C.J. Chivers, NYT, offering a a page one opinion piece on Georgia

(Thanks Glenn, for the Instalanche, and welcome Instapunditeers.)

(Update: Dear Mr. Chivers. I’ve gone back and read some of your earlier reporting, which is excellent. So why don’t you ignore all the rude things I say below, and quit wasting your time writing the kinds of things that get the cross-x I give it below. Why, in the midst of the world potentially changing in a genuinely strategic and dangerous way, are you writing pointless opinion pieces, pieces which I or anyone else might agree or disagree with, while channeling - not Kremlin operatives, not Georgian generals but ... anonymous USG flunkies, likely from the State Department, with some or another ax to grind. This requires your genuine, hard-won, value-added Russia and Central Asian reporting skills? You have the skills to go gather new, actual facts, and you waste your time on this blather. I realize this is what the Times values, and this is how you get on the front page. But please be aware that there are some NYT readers - even paying subscriber readers - who would actually like to read brand new facts, gathered out in unlikely, difficult places. The test of a good, well-reported piece, Mr. Chivers, is that I wouldn’t be able to say anything about it: a painfully simple logical argument, not subject to the kind of logical questions I raise below, and facts that you have found out that no one yet knows. I don’t suppose it will wind up on the front page. But I would read it and I bet a lot of other people would too. Why don’t you do what you are specially in a position to do, and go out and research and report something in this moment of crisis? I mean something not obtained in the eternal circle-jerk between NYT reporters and USG officials eager to leak something. You can put all your brilliant analyses and opinions in the book later - I promise I’ll buy it. But in this moment of crisis, why not do some original reporting? Like you used to do? You used to be quite good at it, you know.)

The last time I had occasion to think about NYT’s Moscow bureau chief C.J. Chivers was by reason of his reporting on the latest UN conference on small arms controls. I put that post up at Opinio Juris, here. My basic point was that Chivers’ reporting was soft-ball at best, took whatever UN officials had to say at pretty much face value, and didn’t offer relevant qualifications to the narrative he and UN officials seemed together to accept. Dave Kopel, at Volokh Conspiracy, had more to say, here.

The NYT has a front page article by Chivers, a “news analysis” offering, In Georgia and Russia, a Perfect Brew for a Blowup, August 10, 2008. I haven’t posted this to OJ, because it’s frankly not worth it, but it is still an annoyance. Midway through the article, Chivers informs us that:

The risks were intensified by the fact that the United States did not merely encourage Georgia’s young democracy, it helped militarize the weak Georgian state.

In his wooing of Washington as he came to power, Mr. Saakashvili firmly embraced the missions of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first he had almost nothing practical to offer. Georgia’s military was small, poorly led, ill-equipped and weak.

But Mr. Saakashvili’s rise coincided neatly with a swelling American need for political support and foreign soldiers in Iraq. His offer of troops was matched with a Pentagon effort to overhaul Georgia’s forces from bottom to top.

At senior levels, the United States helped rewrite Georgian military doctrine and train its commanders and staff officers. At the squad level, American marines and soldiers trained Georgian soldiers in the fundamentals of battle.

Georgia, meanwhile, began re-equipping its forces with Israeli and American firearms, reconnaissance drones, communications and battlefield-management equipment, new convoys of vehicles and stockpiles of ammunition.

The public goal was to nudge Georgia toward NATO military standards. Privately, Georgian officials welcomed the martial coaching and buildup, and they made clear that they considered participation in Iraq as a sure way to prepare the Georgian military for “national reunification” — the local euphemism of choice for restoring Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Georgian control.

All of these policies collided late last week. One American official who covers Georgian affairs, speaking on the condition of anonymity while the United States formulates its next public response, said that everything had gone wrong.

Does Chivers really want to tell us that the United States “helped militarize the weak Georgian state”? What is the evidence for that? The fact that the US helped reequip the Georgian military and helped train it? Mr. Chivers, cf. militarize - it doesn’t mean training and weapons merely. It doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It means systematically remaking the state under military domination. Is that really what you mean? Really? Again, what is your evidence for this remarkably strident charge? Besides the supply of American equipment and training?

After all, US policy around the world has been training of military forces in democratic states so that their militaries would operate in a more professional and disciplined fashion - particularly in matters of human rights. As I noted in my OJ post, here, the Georgian military was in desperate need of such professionalization going back to the days that led to the current conflicts. It was, in my personal experience at Human Rights Watch in the early 1990s, a militia army, extremely abusive and undisciplined in pretty much every way. The US “helped militarize” the Georgian state by seeking to raise its military above those standards. Good God, the horror.

To precisely what in what the US taught do you take exception? You say that the United States “helped rewrite Georgian miilitary doctrine and train its commanders and staff officers. At the squad level, American marines and soldiers trained Georgian soldiers in the fundamentals of battle.” You say this with a certain hint of dark things. Wow. How horrible - the fundamentals of battle. Who would have thought?

So what are you suggesting? Come on, be straight about it. What exactly do you think that American training said or did that was objectionable? Are you, for example, suggesting that US forces trained Georgian forces in abuses, of the kind of Abu Ghraib? What? It’s not good enough to drop a dark suggestion that training in basic military skills is somehow wrong. You actually have to say what’s wrong with it. If your point is that this led Georgian political elites to assume that the US would back them in a fight with the Russians over South Ossetia or Abkhazia, fine, or that the US failed to disabuse them of that possibility in order to keep them in Iraq, fine too - but that’s a completely different argument from saying that Americans trained Georgians in perfectly respectable military skills that any army needs, including respect for the laws of war, and implying that there was something sinister about it. Those latter possibilities, while entirely possible and in my speculative estimation likely, require premises going beyond simply saying that the US trained the Georgians. I’m speculating; you’re telling me you’re not. But what you offer in way of evidence consists of the fact of training and equipment - consistent with any number of other policies and explanations - and some anonymous sourcing.

