What Sanchez really said
Today’s NY Times prominently highlights a speech by retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, ex-Commander of US forces in Iraq, in which he is deeply critical of the conduct of the Iraq War.
The Times summarizes Sanchez’s speech in its lede front-page paragraph as:
…call[ing] the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and sa[ying] the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”
The article goes on to explain that Sanchez has a self-defensive dog in this race:
[Sanchez’s] own role as commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal leaves him vulnerable to criticism that he is shifting the blame from himself to the administration that ultimately replaced him and declined to nominate him for a fourth star, forcing his retirement…
General Sanchez has been criticized by some current and retired officers for failing to recognize the growing insurgency in Iraq during his year in command and for failing to put together a plan to unify the disparate military effort, a task that was finally carried out when his successor, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., took over in mid-2004.
In earlier years, I would have read the NY Times piece, digested it, come to a conclusion about the events described therein, and gone about my business. But, due to the wonders of the internet—and my own awakened knowledge that media reports of speechs are among the most susceptible to distortion of all MSM activities—I thought it might interesting to look up the text of the speech itself and see what Sanchez actually said.
It wasn’t easy; most online newspapers covering the speech—including the Times—do not provide a link to it, which would have been an easy thing to do. But I finally struck pay dirt here (apologies for the all-caps format in the link).
If one studies the actual speech, the first thing that leaps out is that, for the first half its length, it deals with an entirely different subject, one the Times curiously fails to even mention: the destructive role of the press in reporting on the war. No doubt this omission on the Times’ part was purely arbitrary [/sarcasm off].
In fact, when I first read Sanchez’s speech, I thought for a while that I was reading the wrong link, and that this was a speech that had been given at some other time. But no; he finally gets to the part the Times focuses on a bit more than halfway through the speech.
But first, here’s Sanchez on the media:
My perception is that the sensationalistic value of [press] assessments is what provided the edge that you seek for self aggrandizement or to advance your individual quest for getting on the front page with your stories. As I understand it, your measure of worth is how many front page stories you have written and unfortunately some of you will compromise your integrity and display questionable ethics as you seek to keep American informed…For some, it seems that as long as you get a front page story there is little or no regard for the “collateral damage” you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct.
Sanchez goes on. And on and on. Granted, he’s got a dog in this race, as well—after all, as officer in charge during Abu Ghraib, he himself was excoriated by the press. But he gives as good as he gets, and his first target is most definitely the press.
And what of his statements on the Iraq War? Does the Times characterize them fairly?
Well, yes and no. It is indeed true that he is highly critical of the current administration’s decisions there, including the surge strategy, and the the Times quotes are accurate, as far as they go. Of course, in the case of the surge and General Petraeus, Sanchez once again has a dog in this fight, if only a psychological one: it would be embarrassing if Petraeus were to succeed where Sanchez had failed.
But, reading the speech, it seems to me that the main thrust of its latter half is something the Times hardly mentions, much less emphasizes: the lack of a unified plan for victory in the war.
Here’s a fuller quote from that section of the speech than the Times offered, one that gives more of its actual flavor [emphasis mine]:
After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve “victory” in the war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism. From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan to the administration’s latest “surge” strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronize its political, economic and military power. The latest “revised strategy” is a desperate attempt by an administration that has not accepted the political and economic realities of this war and they have definitely not communicated that reality to the American people. An even worse and more disturbing assessment is that America cannot achieve the political consensus necessary to devise a grand strategy that will synchronize and commit our national power to achieve victory in Iraq….
Sanchez goes on to emphasize the need for coordination of efforts, and especially bipartisan political leadership and consensus. Good luck.
Reading the entire speech, I agree with many of Sanchez’s points, such as the lack of coordination, failure of bipartisan efforts, and need for better communication—not to mention his criticism of the press. I also see it as extremely self-defensive—“it wasn’t my fault, it was everyone else’s, and no one is able to do better.” But the Times’ and general MSM coverage of his speech also serve to highlight how very correct he is in the first half of it; the speech itself has been used by the press primarily as a “gotcha” moment to skewer Bush and the war itself.
