticked that I said he is on "the left" (in my last item re Obama). He wrote me a note, here's the exchange:

TR: Describing Iraq as a Hobbesian state worse than a civil war makes one a leftist? That would be a surprise to the Army major in Baghdad who first used the term in a discussion with me. Under your definition, the Defense Intelligence Agency is a leftist organization. Cheers...

PW: Nice appearance. Yep, I made the assumption which I make of most mainstream reporters, esp ones that write about Fiascos in Iraq, that they're on the left. Certainly that was the function Meet the Press assigned to you: to represent the left. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to run your response... Also: can I score your book from someone?

TR: Here's my response: "It's a rookie mistake to assume things, especially when you can check them out. It must be a real luxury to be able to make things up. If you had read my book, you'd know it isn't a book of my opinion, but instead is based on hundreds of interviews and a review of 37,000 pages of documents." You can get the book at the bookstore.

The only thing I want to retract is describing my judgment of Ricks's politics as an "assumption" (putting it in the same category as his false assumption I'm a newby). It was a characterization, and I stand by it.

1, Meet the Press assembled a roundtable of four: two neocons, a centrist (CFR's Richard Haass), and a lib/left voice: Ricks. It's too bad that Anatol Lieven or Dan Swanson, someone truly on the left, isn't at the table, but that's just the way the American cookie crumbles now. The Washington Post is a liberal publication. 2, I mentioned Ricks last summer when he made the brave comment on Howard Kurtz's show that the Israeli generals were leaving some Hezbollah rockets intact so that the civilian-deaths wouldn't just pile up on one side, Lebanon. Brave, because Ricks, who as I recall based his statement on informed speculation at the Pentagon, was thereby defying an iron law of the conventional wisdom: Israel is fighting for its existence, not to maintain the perception that it's David to an Arab Goliath. The Israel lobby went crazy, and Ricks and the Post backed down, alas (with Ricks saying drily that he was going to go back to a noncontentious issue: Iraq). But let's be clear: Ricks's willingness to question Israeli motives places him firmly where Russert put him, on the left side of the discourse. 3, Ricks's claim that the Pentagon's DIA is neutral shows how little he understands of the ideological matrix in which we work. As I've said many times on this blog, with the elites signing off on the Iraq calamity, from the New Yorker magazine to Hillary Clinton, the military is our best hope as the braintrust of the antiwar movement. Cindy Sheehan isn't far removed from the colonels who are talking to Seymour Hersh, and probably to Ricks, too. Last spring, West Point hosted Noam Chomsky, the Naval War College hosted Walt and Mearsheimer (when these important intellectuals are in mainstream purdah). The guys in uniform who are being called upon to make the only real sacrifice here are also the ones looking for real ideas (like, Talking to Syria). Navy Secretary Winter is pushing for a "hearts and minds" battle with Islam, not a hot war.

I understand why Ricks is ticked. He's a soi-disant professional and doesn't want to be ideologically punched. It might damage his credibility. Not in my book. When Ricks said on Meet the Press that the Iraq war was "probably...the most profligate and worst decision in the history of American foreign policy," he was a brave speaker of truth, and also mirroring the military's best judgment, which is now on the left of the discourse. The good minds in the defense establishment occupy the same position as State Department Arabists do when the political parties and the executive sign off on illegal Israeli settlements. Tom Ricks can't cop to this. His problem, not mine.

One big price exacted by the Israel lobby is that it tries to shut down free debate when Israel's motives are questioned. This is the lesson of the furore over comments on CNN by Tom Ricks, the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent.

Three weeks back on Howard Kurtz's show Reliable Sources, Ricks, who has just published a bestselling book about the Iraq fiasco called Fiasco, made a startling statement:

One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.

KURTZ: Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it's fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?

RICKS: Yes, that's what military analysts have told me.

KURTZ: That's an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in.. terms of the battle of perceptions here.

RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.

KURTZ: All right.

The comments drew a sharp reaction from the pro-Israel community. For instance, former Mayor Ed Koch said that they were antisemitic, for they repeated the classic "blood libel," suggesting that Jews would sacrifice children to derive benefit to their people. Or something like that.

Koch then badgered Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. about the remarks, and then brandished Downie's response on the National Review website.

I have made clear to Tom Ricks that he should not have made those statements. Len Downie

That's too bad. Yes, Ricks's statement seems off the wall. But he stuck to it throughout the flap, telling The New York Sun "The comments were accurate: that I said I had been told this by people. I wish I hadn't said them, and I intend from now on to keep my mouth shut about it."

The danger here is that zealous devotion to Israel on the part of the American lobby causes good reporters not to even speculate about international affairs, but to portray Israel always in favorable terms. Kevin Drum made the same point last month, when he said he avoided even voicing pro-Palestinian views because folks are so touchy about the issue, and the Middle East is so complex. I.e., leave it to the experts who know everything. That's un-American: we should encourage debate, not stifle it. (Interestingly, Kurtz himself didn't find Ricks's statement preposterous. And as all the recent Israeli histories of the Six-Day War have shown, the truth about the military events takes a long time to unfold.)

It's hard to imagine any of these guys getting so bent out of shape if, say, American military tactics were impeached. A point Ricks made to me when I asked him to talk about the flap. "No thanks, I have vowed to going back to covering only Iraq, where tempers seem to run calmer."