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Blog of Adam Daifallah -- author, journalist, law student. Lover of politics, writing, golf, curling, fitness, fashion, bacon and maple products -- not necessarily (but probably) in that order. Partisan of the Anglosphere. Contact me via email at adam@daifallah.com. This summer I am joined by Keir Wilmut and Omar Soliman.
Monday, May 31, 2004
Chalabi hit job article #353,023
Jane Mayer has produced a mammoth work of journalism about Ahmad Chalabi for the New Yorker. It's likely to get a lot of play this week. The piece, titled "The Manipulator," is a classic hit job. But it's a good hit-job piece.
I haven't heard much about Mayer since her attempt (with Jill Abramson, currently the #2 at The New York Times) to vindicate Anita Hill. Mayer has done a lot of homework about Chalabi and the history of the Iraqi opposition. Unfortunately, the piece is tremendously biased against Chalabi and is a touch boring to read because of its repetitive style. The format:
X said Ahmad Chalabi did a lot of bad stuff. The bad stuff he did is A, B, C. (Y denies this.)
An example of what I'm talking about:
Chalabi has consistently denied having any personal political ambitions, or any desire to lead Iraq. As early as 1994, he told the Los Angeles Times, “Anyone who wants to take power in Baghdad is crazy. I’m just in this to get rid of Saddam.” In our conversation, however, Chalabi said that he could no longer uphold his promise that he would never seek office in Iraq. “Never is a very long time,” he said. Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector for the United Nations, who has known Chalabi for seven years, said that Chalabi had confided to him his plans to run Iraq once America had liberated it. Ritter, who strongly opposed the war and produced a controversial documentary in 2001 asserting that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, also said that Chalabi spoke of benefitting financially from Iraq’s oil reserves, which are the second largest in the world. (Chalabi’s office denies this.)
There's nothing wrong with this stylistically, as far as I know. But she could have done a bit more research to present more from the denying side, other than just doing a four word denial sentence in parentheses at the end of the paragraph.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 12:40 AM
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