‘Russians hungry but not starving’
A short history of the New York Times being wrong about everything
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 incentivised to make attention-grabbing statements. They are also prone to huge ideological bias and arrogance, and I recall 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 3pm?
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, he 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-Moslem 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, he 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.’
He 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.
They 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.
