July 15, 2007 08:53 AM UTC

Al-Qaeda in Iraq and American Media's Laziness in Regards To It

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• by: Mr. Toodles

http://www.nytimes.c…

AS domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away, President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al-Qeada.

Bush mentioned the terrorist group 27 times in a recent speech on Iraq at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. In West Virginia on the Fourth of July, he declared, “We must defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq.” The Associated Press reported last month that although some 30 groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi government targets, press releases from the American military focus overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda.

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there. While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements.

Middle East experts with whom I talked in recent days said that the heavy focus on Al Qaeda obscures a much more complicated situation on the ground — and perhaps a much more dangerous one around the world.

“Nobody knows how many different Islamist extremist groups make up the insurgency” in Iraq, said Anthony H. Cordesman of the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even when you talk about Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the idea of somehow it is the center of the insurgency is almost absurd.”

Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor of Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, said, “I have been noticing — not just your paper — all papers have fallen into this reporting.” The administration, he added, “made a strategic decision” to play up Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq, “and the press went along with it.” (Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, but we’ll get to that in a moment.)

Recent Times stories from Iraq have referred, with little or no attribution — and no supporting evidence — to “militants linked with Al Qaeda,” “Sunni extremists with links to Al Qaeda” and “insurgents from Al Qaeda.” The Times has stated flatly, again without attribution or supporting evidence, that Al Qaeda was responsible for the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra last year, an event that the president has said started the sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.

For the president, an emphasis on Al Qaeda has political advantages at a time when powerful former allies, like Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are starting to back away from his war policy. Al Qaeda is an enemy Americans understand, in contrast to the messy reality of an Iraq where U.S. troops must also deal with Sunni nationalists, Shiite militias and even criminal gangs.

“Remember, when I mention Al Qaeda, they’re the ones who attacked the United States of America and killed nearly 3,000 people on September the 11th, 2001,” Bush said in the Naval War College speech.

Actually, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which came into being in 2003, pledged its loyalty to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda the next year but is not believed to be under his operational control.

Jonathan Landay, a friend and former colleague, wrote a sharply skeptical story for the McClatchy newspaper group after the president’s June 28 speech. Bush called Al Qaeda “the main enemy” in Iraq, but Landay reported that “U.S. military and intelligence officials” reject that characterization.

Indeed the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, representing the intelligence community’s consensus assessment, summed up the situation this way:

“Iraqi society’s growing polarization, the persistent weakness of security forces and the state in general, and all sides’ ready recourse to violence are collectively driving an increase in communal and insurgent violence and political extremism.” Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia, were mentioned as “very effective accelerators for what has become a self-sustaining intersectarian struggle between Shia and Sunnis.”

In other words, the story of Iraq isn’t the story of all Al Qaeda all the time.

The Times report on the Naval War College speech didn’t deal with the president’s emphasis on Al Qaeda and instead focused on his growing troubles with Republicans in Congress. Dean Baquet, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, said the article reflected the “overall sense he’s losing ground even within his own party.” It took that angle, he said, because Times reporters and editors believe Republican defections “might be the beginning of something big in Congress.”

Baquet said, “I think the paper’s coverage over all has been pretty skeptical of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.”

I went back and read war coverage for much of the month of June and found many stories that conveyed the complexity and chaos of today’s Iraq. Times reporters wrote that Iraq’s political leaders were failing to meet benchmarks that would show satisfactory progress to the American government, that a formerly peaceful Shiite city in southern Iraq was convulsed by violence as rival groups fought for control, and that Sunnis feared their own country’s army because it is dominated by Shiites.

But those references to Al Qaeda began creeping in with greater frequency. Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said she takes “great pride in the whole of our coverage” but acknowledged that the paper had used “excessive shorthand” when referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “We’ve been sloppy,” she said. She and other editors started worrying about it, Chira said, when the American military began an operation in mid-June against what it said were strongholds of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

On Thursday, she and her deputy, Ethan Bronner, circulated a memo with guidelines on how to distinguish Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

It’s a good move. I’d have been happier still if The Times had helped its readers by doing a deeper job of reporting on the administration’s drive to make Al Qaeda the singular enemy in Iraq.

Military experts will tell you that failing to understand your enemy is a prescription for broader failure.