(updated below)

The Atlantic‘s James Fallows, whose analysis I often find worthwhile, yesterday defended Jeffrey Goldberg and his Iran article from unidentified critics (emphasis added):

Is this article warmongering? Or to put it more delicately, is it meant to condition the American public and politicians to the prospect of an attack on Iran? Many people have portrayed it as such. I disagree. I think that those reading the piece as a case for bombing Iran are mainly reacting to arguments about the preceding war.

Jeff Goldberg was a big proponent of invading Iraq, as I was not — and those who disagreed with him about that war have in many cases taken the leap of assuming he’s making the case for another assault. I think this is mainly response to byline rather than argument. If this new article had appeared under the byline of someone known to have opposed the previous war and to be skeptical about the next one, I think the same material could be read in the opposite way — as a cautionary revelation of what the Netanyahu government might be preparing to do. Taken line by line, the article hews to a strictly reportorial perspective: this is what the Israeli officials seem to think, this is how American officials might react, this is how Israeli officials might anticipate how the Americans might react, these are the Israeli voices of caution, here are the potential readings and mis-readings on each side.

First of all, it’s inaccurate to claim that critiques of Goldberg’s article are based on what he did in the past.  The objections I raised yesterday, based largely on Jonathan Schwarz’s well-documented analysis, concern false and/or dubious claims in Goldberg’s current essay, all of which just so happen to militate in favor of attacking Iran.  Take, for instance, the glaring contradiction between (a) Goldberg’s 2002 statement about the effect on Saddam’s nuclear ambitions of the 1981 Israeli strike (“After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts”) and (b) his claim about that same topic in his current Iran article (“In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions”).  The point of that contradiction is not — as some Goldberg defenders (such as his friend Joe Klein) concluded — that Goldberg made inaccurate claims about Iraq’s nuclear program back in 2002 and therefore shouldn’t be trusted now. 

The point is the exact opposite.  The highlighted claim from 2002 was actually one of the few things Goldberg said back then about Iraq which was accurate:  Saddam really did massively increase his efforts to obtain nuclear weapons after the Israeli air attack.  Indeed, at the time of the 1981 strike, Iraq had no meaningful nuclear weapons program; it was the 1981 Israeli attack that spawned the intense efforts to develop one.  That’s the effect of attacking a country:  incentivizing them (and others) to obtain nuclear weapons in order to deter future attacks. 

What’s false is Goldberg’s current claim, made to glorify the efficacy of the 1981 Israeli air strike, that it “halt[ed] — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”  In fact, it had the opposite effect, and the proof is (among other things) what Goldberg himself wrote accurately back in 2002 (“After the Osirak attack, [Saddam] rebuilt, redoubled his efforts”).  What actually halted the Iraqi nuclear program was not the Osirak attack (as Goldberg himself recognized in 2002) but Operation Desert Storm and the U.N. inspections regime (Goldberg, responding to my post yesterday, acknowledges the latter fact).  Despite that, Goldberg — with zero evidence and in direct contradiction to what he wrote back then (and in direct contradiction to clearly established facts) – now falsely claims that the 1981 Israeli attack succeeded in halting Saddam’s nuclear ambitions.  So:  just think what a similar attack on Iran could achieve!  “An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity,” he writes, just in case readers failed to draw the optimistic inference on their own.  

Fallows also ignores the fact that in the very first sentence of the article, Goldberg asserts a highly controversial and vital proposition as though it’s indisputable fact:   that of Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons.”  Someone who begins his article by slyly assuming as fact a central proposition which is actually very much in doubt — and does so by simply ignoring the substantial evidence which negates it, as in:  pretends that contrary evidence does not exist — is most assuredly not someone writing from “a strictly reportorial perspective.”  It may well be that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons — there’s also evidence suggesting it might be — but to depict that proposition as a given, by steadfastly ignoring the substantial evidence to the contrary, is quite redolent of those who did the same thing seven years ago with regard to The Grave Iraqi Threat.  Someone writing from “a strictly reportorial perspective” would have acknowledged — rather than concealed from his readers — the substantial cause for doubt about that claim, one that shapes the entire article (and the entire debate over attacking Iran).  All of these deficiencies stand separate and apart from Goldberg’s past conduct.

But even if Fallows were right that suspicions and doubts about Goldberg’s article were based on his past behavior, wouldn’t that be perfectly justifiable?  The Iraq War is the single worst political and media debacle of this generation — the massive human suffering it caused is staggering — and Goldberg’s shoddy, error-filled, reckless “journalism” played a leading role in helping to bring it about.  So discredited and humiliatingly wrong was Goldberg’s pre-war “reporting” that it’s squarely within Judy Miller territory.  But — knowing all of that — this is whom The Atlantic eagerly wooed away from The New Yorker and now chooses to publish as its expert journalist on the Middle East.  And that’s to say nothing of the consuming, Israel-devoted biases of this ex-IDF prison guard.  In light of that long record, what right does Fallows have to complain that people react skeptically to Goldberg’s ”reporting” on Israel and Iran and the agenda shaping it?  Shouldn’t any rational reader have exactly that reaction?  If, tomorrow, Judy Miller or Michael Gordon began publishing articles touting the Iranian Nuclear Threat based on anonymous sources, would Fallows react with greater skepticism as a result of that duo’s past conduct?  I certainly would.

What Fallows’ lament really reflects is that the Obamaian protective decree — Look Forward, Not Backward — applies to more than just Bush administration criminals.  No American elites are supposed to pay any price — even reputationally — for the role they played in leading the country into a horrific and unfathomably devastating war based on false pretenses.  We’re all supposed to chalk it up to an unfortunate though understandable mistake, let bygones be bygones, and not hold it against anyone, not even use it to judge their current credibility or trustworthiness.  Fallows thus demands that we take Goldberg’s self-proclaimed “‘profound, paralyzing ambivalence’ about military strikes on Iran on its own merits.”  In other words:  forget what Goldberg did in the past; that was merely “the preceding war.”  He’s entitled to a presumption of good faith and candor now.