by Matt Barr

The Paper of Broken Record

The New York Times (motto: "all the news that gives war supporters fits, we print") today sought to staunch the damage done the Iraq insurgency by the Pentagon's release of a Zarqawi blooper reel.

Captured video showing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sneaker-clad, not really knowing his way around an automatic weapon and surrounded by the kind of help you might expect to find in a sitcom spoof of loveable but inept Curlyesque terrorist insurgents was released Thursday during a DOD press briefing. Well, the help were Arab, which no sitcom would make terrorists today, but you know what I mean.

C.J. Chivers' Times story is just short of the kind of thing you might read in the Onion, or Scrappleface. Only it seems to be completely in earnest. Not All See Video Mockery of Zarqawi as Good Strategy, proclaims the ill-chosen headline. Ill-chosen: The interviewees (three to one against making fun of Zarqawi) have no insight into the strategic (or tactical, which mocking Zarqawi is) value of releasing the video. They argue instead that it didn't fool them into thinking Zarqawi was some kind of boob:

The weapon in question is complicated to master, and American soldiers and marines undergo many days of training to achieve the most basic competence with it. Moreover, the weapon in Mr. Zarqawi's hands was an older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising. The veterans said Mr. Zarqawi, who had spent his years as a terrorist surrounded by simpler weapons of Soviet design, could hardly have been expected to know how to handle it.

Which is precisely what the average viewer on YouTube or Al Jazeera thinks when they see it. "See there, they're trying to make him seem doltish, but he spent his years as a terrorist surrounded by simpler weapons of Soviet design, and he could hardly have been expected to know how to handle it. Also, the weapon in Mr. Zarqawi's hands was an older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising."

Maybe these are interesting points -- they're not to me, but I'm one of them red staters -- but the headline and lead let us know we're supposed to be talking about "question[ing]... an effort by the American military to discredit" Zarqawi. That is, the quoted retired and active military persons are supposed to be saying showing this video won't work; not enough people will think he looks like a goof. They're not.

We have an active-duty Special Forces colonel on the record, too: "[A]s a military guy, I shrug my shoulders and say: 'Of course he doesn't know how to use it. It's our gun.' He doesn't look as stupid as they said he looks." As a military guy. Got it. Finally, bring on the perfesser:

"I see a guy who is getting a lot of groceries and local support," said Nick Pratt, a Marine Corps veteran and professor of terrorism studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. "You cannot say he is a bad operator." He added, "People should be careful who they poke fun at."

We ominously end our report with those words, their truth learned the hard way by certain ink stained Danish wretches. Again: Do you see a guy who's getting a lot of groceries and local support? Will The Arab Street get a load of the video and think, hey, I think Abu's gained weight! For the love of Pete.

It should be noted that this isn't the Times' only coverage of the video's release -- that would be a real Daily Kos trick. About a third of a 1,100 word page one report on Friday about the briefing where it was released deals with the contents of the video outtakes. Today's front page story by Chivers would have been simply fabulous, and even possibly interesting, as I say, if it had come from the angle of does the video really demonstrate Zarqawi's ineptitude and hypocrisy? But that's not what they were after: they wanted to show that the reception the video would get wouldn't be what the Pentagon thought.

Why? Because retired and active duty officers were picking up the phone and calling the Times to tell them this was trouble waiting to happen? I suppose Cols. Costagliola and Pratt and our Special Forces man could have been exercised the moment they saw the tape and wanted to sound the alarm that it was bound to backfire. But I doubt it.

I don't question or impugn the motives of any of the three men, by the way -- I think Chivers fished for their feedback on what the video says to someone with military training, then reported that it wouldn't work on Joe Schmoe.

The front page of the New York Times, hallowed journalistic ground if there ever was, has turned into a showcase for amateur punditry, emphasis on the amateur. Hyperpartisan right wing blogs react to the odd truly hilarious elocution malfunction on the part of our not-so-silver-tongued President with equally hilarious and tortured explanations of why what he said was accurate, and really, when you think about it, the only sensible way to say it. Angry lefties react to frightening hee-yahs by Democratic candidates for President by arguing that the media distorted them to derail a surging candidacy.

Today, in the exact same vein, we have the New York Times explaining that Keystone Kopsish footage of a terrorist mastermind isn't really funny at all:

But the retired and active officers said the public presentation of the tape did not address elements that were disturbing, rather than amusing: the weapon was probably captured from American soldiers, indicating a tactical victory for the insurgents. And Mr. Zarqawi looked clean and plump.

He looked clean and plump. And so our strategy backfires. At least among people who read the Times. But is that front page news, exactly?

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