Eliminated in the coverage, also, is Sanchez’s clear warning that withdrawal is not the answer and would in fact be disastrous.
And what does he suggest instead? Well, as the Times mentions, some of it is pretty much what Petraeus seems to already be doing:
Asked after his remarks what strategy he favored, General Sanchez ticked off a series of steps””from promoting reconciliation among Iraq’s warring sectarian factions to building effective Iraqi army and police units ”” that closely paralleled the list of tasks frequently cited by the Bush administration as the pillars of the current strategy.
Evaluate Sanchez’s speech as you will. Agree with it, or disagree—or partially agree, as I do. Just don’t trust the press to represent it fairly.
Very thorough post – great job!
I’m never surprised by the Times’ antiwar reporting. Sure, Sanchez has his demons, with Abu Graib, etc., but he’s a soldier and wants the U.S. to win.
Funny thing is, that’s exactly what’s happening. Sanchez is right to reject withdrawal, and the Times is stessing his comments because even the public’s moved on. Petraeus won the debate, MoveOn scored a Neville Chamberlain moment in attacking his testimony, and on-the-ground reports from Iraq say even political accommodation is happening.
The Times can’t stand it, and as they’ve backed the wrong horse, maybe they see Sanchez’s comments as saving their long-odds bid to turn the public towards retreatism.
Keep it up over here!
Thanks for going deeper into this story. As usual, your argument is made effective and with style.
“effectively” !
Hoystory has the speech with corrected capitalization.
http://www.hoystory.com/?p=4604#more-4604
The US and European media is run by propagandists. Much better to go to the source (such as the actual speech that Sanchez gave) rather than letting the media monkeys interpret reality for us.
The difficulty with long struggles that seem to be endeless with no clear end in sight is that by their length and changing cast of characters, they create heros and villains, the capable and less than capable, the wise and the silly. Unless we want to sink into the mud created by sensational and usually left leaning mainline journalists, we need to understand that Iraq has senior military who support current efforts and those that do not. Those generals that so soundly defeated the Iraq military in two wars emerged unscathed by history because they completed their tasks efficiently and with rapidity and minimal losses. They also left the scene as active duty very quickly. Their rapid departures immunized them and they did not need to contend with the inherent instability of the failed Iraqi state. The generals that came after needed to deal with that mess and some have done better than others. However, there is not a single senior military leader that has done less than that ordered or demanded, not matter what the essential wisdom of those policies may have been. Our junior officers and young soldiers have performed with amazing skill and bravery in the most difficult circumstances. The history of this struggle in Iraq has yet to be written.
The MSM skewing of speeches – heck: the MSM lying about speeches, has been a shocking discovery of my internet experience. The degree of the skew/lies really shakes me. It scares me, actually. It makes me fear for our society, and wonder at how extreme my naivete was/is.
I never looked for the skew/lies – at least not in the early days. I stumbled across the skew/lies, via late night reading of speech texts on the Internet, followed by seeing next day MSM headlines and articles, which were allegedly about the speeches I had read the night before, but actually were about speeches with which I was not familiar.
I was also struck by his criticism of the “Interagency,” by which I assume the civilian leadership/bureaucracy, and he called out the State Department and National Security Council by name.
If he’s saying that these civilian agencies have failed to put the country on a war footing, then I can’t see why the Times would report a single word of it.
It’s just that small part of his article that criticizes the Administration for Not Doing Enough that they focus on.
In fact, most of the speech, not just the part about the media, was an excoriation of everything the Times believes, with the exception of the association of the word “incompetent” with “Administration.”
In other words, we need to wage more war (economically, ideologically, culturally, etc.), not less.
Gcotharn, yes it’s shocking. Even after decades it still gets me in my gut at how they twist reality into some claustrophobicly narrowly distorted view. The assumption that they don’t just have the naked power but also the right to do this is nauseating.
The Anchoress had a similar experience with a satisfying resolution.
