The “nothing ever happens” people seem to be, sadly, correct about Iran thus far, although one hopes that the brutal Islamic Republic might still be overthrown. It’s hard to know what to think, and at times like this we all turn to the experts to give their analysis of what might happen and what might follow.
Foreign policy expertise is hard work, because it requires both a specific knowledge of the national culture and the relative strength of personalities. Because there are so many factors involved, analysts frequently get things completely wrong, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles being the notorious examples. The art of “superforecasting” came about because US foreign policy experts turned out to be disastrously wedded to preconceived ideas; the success of superforecasters suggests that people with less specialist knowledge but a better control of their biases do a more accurate job of predicting events.
The same is true of media experts. Newspaper opinion pieces have a bad predictive record because journalists have no skin in the game and are incentivized to make attention-grabbing statements. They are also prone to huge ideological bias and arrogance. I recall, for example, a leading British columnist around 2004 arguing that NATO’s victory in Afghanistan proved that we shouldn’t take history as a guide. Just because the British and Soviet empires had failed in their attempts to tame the country, we shouldn’t assume that the Americans would fail too. Oh well – can you give us 1,000 words on Libya by 3 p.m.?
The paper’s coverage of Nazi Germany may have been naïve – they weren’t alone
In my experience, experts within the journalism trade are usually no more accurate or perceptive than a random person who works in finance and sees where investors put their money – and no newspaper has such a rich and deep tradition of getting things wrong as the New York Times. In a much-shared February 1979 article for the august publication, Princeton professor Richard Falk wrote about the revolutionary leader who had earlier that month returned from Paris to Iran, and who he believed was setting the country on a bright new path – one Ayatollah Khomeini.
“President Carter and [national security adviser] Zbigniew Brzezinski have until very recently associated him with religious fanaticism,” Professor Falk wrote:
The news media have defamed him in many ways, associating him with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti‐Semitism, and with a new political disorder, “theocratic fascism,” about to be set loose on the world. About the best he has fared has been to be called (by Newsweek) “Iran’s Mystery Man.”
Although revolutionaries tend to degenerate into excess, Falk wrote:
Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs, including the character and role of Ayatollah Khomeini. In recent months, before his triumphant return to Teheran, the Ayatollah gave numerous reassurances to non-Muslim communities in Iran. He told Jewish‐community leaders that it would be a tragedy if many of the 80,000 Jews left the country. Of course, this view is qualified by his hostility to Israel because of its support of the Shah and its failure to resolve the Palestinian question.
He has also indicated that the nonreligious left will be free to express its views in an Islamic republic and to participate in political life, provided only that it does not “commit treason against the country” by establishing foreign connections – a lightly‐veiled reference to anxiety about Soviet interference. What the left does in coming days will likely indicate whether it will be seen as treasonous.
To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. His political style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion. Thus, the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.
In fact, the Ayatollah’s “entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals,” and the provisional government’s key appointees are:
Widely respected in Iran outside religious circles, share a notable record of concern for human rights and seem eager to achieve economic development that results in a modern society oriented on satisfying the whole population’s basic needs.
Although there was a great deal of deference to the Ayatollah, Falk noted, this was not about coercion and:
The Shiite tradition is flexible in its approach to the Koran and evolves interpretations that correspond to the changing needs and experience of the people. What is distinctive, perhaps, about this religious orientation is its concern with resisting oppression and promoting social justice.
Falk concluded that:
Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third‐world country.
And they all lived happily ever after.
The New York Times weren’t the only ones who were hoodwinked, and Professor Falk wasn’t the worst; indeed, even the CIA was fairly ignorant of the Ayatollah and the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. None were so foolish about Iran as Michel Foucault, however, who spoke warmly about a revolutionary regime which undoubtedly would have hanged him from a crane.
Yet the New York Times has an especially long pedigree at being wrong about… everything. On October 9, 1903 it predicted that “man won’t fly for a million years,” following an attempt at air flight by William Langley from a houseboat on the Potomac river:
It should be remembered, however, that the bird successful in flight is an evolution. It has taken a great many generations of his kind to develop his muscular system in just the right way for flying purposes, and very likely the process has consumed many centuries of time. The mistake of the scientist would appear to be in his assumption that he can do with much less suitable material by a single act of creative genius what nature accomplishes with such immeasurable deliberation.
Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years-provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials. No doubt the problem has attractions for those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably.
The Wright Brothers successfully flew a plane two months later.
In 1914, the paper suggested that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo made war less likely. As the Vox journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote:
The Times reported that “in Russia, England, and France the Archduke Francis Ferdinand was regarded as one of the most serious dangers to the European peace” while “even in Germany his accession to the throne was viewed with apprehension.”
Their view was that Franz Ferdinand was a proponent of an aggressively anti-Serbian foreign policy, and that his removal from the order of succession made a Balkan conflict less likely. By contrast, the new heir apparent, “while popular in Vienna is described as a young man of no remarkable ability.”
In 1924, after a young firebrand by the name of Adolf Hitler had been sent to jail following a failed coup, the New York Times reported that he had been “tamed” by prison and was “no longer to be feared,” having been the “demi-god of the reactionary extremists.” I think it’s fair to say that rehabilitation didn’t work in Hitler’s case.
In 1936, with the Nazis in power and hosting the Olympics, the paper gushed that:
However much one may deplore or detest some of the excesses of the Hitler regime, the games make clear beyond question the amazing new energy and determination that have come to the German people.
Huge amounts of energy and determination, it turned out.
The paper’s coverage of Nazi Germany may have been naive – they weren’t alone. Their coverage of the Soviet Union, however, was shameful. The NYT correspondent Walter Duranty was not naive or overly optimistic, but deeply cynical, a creature of the Kremlin who spouted Soviet talking points as millions starved.
As Izabella Tabarovsky wrote in the Tablet magazine, Duranty was:
The reigning Western popular authority on all things Bolshevik. On March 31, the Times carried Duranty’s now-infamous piece, “Russians Hungry but Not Starving,” in which he disputed the facts of the famine – facts that he himself knew to be true, and had frequently discussed in private conversations.
Yes, there was hunger, Duranty wrote, but the deaths were due to diseases associated with malnutrition rather than to starvation itself. Shortages existed, but larger cities had food. The “novelty” of collective farming had simply “made a mess of food production.”
It sounds like the Ukrainian famine was some sort of right-wing conspiracy theory that fact-checkers needed to debunk.
Duranty also used his position to discredit his British rival Gareth Jones, who was accurately reporting the famine. While the New York Times’s man spouted lies about Russia, the Manchester Guardian was notably honest, the only paper to publish Jones’s reports, as well as those of Malcolm Muggeridge. In 1932, Duranty was rewarded with the Pulitzer prize for his journalism; the following year Jones was expelled from the Soviet Union in disgrace. After reporting on Nazi Germany, where he found that his earlier fears had proved accurate, the Welsh journalist traveled to Mongolia where he was murdered, mostly likely by the Soviets. In 1941, Duranty would briefly acknowledge that he had underestimated the famine and would even go so far as to call it man-made.
When Stalin finally died in in 1953, the paper wrote an obituary for the Soviet dictator which declared that “only a man of iron will and determination like Stalin’s could have held together his shattered country” and:
The energy and willpower he displayed both before and during the war confirmed the justification for his name, for Stalin in Russian means “man of steel”… With head high, a book under his arm, Stalin walked the gauntlet without a whimper, his face and head bleeding, his eyes flashing defiance.
A good thing that he never made any racist comments on a podcast.
The 20th century witnessed a number of nightmarish regimes, often welcomed by journalists and editors who wished to see them succeed, or were prepared to overlook their excesses if the goal was noble. It was Duranty who, paraphrasing a Russian term, first used the phrase “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” about communism (to which the obvious reply is: “where’s the omelette then?”).
Sometimes, however, one should perhaps blame the headline writers, as journalists are often prone to do. In April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, the paper ran with the headline “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life,” but the text by correspondent Sydney H. Schanberg was not so optimistic.
“Some critics of American policy in Indochina have gone so far as to predict that the peninsula will become a virtual paradise once the Americans have gone,” he wrote:
This is perhaps wishful polemics, for it is difficult to predict with any degree of confidence what Indochina will be like under Communism.
As it turned out, it was unimaginably worse: the Khmer Rouge went on to kill a quarter of the country’s population, with Schanberg famously becoming the protagonist of the film The Killing Fields. But, as columnists always like to point out, he didn’t write the headline.
This article originally appeared on Ed West’s Wrong Side of History substack.
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