One of the things that drives our foreign policy is what our national press chooses to focus on an what they choose to ignore. For example, Karen DeYoung has a new piece up at the Washington Post that focuses on an alleged suicide bomber pipeline that transits Syria on its way into Iraq. According to DeYoung’s reporting, this pipeline has recently been reactivated, although she is careful to note that our intelligence agencies are uncertain about the degree of knowledge and complicity there is in official Syrian circles about these activities.
There is nothing particularly wrong with DeYoung’s article. It quotes officials both on and off the record, it notes recent policy moves by the administration, and it doesn’t make any outlandish or overly speculative assertions. I’m not nitpicking DeYoung’s reporting.
But the article does continue a trend that was set during the Bush administration where much emphasis was put on any mischief being created in Iraq that emanated from Syria, but almost nothing was said about the much larger amount of mischief emanating from Saudi Arabia. Almost exactly four years ago, the Washington Post ran an article (unreliable in some respects) that flatly noted the high number of Saudi suicide bombers in Iraq:
In a paper published in March, Reuven Paz, an Israeli expert on terrorism, analyzed the lists of jihadi dead. He found 154 Arabs killed over the previous six months in Iraq, 61 percent of them from Saudi Arabia, with Syrians, Iraqis and Kuwaitis together accounting for another 25 percent. He also found that 70 percent of the suicide bombers named by the Web sites were Saudi. In three cases, Paz found two brothers who carried out suicide attacks. Many of the bombers were married, well educated and in their late twenties, according to postings.
“While incomplete,” Paz wrote, the data suggest “the intensive involvement of Saudi volunteers for jihad in Iraq.”
So, the Washington Post knows the truth. They have reported on the huge number of Saudi suicide bombers in Iraq relative to any other nationality. But they have written almost nothing else on this topic in the last four years, while they focused repeatedly on Syria’s culpability. It’s true that a certain percentage of the Saudi bombers have entered Iraq through Syria, but most of them come in through the long common border of their own country.
This disparity in reporting in not all the Post’s fault. It is their sources that choose to emphasize the Syrian angle. The Bush administration argued for years that Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction but that they had moved them to Syria just prior to the war. It’s been U.S. policy to isolate Syria and to put pressure on them. We do not have similar policy goals for the House of Saud. So, it’s understandable that the Post’s reporting reflects these differences.
Yet, a newspaper should report on just these types of biases and help readers understand why their own government might be emphasizing one thing and downplaying another. I don’t see that in DeYoung’s article today. I haven’t seen that in her paper’s reporting during the whole duration of this war.
Where in DeYoung’s article does she discuss the larger strategic landscape of the Obama administration vis-a-vis Syria? She tells us that Obama has renewed sanctions on Syria because of their support of terrorism and the belief that they are undermining Iraqi stability. She tells us that the Obama administration has reopened diplomatic talks with Damascus. But she says nothing about efforts to start up negotiations between Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights or efforts to pry Syria away from Iran’s orbit.
Without airing these issues, they leave the reader with no context for understanding why U.S. officials might be raising the issue of a terrorist pipeline at this particular point in time. The article, after all, focuses on a mere four Tunisians that were recruited (only two of whom became bombers). This isn’t some massive uptick in Syrian-based terrorism. There is a reason that the U.S. Government is choosing to push this issue now, as opposed to last month.
And, whatever the danger is deriving from Syria, I am sure the danger deriving from Saudi Arabia remains much larger.
The reason bloggers accuse bigfoot reporters of being little more than stenographers is because of articles like DeYoung’s. It isn’t egregiously bad, or even deliberately misleading. But, without contributing some skeptical analysis, the reader is getting little more than the party line from the government. We need and deserve more than that.