What is really funny is that the NYT also ran a story about how the Mahdi Army has been hammered into the ground, entire neighborhoods in Sadr City has renounced them, tipped off the wicked Americans into killing them off by the truck load. Gives the Sanchez story about the same weight one would give memoirs by ex wehrmacht generals – why, they always had the right plan etc, except the fuhrer jammed everything up in a catostrophic nightmare with no end in sight. After all, what could a general say after losing or being percieved as losing?
No doubt this omission on the Times’ part was purely arbitrary [/sarcasm off].
Yes, Neo, it was purely in the best interests and traditions of the human race that they decided to focus on more important matters.
Cannon also has a unique take on the speech, given that he bolded some portions of Sanchez’s speech
He has much to say about the failures of the Administration, but you can click on the link above on your own. Perhaps his harsh criticism of the administration makes his even harsher excoriation of the media more palatable to the administration’s domestic enemies. MY agenda is changing the minds of the American domestic target audience about the value and credibility of the information they receive from the Main Stream Drive By Media. I seek to expose their bias and convince people not to believe the psychological operations products they partner with the enemy to disseminate. The mind of the American voter is the key terrain in this Long War. Nobody is doing much to protect and defend that key terrain. We The People must Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, and there are plenty of forces at work to distort what we observe so we make the wrong decisions and act as they desire.
When you deal with media apparatuses, however, always be aware that they are setup not to deal with problems so much as create problems for the enemy.
The MSM figured, with its legacy reflexes, that by spiking this it wouldn’t exist.
But it’s out.
Those guys are so hosed, and they still haven’t figured it out.
“wonder at how extreme my naivete was/is.”
The sad thing is that what we see now is MUCH better.
In the early 90’s my political position was mostly cemented by watching c-span and then listening to the news report on it. There were, literally, cases where a republican would comment “I abhor people who say ” (with blah being some terrible, I remember one being something about oppressing black people and keeping them poor) only to see the “I abhor people who say” being relegated to a “…” then a LONG article on how bad those people were (or the clip of the speech cut the first part out too with that part played over and over and over). There were quite a number of political careers destroyed in that way.
That level of lying mostly left with the advent of Fox News, they made quite a bit of their original popularity by showing this stuff. It continues to get better as blogs do this type of thing – stuff like RatherGate or even this would most likely have *never* been exposed before the advent of Blogs. Amongst one of the reason I believe people like Rather get so miffed over it is that compared to other “inaccuracies” they told in the past these are fairly small.
Neo,
Mystified as I am by this blog’s incessant need to dump on the New York Times, I’d like to remind you that few other reports I’ve seen have settled on a different interpetation of Sanchez’ speech. Iknow you’d all like to believe that it was somehow a ‘posivitve” review of the war, but I can’t find it. In fact, located as I am in Micronesia, I get the Australian (members of the “coalition of the willing”) media quite often. Their TV coverage of the speech was even more incriminating of the war than that of the NYTimes. Perhaps if you go to Poland or Barundi you might find the positive angle you’re looking for.
Jimmy.
New technique: Don’t look at the interpretation.
Check out the speech.
Okay. Now sit down carefully. This can be a disorienting experience at first….do your own interpretation.
Sanchez’ view of the war is interesting, but he doesn’t say much new, at least to those whose interest goes past the traditional media.
The interesting thing is that he did hammer the press so vigorously.
Two facts: One is he did it. That’s out, despite the MSM’s attempts to bury it.
The other is the MSM got caught trying to bury it.
They are stupid.
Jimmy. Have you caught your breath yet?
Interestingly enough, I always found it difficult to trust any reporting from a paper whose motto was “All the news that’s fit to print”.
That alone should have told you all you needed to know about agenda, bias, and manipulation.
Richard,
Now I know Fox News never indulges in anthing anyone could call spin, but are you suggesting that interpretations of the speech are meaningless? Then, I imagine, I shouldn’t be paying much attention to this blog.
Asked after his remarks what strategy he favored, General Sanchez ticked off a series of steps–… to building effective Iraqi army and police units”
From a recent Victor Davis Hanson dispatch (having just been to Iraq):
“That said, Iraqis are trying to adopt much of the ethos of the American office corps, and thus a constant refrain in training is the need for them to get out, risk danger, and treat their subordinates with respect.