Christ, it’s not that hard. Tell us straight what you you think is wrong with US policy. Is it the content of training? Is it the the bare fact of training? Is it an implied deal of training for the US going along with a Georgian move to re-take the territories? These are not the same thing, but you conveniently treat them as though they are - and, in particular, without managing quite to say so, imply sinister things about the bare fact of training and its content, as a way of casting suspicion on US conduct, rather than Georgian interpretations of it. As for the US re-equipping the Georgian army, if that’s wrong, one obvious implication is that it would somehow be better if the Georgian republic were unable to defend itself against Moscow - maybe that’s true, maybe not, but surely you would admit that this is a rather Moscow-favorable interpretation of things, offered by a Moscow bureau chief, and that simple argumentative obligations, not offered as narrative, would require that you at least acknowledge the possibility and state why that is not the case. Might I trouble you to do that?

Look: what you’ve offered us is an argument, masquerading as a narrative news story. I’m very interested in arguments, especially on a policy topic as difficult and fraught with risks as this, and I don’t doubt that you have important things to say. But if you want to offer an argument, then, well, argue it. Make claims and then explain the evidence for your premises. You offer us a narrative story that is, let’s be honest, very Moscow-centric, backed by a couple of unnamed US government sources. The last one you cite, the one American “official who covers Georgian affairs,” sounds like possibly he or she has an agenda or two. Is that possible? Might you tell us about it? But the fundamental point is that if you actually set out to argue your case, it wouldn’t look anywhere near as convincing as the narrative you spin out, because you might have to consider weaknesses in your own position. It would be a lot harder to rely on anonymous sources. A decent editor would query the use of inflammatory and unwarranted language like “militarize.”

I’m fine with the NYT becoming an 80% opinion paper, heck, 95%, since that’s what it is already. But in that case, offer the opinion pieces as arguments. My fifteen year old daughter just finished an elementary logic class this summer - strikingly, one of the most important parts of the class was the discussion of why straw arguments were bad, and the obligations in argument of charity in presenting an opponent’s position and fidelity in offering it. The fundamental problem with the journalistic media style is that, offered in place of argument, presenting opposing views, alternative explanations, anything to the contrary, simply disappears. Doesn’t fit the narrative. For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to argue, then argue.

Mr. Chivers, I don’t doubt you have important things to say about the Russia-Georgia war. So why don’t you report the facts, unadorned, and if you want to argue your opinions, then do so in an plainly stated, argumentative way?

(ps. To finish out the apparent agendas, I suppose I should add that what Chivers means by “militarization” is that Georgia supported the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he says (bold added):

[T]he fact that the United States did not merely encourage Georgia’s young democracy, it helped militarize the weak Georgian state.

In his wooing of Washington as he came to power, Mr. Saakashvili firmly embraced the missions of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first he had almost nothing practical to offer. Georgia’s military was small, poorly led, ill-equipped and weak.

But Mr. Saakashvili’s rise coincided neatly with a swelling American need for political support and foreign soldiers in Iraq. His offer of troops was matched with a Pentagon effort to overhaul Georgia’s forces from bottom to top.

Is it a “fact” that the US “helped militarize the weak Georgian state”? This sounds like an opinion to me. It might be a reasonable one - I think what Chivers says next is almost certainly correct, that the Georgians perceived the situation as a quid pro quo, but that too falls into the category of opinion, even if informed opinion, at least on the evidence presented: it is not shown, instead it is used as a premise in the rest of the argument - assumed, in other words.

It is likewise quite another question whether the US, which has had a long term policy of assisting places like Georgia with training and equipment, for reasons that long predate Iraq or Afghanistan, also saw this as the quid pro quo. Chivers would have to establish that this would not have been US policy in any case. Not exactly what I associate with, um, facts. The implication, in any case, that Chivers wishes to draw from this is that the weak Georgian state was “militarized” by the fact of US military assistance - as though there were no independent reasons why the US would not have undertaken this - and the “proof” of this is ... Georgian military support for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq. Lovely.)

(pps. Remarkably, dear readers, I am one of the dwindling out-of-NYC home subscribers to the Times. I pay for it, I don’t just read it online. Even more remarkably, I am actually a NYT shareholder, oy vey - shares I bought a while back because, as a finance professor in my day job, I thought it would help if I owned a few shares of a company I frequently use as a class test case to give me a personal reason for keeping track of the company finances. Still, I didn’t imagine when I bought it that the stock price would fall this far ... For that matter, I’ve written for the Magazine a couple of times. I don’t have a strong opinion as to whether the content really has an effect on the financial decline of the Times; there are arguments both directions, in that the greater opinionizing , if it really is that and not simply more noticed opinionizing, might have the effect of reinforcing the core audience as a niche product. And the conditions of the industry are disastrous for reasons that reach beyond any single newspaper. But I do agree with Glenn Reynolds and others that the best financial strategy for newspapers, including the Times, is reporting of facts and not simply offering opinions. The web is filled with people with opinions who frankly write as well as any NYT writer. Any ass with a law degree can do what I did here, and simply closely read what was written; I did what an editor should have done. What we don’t have is independent access to facts. Pity that the Times seems to reached the point where “reporting” simply means calling a government source and saying, hi, you want to leak? For that matter, I suspect Chivers is probably a pretty decent factual reporter on the ground in the many places from which he has reported, possibly even an outstanding one, but you’d never know - the problem is that factual reporting is not especially valued by his employer, and does not seem to be the ticket to the front page. More’s the pity. Mr. Chivers, I apologize for being rather rude in this post. But at some point exasperation trumps - who was it, Dorothy Parker, who got it best: What fresh hell is this?)