From: Ali Abunimah
To: National Public Radio, Morning Edition (morning@npr.org)
Subject: NPR--Cokie's War
30 September 2002
Mornin' Bob,
For two weeks running now Cokie Roberts has been trying to disguise her unrestrained desire for war with Iraq as objective analysis, and to project her own enthusiasm on to the entire nation.
This morning Cokie dismissed the cautions from two Democratic Congressmen, Jim McDermott and David Bonior as all but irrelevant, and even suggested that their party has repudiated them. She seemed to find it distasteful that the two men were in Baghdad, suggesting that they had somehow been taken prisoner by the Baghdad regime.
Obviously members of Congress should go to Iraq and see what they are being asked to support bombing and/or invading. I have never heard Cokie breathe a word about the constant shuttle of US Congressmen to Israel, ostensibly on "fact finding missions" but often just to please domestic constituencies and win elections. This is entirely normal for her, even perhaps when Hillary Clinton went to Israel last Spring and embraced the leader of the pro-ethnic-cleansing Moledet party.
No doubt some democrats have criticized Bonior and McDermott, but other prominent Democrats seem to be backing their view. For example, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin who has been a consistent sceptic about the Bush administration's approach to Iraq has now announced that he plans to vote against a war resolution. Cokie had nothing to say about that, and in such an evenly divided Senate this could be important and might induce others to follow suit.
Most disturbing is Cokie's use of ABC News polls to try to back up her claim that all opposition to the war she wants has melted away, and that what was it, eighty percent of people support how the president is handling Iraq? I know that Cokie only cites ABC News polls because she is paid by ABC, and so is probably under contract not to mention polls taken by other companies. But this contradicts the interest of NPR's audience in truly objective analysis.
If Cokie were providing such analysis, she would certainly mention at least two other polls which flatly contradict the picture of the world she is painting.
A Fox News poll which I saw reported on Fox news in Chicago last night, said that support for military action against Iraq had fallen by nine points to sixty one percent in the past two weeks, and that support falls to just forty six percent if the US were to act without UN and international backing.
An Associated Press news poll published on September 27 put 64 percent in favor of military action against Iraq, but that drops to 33 percent if the United States acts without allies. When asked if they would support military action if it meant thousands of US casualties, overall only 48 percent said they would support it, a number that falls to 25 percent if the US acts alone.
Cokie's dubious claim that all but a few marginal Democrats are just falling over themselves to get behind the president looks even more tenuous since the AP poll puts support for the war among Democratic voters at only 42 percent in favor, falling to just thirteen percent if the US acts alone.
I am not under any illusion that the Democratic Party in Congress as a whole is going to show any backbone or present effective opposition against this War Administration, but nor is it possible to buy Cokie's transparent attempts to use polling to dismiss the genuine misgivings that exist amongst an apparently growing number of people, to misinform, mislead, and beat the drums for war.
Yours,
Ali Abunimah
http://www.abunimah.org