The New Republic's view of our troops

By now, I'm sure you've heard of the New Republic story by an anonymous soldier/journalist, writing under the pseudonym of Scott Thomas and making all sorts of vile accusations against our troops such as making cruel fun of a woman disfigured by an IED or scampering around with a child's skull on a soldier's head or of a soldier who liked to use his Bradley to run over dogs in Iraq. Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard has been raising all sorts of doubts about the veracity of TNR's story. Military correspondents have written Goldfarb using their own expertise to throw more doubts on the story. TNR's editor Franklin Foer told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that they are investigating the story and that members of the author's unit corroborate his story.

What has struck me most about the story is not the possibility that the New Republic might have published a fake story with made up anecdotes about our military. After all, the New Republic has fallen for stories "too good to be true" before. And, with around 160,000 of our troops over in Iraq risking their lives in dangerous conditions while enduring heat approaching 120 degrees, I suppose that it is possible that some of these people would behave in inhumane and disturbing ways. After all, we have the examples of the guards' behavior at Abu Ghraib to know that there is a possibility that a small group could act in disturbing ways.

What had struck me was that the New Republic chose to publish Scott Thomas's Baghdad Diary in the first place. Did they think that what he wrote was representative of our troops overall? It seems so and that is what is so depressing. They seem to have bought totally into the storyline that the war in Iraq has corrupted the basic decency of our American soldiers. Kathleen Parker exactly puts her finger on what was going on with the New Republic's editors.

It may be that The New Republic editors and others who believed Thomas' journal entries without skepticism are infected with Nifong Syndrome -- the mind virus that causes otherwise intelligent people to embrace likely falsehoods because they validate a preconceived belief.

Mike Nifong, the North Carolina prosecutor in the alleged Duke lacrosse team rape case, was able to convince a credulous community of residents, academics and especially journalists that the three falsely accused men had raped a black stripper despite compelling evidence to the contrary.

Why? Because the lies supported their own truths. In the case of Duke, that "truth" was that privileged white athletes are racist pigs who of course would rape a black woman given half a chance and a bottle o' beer.

In the case of Scott Thomas, the "truth" that American soldiers are woman-hating, dog-killing, grave-robbing monsters confirms what many among the anti-war left believe about the military, despite their protestations that they "support the troops."

We tend to believe what we want to believe, in other words.

Whether Scott Thomas is real and his reports true remains to be determined. In the meantime, it is tempting to wonder: What if we believed in American honor and victory in Iraq?

What would those dispatches look like?

Well, those dispatches would look like what we read in conservative outlets like the Standard or National Review. Isn't it sad that evidence that a writer believes in the honor and dignity of our troops seems to be in evidence mostly in conservative journals. A liberal journalist has a mindset that means that he or she wouldn't even think of writing a story about our troops behaving nobly by risking their lives to ensure a better life for Iraqis because such an article would not be of interest to that reporter's readers and because such a framework for a story just doesn't occur to these people. It doesn't fit their template of how Iraq has corrupted the intrinsic decency of the men and women who serve there. They see the soldiers in the Baghdad Diarist's stories as much more typical of our troops than the model of courageous and good people that so many conservatives see as the typical soldier. That is why TNR's editors would find Scott Thomas's stories so believable.

Remember Stephen Glass's fabricated stories for TNR? One of those stories was about debauched behavior at a Young Republicans convention. That fit perfectly into what liberal editors at TNR probably thought of young conservatives - that they are all hypocritical libertines. Read this description of the stories that Glass wrote.

But Glass's real trick was the way he appealed to his audience's prejudices. His most colorful material usually involved people from outside the New Republic's readership: old folks in retirement homes, menial laborers, backwoods Christians. The behavior he described may have been improbable, but it conformed to stereotype. Old ladies doted, a bit battily, on obscure political figures; a limo driver plotted seductions; religious yokels ranted about the devil. An elderly Pole fumed about a Jewish conspiracy to keep foul-prone heavyweight Andrew Golota from winning the title.

At the same time, the stereotypes flattered the reader, making him or her privy to the inner workings of the common folk -- as laid bare by a bright young lad with a Penn degree and an inquiring mind. The world, Glass assured everyone, was just as you imagined it to be, only weirder and more compelling.

The applications of this trickery were generally subtle. Freelancing for the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review magazine (where he'd worked before TNR), Glass apparently did use characters for crude propaganda: "I thanked God that some wise men privatized Social Security here," a Texas widow says, recalling her husband's death. But his New Republic work played to less overtly ideological prejudice. When Alec Baldwin dabbled in real politics, we wanted to believe he would shallowly snub a policy-wonk admirer. We welcomed the news that conservative Republicans, so hostile to the press, were secret hedonists and hypocrites. We liked the thought of corporations quailing before teen cybergeniuses, and of bond traders so enslaved to their lucrative work that they kept deskside urinals.

You could use this description of Scott Thomas's writings. It fits the template that they have so they didn't question it. And since they probably don't know much about the military, stories like a guy weaving his Bradley from side to side on a street in order to kill stray dogs rang true to them. And they were happy to run the stories because it made the larger point that they want to make about how the war in Iraq has debauched our troops. Not that all journalists over in Iraq are Scott Thomases. Many of them are sending back riveting and inspiring stories. But too often the focus seems to be on suspected atrocities rather than on noble bravery. Kathleen Parker is exactly right. If we had the same attitude towards our military that we had had in World War II, the dispatches from the front that journalists were sending back and their editors printing would look very different.

UPDATE: Read Mac Owens' column at NRO based on his experiences observing how tales of atrocities spread in Vietnam by people who couldn't have observed what they were saying had happened.