Many are doing just that-to such a degree entire units are starting to emerge that are probably better than any in the Arab Middle East. Surely one fear of Iraq’s neighbors is that if this country ever gets settled down, its army will be one of the most professional and competent in the region.”
There’s a lot of good info in that posting.
Great coverage of the situation, Neo.
I should elaborate that the purpose of that last posting is to point out that LTG Sanchez view of the situation is at best, outdated. That seemed the perfect example.
“I always found it difficult to trust any reporting from a paper whose motto was “All the news that’s fit to print”.
That alone should have told you all you needed to know about agenda, bias, and manipulation.”
Heh, kinda like calling your news service “Pravda” (Truth).
“the defensive dog in the race” says it all.
MY ASSESSMENT IS THAT YOUR PROFESSION, TO SOME EXTENT, HAS STRAYED FROM THESE ETHICAL STANDARDS AND ALLOWED EXTERNAL AGENDAS TO MANIPULATE WHAT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SEES ON TV, WHAT THEY READ IN OUR NEWSPAPERS AND WHAT THEY SEE ON THE WEB. FOR SOME OF YOU, JUST LIKE SOME OF OUR POLITICIANS, THE TRUTH IS OF LITTLE TO NO VALUE IF IT DOES NOT FIT YOUR OWN PRECONCIEVED NOTIONS, BIASES AND AGENDAS.
Gee, sounds like he’s talking about Jimmy.
General Sanchez’s remarks were rebroadcast a number of times by C-Span, actually as part of a series of different remarks by individuals and panels on the overall review of military and military press reporting and interactions. The Sanchez remarks were very reasoned, I thought, and not outdated in terms of policy, and he was just as concerned with the ethics and accuracy of reporting on Iraq as he was in the policy issues. The additional discussions by experts and reporters dealing with readiness and spending were just as significant and largely unreported. Sanchez does maintain that there were and are major shortcomings and the implication is clear that he consideres Iraq to have been poorly thought out for the long haul, and policy to have been inadequate. Interestingly, if you listen to his prognosticating, he does in some sense predict continued failures–I suspect that the current Kurdish-Turkish mess brings weight to his views, and is certainly making a mess of what we can or cannot do. Sanchez lost 800 soldiers during his tenure. He clearly feels that thier loss was a failure of the policy makers and unnecessary. He was genuinely moved by their sacrifice, and his concern is that their loss and the later decay in our military readiness, and everyone of the “experts” agrees we will need a ten-year rebuild of our forces to pre-Iraq readiness. I can hardly wait for the Sanchez memoirs!
“Sanchez lost 800 soldiers during his tenure. He clearly feels that thier loss was a failure of the policy makers and unnecessary.”
You’re projecting something that just isn’t there. If what you claim is so, he should have resigned in protest far earlier than he ended up having to, in worse circumstances.
Sanches found even more harsh words about press, that were conveniently omited from their reports. See
http://shieldofachilles.blogspot.com/
Of course, you remark on his remarks about the press and forget the “big picture” again. Iraq is a failure and our Armed forces are breaking under the stress. Are you going to blame the press for that as well? Lack of leadership, a poor plan to begin with forged by those neos in a think tank and poo pooing the “experts” who knew better about force size and costs, and hubris. Ingredients on how to make a failure. Truly sad. Can you name more than Franks or Patreaues as generals who actually think that Iraq is a good idea?
I second the emotion, Laura.
“Can you name more than Franks or Petraeus who actually think that Iraq is a good idea?”
Sure:
Adm. Michael Mullen
Gen. James Cartwright
Gen. George Casey, Jr.
Gen. T. Michael Moseley
Adm. Gary Roughead
Gen. James Conway
Adm. William J. Fallon
Gen. Lance Smith
Gen. Bantz J. Craddock
Gen. Gene Renuart
Adm. Timothy J. Keating
Gen. Joseph Fil, Jr.
Gen. Jeffrey W. Hammond
Shall I go on?
The Times really had to “cherry-pick” the nightmare quote, especially when General Sanchez’s nightmare is the incompetent strategic leadership in Washington that includes Capitol Hill.
Funny how the Times and the AP made it sound different.