Junto Boys

HOW SANCTIONS ARE AS USELESS AS THE NEW YORK TIMES

After two weeks of testimony, a jury took only a few hours to convict a South Korean national, Tongsun Park, of acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The conspiracy of which he was a part ran for 10 years, ending in late 2002, and helped one of the world’s worst regimes maintain its grip on power.

But The New York Times did not assign a reporter to his trial, its total coverage amounting to a brief wire report on the day following Mr. Park’s conviction. Of the other major national dailies, The Washington Post ran a single news-brief item, the Los Angeles Times not a word.

Given the stakes—and what the Park trial clearly demonstrated about the seamier side of the U.N.—it hardly made sense.

The most innocent explanation is that the major newspapers had simply moved on to other things, frustrated by the apparent complexity and opacity of the oil-for-food scandal, of which the Korean fixer is only one colorful part.

But some critics contend there may have been another factor: a combination of sullenness and embarrassment on the part of what bloggers gleefully disdain as “the mainstream media.”

“The oil-for-food story began on the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal. The U.N. denied it had done anything wrong for the longest time, and most of the press followed its lead,” said James Bone, New York correspondent of The Times of London. “Many of the major newspapers came to the story late and are embarrassed by it.”

The media spent the time leading up to the war saying it would be a bloodbath with thousands of Americans dying and months of fighting. When the Iraqi Army laid down like lambs, the media said that everyone knew the fighting would be easy, but re-building would be impossible because you cannot force democracy.

Since the Iraqis voted in greater numbers than Americans do the frame became Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam would have eventually fallen through the sanctions. This story shows that the sanctions only made Saddam stronger, not too unlike the way prohibition made Al Capone stronger.

Many in the media were quick to judge Bush's failure to see 9-11 coming, but they were in no way critical of Clinton's nonaction in the 1990s. It's easy to be a critic of a proactive plan, because any pencil pusher would do it differently. It's a simple economic question. You get more of the behavior you reward and less of the behavior you punish. While Bush fights terrorism I will do my part and not pay for the New York Times.