{"id":4353,"date":"2008-06-02T13:15:03","date_gmt":"2008-06-02T20:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=4353"},"modified":"2008-06-02T13:15:03","modified_gmt":"2008-06-02T20:15:03","slug":"not-the-first-time-luttwak-gets-his-factual-premises-all-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/02\/not-the-first-time-luttwak-gets-his-factual-premises-all-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Not the First Time Luttwak Gets His Factual Premises All Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clark Hoyt, the public editor, or ombudsman, of the New York Times<\/em>, went after<\/a> Edward Luttwak in his weekly column today for the military historian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s controversial May 12 op-ed on why Sen. Obama would be considered an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153apostate\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by many Muslims and thus particularly susceptible to assassination attempts if, as president, he were to go on a state visit to a Muslim nation. After consulting with five Islamic scholars at U.S. universities on whether Luttwak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s argument was consistent with Islamic law, Hoyt concluded that Luttwak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s assertions were essentially baseless and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153extreme\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and strongly implied that the op-ed should not have been published at all. (The headline of Hoyt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s essay was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) Hoyt also took to task the op-ed editor, David Shipley, for publishing only letters to the editor in response to the original op-ed and not providing space for a full rebuttal.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time that Luttwak, who has long gloried in his role as an unconventional policy provocateur (usually, but not always, on behalf of hawkish, if not neo-conservative, forces in Washington), has written attention-grabbing op-eds that are based on no factual evidence of any kind. I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t compiled them in any systematic way, but one example some 20 years ago really stands out as a warning to all op-ed editors at elite newspapers that Luttwak was not the most careful of researchers.<\/p>\n

On November 22, 1987, Luttwak published an op-ed in the Washington Post<\/em> entitled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A Member of Moscow\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Exclusive Club\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which argued that the fact that then-Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega was seated next to East German leader Erich Honecker and Polish President Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski \u00e2\u20ac\u0153in the section reserved for the leaders of Leninist governments in good standing\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at the opening of the Communist Party Congress in Moscow conveyed a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153very definite message: the Sandinista regime has been admitted to the very exclusive club of governments that the Soviet Union regards as permanent<\/strong>, organic allies.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d [emphasis in original] The conclusion:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153If there were any suspicion that the Sandinistas might actually allow the democratization required by the Arias peace plan, creating the possibility of a peaceful change of government by free elections, Ortega would not have been seated where he was.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Within the op-ed space, the Post<\/em> reprinted the AP photo cropped in a way that only Ortega\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face was visible.<\/p>\n

There was only one problem with both the photo and Luttwak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s analysis (aside from the fact that the Sandinistas did indeed accede to a peaceful change of government by free elections under the Arias plan): Ortega was not seated next to Honecker and Jaruzelski. What Luttwak had thought was one photo of the three leaders seated together that had appeared in the Times<\/em> and other newspapers on November 3 was actually two distinct photos separated by a thin white line: one of Honecker and Jaruzelski seated next to each other, the other of Ortega and a man whom the Times<\/em> later identified as Gus Hall. In fact, the latter two were seated in an entirely different section of the hall, as was indicated by the entirely different angles of Ortega\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face (presumably fixed on Gorbachev at the podium) and those of Honecker and Jaruzelski.<\/p>\n

Luttwak, in other words, had based his entire analysis (and he was very close to senior Reagan administration officials, such as then-Undersecretary for Policy Fred Ikle and Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams) at the time \u00e2\u20ac\u201cthat the Soviet Union now considered Nicaragua as as integral a part of its empire as Poland and East Germany \u00e2\u20ac\u201d on a total visual misapprehension.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Am I the only person who has seen the photographs published in all our newspapers,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he asked. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Americans are still furiously debating the nature of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and its intent in regard to the Arias peace plan, but surely that question has been settled conclusively by the photos that appeared on Nov. 3, the day after the opening of the Party Congress in Moscow.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n

Despite several letters to the editor (including one from me sent the day of the op-ed\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s publication) pointing out the obvious error, the Post never issued a correction or an explanation. (After all, in order to crop Ortega\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s photo to incorporate it into Luttwak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s op-ed, the newspaper\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s editors should have known that the factual premise on which his analysis was based was completely faulty.) So It fell to a Post<\/em> columnist, the late and great Phil Geyelin, to write his own op-ed in rebuttal one week after Luttwak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s article came out. In reply to Luttwak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s question whether he was the only person who had seen the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153telltale photographs,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Geyelin wrote:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153No, Edward, you are not the only one; but you may be the only one who failed to notice that the photographic display in The New York Times actually consisted of two photographs, one of Honecker and Jaruzelski seated side by side, and another of Ortega alone. There was white space between the two shots and nothing in the caption to suggest that the three men were even in the same room.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nor was there, according to authorities I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve talked to, a special section \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcreserved\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 for \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcLeninist governments.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 True, the communist countries of Eastern Europe were lumped together. But Ortega was no closer to them than he was to a mixed gaggle of Socialist leaders, including representatives of India\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ruling National Congress, the Italian Communist Party, and the PLO\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Yasser Arafat. So much for the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpolitical precision\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of Soviet seating arrangements or the claim that \u00e2\u20ac\u009dthe nature\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of the Sandinistas, or their intentions, has been \u00e2\u20ac\u2122settled conclusively.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n

So, the next time you see an analysis by Edward Luttwak, be sure to scrutinize the factual premises very carefully. That goes especially for editors and talk-show producers.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Visit Lobelog.com<\/a> for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clark Hoyt, the public editor, or ombudsman, of the New York Times, went after Edward Luttwak in his weekly column today for the military historian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s controversial May 12 op-ed on why Sen. Obama would be considered an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153apostate\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by many Muslims and thus particularly susceptible to assassination attempts if, as president, he were to go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4353"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}