First, a correction: I suggested that the appearance of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's "Baghdad Diarist" was "a case of a magazine giving a break to a young writer ... because the young writer's likeable wife asked them to," but I am reliably informed that Beauchamp and his future wife were only acquaintances when she mentioned him to TNR's editors.
Second, TNR has posted another update, in which they write that the Army, by restricting access to Beauchamp and refusing to share any of the details of its own investigation, has thrown up a wall to further inquiry. TNR's critics, needless to say, aren't buying.
At this point, the Beauchamp story is beginning to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Libby affair. Both are Iraq War-related controversies in which the underlying accusation (perjury in a case where no criminal charges were filed, embellishment or fabulism in a back-page TNR Diarist) is less significant than what the alleged crime is supposed to represent: In Libby's case, the "Bush lied, people died" theory of the war; in the Beauchamp affair, the belief that the press is actively undermining the American mission in Iraq. And in each instance, not only the interpretation but the facts of the case seem to shift depending on whose account you read. I hope that we'll reach a point with the Beauchamp case where at least the facts will be agreed upon, but I wouldn't bet on it; barring a public, obviously uncoerced recantation from Beauchamp himself (or his corroborating witnesses), or a military investigation that vindicates his claims, it seems more likely to end, like the Libby affair before it, as a matter of whom you believe, and why.
the Beauchamp story is beginning to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Libby affair.
Are you arguing that they're similar in overall importance? Or in ideologically colored reactions? The latter I can see, the former not so much.
Scooter Libby was part of a government effort to score political points by leaking classified information. He hoped that info reflected negatively on someone who pointed out, accurately, the the decision to go to war was not based on the most sober and careful assessment of intelligence, but rather the most inflammatory bits of data available, regardless of reliability.
The Beauchamp affair is about a little-read article in a little-read magazine, that has no larger bearing on anything in particular. (It's strange that the same people who insist "the gloves must come off" and that "bad things happen in war, as in at abu Gharib, there's no sense getting all bent out of shape about it" are so adamant that this tale of cruelty, with no particular larger meaning other than that war can be dehumanizing, is politically incorrect).
Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 11, 2007 12:56 PM