One curious headline in yesterday’s New York Times was this: “Treaty Advances Obama’s Nuclear Vision”. The article was about START II, which Obama and Russian President Medvedev agreed to sign this week. Under START II, the number of legal strategically deployed nuclear warheads will be capped at 1,550 for each signatory.
The “nuclear vision” to which the headline refers is Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world, pronounced last April in his famous Prague speech. The reason I dub the headline “curious” is that the actual article consists of quotes from different experts disagreeing about the accuracy of the headline’s premise:
The notion that “this is somehow great news or a breakthrough” in fact “is hardly the case,” said Peter Huessy, president of GeoStrategic Analysis, a national security consulting business. As a matter of percentages, Mr. Huessy noted that the treaty cut warheads only half as much as did the Treaty of Moscow signed in 2002 by President George W. Bush.
“What did we get out of the deal?” Mr. Huessy asked. “Nothing that I can see, and I have been doing nuclear stuff, including arms control, since 1981.”
And:
Stephen Sestanovich, a veteran Russia expert who was ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet republics during the Clinton administration, said that the White House viewed the new treaty as “the key that turns a great many other locks.” But writing on the Web site of the Council on Foreign Relations, he cautioned that the deep mistrust between the United States and Russia stubbornly remained. “The new treaty will not put it to rest,” he wrote.
The headline, for no explained reason, accepts the opposite argument proffered by Robert Gibbs:
“If we get a Start deal done, it will demonstrate a strong partnership between the United States and Russia being able to address not just the problems of nuclear security in their two countries, but the deadly spread of nuclear weapons throughout the world,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.
Since the article is really an aggregation of quotes from people who disagree, the headline should have been something like: “Experts Disagree On Relevance of START Treaty”. However, this error pales in comparison to another one the Times made yesterday in another article, this time about the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The article stated:
Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, anchored by his Likud Party, views Jerusalem, west and east, as the undivided, eternal capital of the Jewish people, where it can build where it wants. The Palestinians and their supporters throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds view East Jerusalem as holy and as rightfully under Palestinian sovereignty.
Shouldn’t the article mention that Israel illegally annexed East Jerusalem, and Israeli sovereignty over this acquired territory is not recognized as legitimate by any other government in the world? Apparently someone else at the Times thought so, for here is a description of the same issue from another article published on-line later in the day:
Israel annexed East Jerusalem soon after capturing it from Jordan in the 1967 war and views the entire city as its sovereign capital. But the annexation was never internationally recognized, and the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
Better. But still. Right?
