When a New York Times reporter called me earlier in the week to ask some follow-up questions about Scott Thomas Beauchamp, she started off by saying that "this is a story that just won't die." Indeed, it won't, if only because the editors at TNR refuse to kill it, preferring instead to stonewall while even Beauchamp has decided to cut his losses.
But the story has moved onto a new phase, as commentators ask, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, 'Why did the New Republic run it?' Krauthammer's theory:
Because it fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar left. The Iraq war -- "George Bush's war," as even Hillary Clinton, along with countless others who had actually endorsed the war, now calls it -- has caused not only the sorrow and destruction that we read about every day. It has, most perniciously, caused invisible damage -- now made visible by the soul-searching of one brave and gifted private: It has perverted and corrupted the young soldiers who went to Iraq, and now return morally ruined. Young soldiers like Scott Thomas Beauchamp.
Krauthammer also seizes on the one "error" that TNR has acknowledged, that the incident involving the disfigured woman, whose identity remains a complete mystery, occurred in Kuwait, and not in Iraq as Beauchamp had claimed in the piece:
Except that it is now revealed that the mess-hall incident happened before he even got to the war. On which point, the whole story -- and the whole morality tale it was meant to suggest -- collapses.
And it makes the rest of the narrative banal and uninteresting. It's the story of a disgusting human being, a mocker of the disfigured, who then goes to Iraq and, as such human beings are wont to do, finds the company of other such human beings who kill dogs for sport, wear the bones of dead children on their heads and find similar amusement in mocking the disfigured.
We will soon learn if there actually was a dog killer or a bone wearer. But the New Republic seems not to have understood how the Kuwait "detail" undermines everything.
There are some other interesting stories out there. The New York Sun also focuses on why this happened to TNR, again.
Bias complaints against the mainstream press usually involve the stubborn use of a preferred story line when facts are shaky or nonexistent. The New Republic's current trouble may be in this category.
The magazine's three "Baghdad Diarist" columns by an anonymous American soldier, later identified as Private Scott Beauchamp, presented a sour view of American troops. It included an anecdote about Mr. Beauchamp and a comrade humiliating an Iraqi woman whose face had been "melted" by an IED. The editors set forth the narrative line - the "morally and emotionally distorting effects of war" are unbalancing some American troops.
Maybe so, but the Weekly Standard reports that Mr. Thomas signed a sworn statement admitting that his columns were exaggerations and falsehoods. Did the New Republic run these articles because it respected and trusted the writer, or because the writer reflected the magazine's disgust with the war?
Ross Douthat, writing from his perch at the Atlantic, suspects that the New Republic's motivations in running the story were not so malicious:
...this was a case of a magazine giving a break to a young writer not because his work "fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar left," as Krauthammer would have it, but because the young writer's likeable wife asked them to. They got burned as a result, and deservedly so. But not because they hate America.
Maybe, but Jeff Emanuel, writing at NRO, returns to an earlier statement from milblogger John Noonan that seems to sum it up pretty nicely:
None of this detracts from the fact that, of the 160k troops in Iraq, TNR choose a real dirtball to serve as their correspondent. When other soldiers are out building schools, providing medical care, and running security operations for the Iraqi people, TNR decided to highlight a real slug of a mechanic who mocks the disfigured and disrespects the dead for kicks.
At least in his imagination anyway.
