Glenn Reynolds notes an article in Australian paper The Age by one Caroline Overington. Her topic is America and Bush, "They Like Him, and They Are Not Stupid." It's nicely balanced, going so far as to hold up the American argument as a belief to be reckoned with - rather than to wrinkle one's nose at. Are you sitting down? Americans aren't illiterate cattlemen, toting revolvers everywhere they go! This piece is a compliment from and to our equals in other nations who, contrary to what we might be led to believe by the left, do not despise us unanimously. It's good for The Age, as its editorials in prewar months were often smugly anti-American.
Unfortunately, Overington is a little loose with facts; their impact is secondary to her observations, but distracting nonetheless. Three errors or oversights stand out.
She notes that two hundred sixty mass graves have been found in Iraq, "containing as many as 20,000 bodies." Is she addressing one of the largest disinterments to date (I found one reference to three mass graves totalling 20,000), or the whole lot of them (standing now at a staggering 300,000)? [I am actually incorrect. 300,000 is an estimate and while it's likely accurate, it is an estimate.] It's hard to say; if her facts aren't wrong, her statement suffers from awkward phrasing.
The Iraqi population, says Overington indirectly, is 12 million. It's in fact twice that, at 25 million. Hate to nitpick, but discounting one out of every two people does matter.
Finally, Overington recalls a tender anecdote with the parents of a soldier recently killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. She puts the date of the incident no later than April, yet claims "At the time, it was already clear that Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction." Clear to whom? The answer of where the weapons are is still not clear, and the question of weapons' existence is much less mystifying if one reviews Saddam's record or refreshes their memory of David Kay's report that suggested a country-wide network of institutions, laboratories and storage sites, and that:
[a]ny actual WMD weapons or material is likely to be small in relation to the total conventional armaments footprint and difficult to near impossible to identify with normal search procedures. It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two car garage.
Not exactly something to respond to with, "Yeah, yeah, but where are the weapons?" Keep in mind, too, that fully loaded Luftwaffe aircraft remained hidden underneath Schoenefeld Airport in Berlin for over fifty years. No billboards or road signs will lead the world to discovering the fate of Saddam's WMDs.
It's not my intention to rain on Overington's parade or dispute her fair and insightful reading of American values. Rather, I find that work such as hers is devalued by one or more of the urban myths that swarm around the war on terror like flies over a picnic. As Steven Den Beste observed several days ago, this period of decreasing danger and growing strength of liberty and enterprise in Iraq is no time to be complacent about misread numbers or, worse, the innocent repeating of persistent little lies. Honest reporting like Overington's deserves better.
