Djelloul Marbrook

What’s with Tom Brokaw and Nancy Pelosi? How can we have intelligent discourse about Iraq or anything else when the press and the politicians fail to do their homework? Yesterday morning the influential NBC newsman asked the equally influential speaker of the House if she would agree the surge in Iraq had worked, a classic when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife question.

To this old news dog’s mind Brokaw’s questions were more probative than probing. They were gotcha questions, and the speaker took the bait. She gave him a circumlocutive answer. But if she had studied the literature, or, giving her the benefit of the doubt, if she had remembered it, she would have made the compelling case that it was not the surge but an earlier decision to pay Sunni tribal leaders that calmed things down in Iraq.

She could have made the case that the so-called Sunni Awakening and not a troop increase had reduced the violence.

But didn’t Brokaw do his homework either, or did he choose to bait the speaker simply because it made a better interview?

After all, the interview would have gotten fairly complicated if the Sunni Awakening had been mentioned, and we know the last thing the press wants to do is complicate issues with nuance. Isn’t that why it invented the preposterous flip-flop controversy—so that discourse might be kept simple-minded?

For example, if the awakening had been mentioned the next logical question would have been what happens when we stop paying the insurgents? And the next question after that might have been, Won’t they remain insurgents as long as the Shi’ite majority, which our invasion has empowered, continues to oppress them?

And the question after that might have been, Are the overwhelmingly Sunni neighbors of Iraq going to stand by and watch their Sunni brethren oppressed by a Shi’ite majority allied with Iran?

So we can see why Brokaw kept it simple and misleading. What is harder to see is why Pelosi either didn’t know Iraq was quieting down prior to the surge or for some obscure reason didn’t want to say so. In either case, it played right into John McCain’s hands, because he has been misleading us all along about the surge.

The Sunday incident reminds me of Rudy Giuliani taking credit for the drop in crime during his tenure as New York mayor when in fact there is strong evidence that the decline was set in motion during the tenure of his predecessor, David Dinkins, who put more cops on the street and instituted rapid responses to neighborhood situations.

The facts haven’t stopped Giuliani from claiming he hung the moon nor will they stop John McCain from dissembling about the surge or offshore drilling. But what was the speaker’s excuse? As for the kind of theater-of-news interview Tom Brokaw conducted last Sunday, the sooner the Internet changes the face of American journalism the better. —DM