PressEthic

The magazine’s sold out town-hall meeting on the future of Iraq was surprisingly “lopsided.”

According to Erin Thompson, there was one kind of argument at the September 23 debate: the pro-war kind. “Not a single person on the panel represented the viewpoint that America should withdraw all its troops immediately,” she said.

She goes on to list the many journalists and former government officials who support staying the course: former Under Secretary of State Douglas Feith; journalist George Packer; former CIA agent Robert Baer; executive director of the Iraq Foundation Rend Al-Rahim; former CIA Director James Woolsey; journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. The lone anti-war journalist was Mark Danner, who was apparently so reserved he didn’t make much of a difference (Kanan Makiya, director of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University, was out sick).

While complete, immediate withdrawal might seem a tad extreme, it’s not. Thompson sites a Fair & Accuracy in Journalism poll that says 41% of Americans support immediate withdrawal from Iraq. While polls are notoriously bad at delineating public sentiment, just about every poll says the same thing: complete withdrawal isn’t that marginal a notion.

According to the latest CNN/Gallup poll, 30% of respondents supported complete withdrawal (33% said we should withdraw some, and eight percent said we should send more); a Pew Research poll found that 45% of respondents said the US should bring its troops home, while 51% said they should stay; 57% said the US should exact a timetable, while 37% said we shouldn’t; a CBS poll said that 52% of Americans say we should get out now, while 42% said we should stay as long as it takes.

Regardless of whether or not the New Yorker supports the war, it should have provided a range of voices and ideas in the discussion—not to mention more of an Iraqi presence. I can understand if the magazine assumed the audience would provide the counterweight. But that still wouldn’t prevent an awfully one-dimensional discussion.