The Guardian’s inexcusable screw up

Speaking of the British press (see below), I’d be remiss if I didn’t express my profound disappointment with London’s Guardian newspaper for its monumental mistake yesterday.

The left-leaning newspaper ran a story yesterday under the headline, “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil.” The beginning of the story ran as follows:

“Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war.

“The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz — who has already undermined Tony Blair’s position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a ‘bureaucratic’ excuse for war — has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is ‘swimming’ in oil.

“The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

“Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: ‘Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.'”

Pretty damning, right? I mean, this would be devastating evidence by one of the leading neocon hawks in the administration that the Bush White House was motivated to invade Iraq because of its rich abundance of oil.

In fact, shortly after the story began running of the Guardian’s website, the ‘net was ablaze with links and commentary over this revelation. Most of the liberal blogs I read every day were quick to point to the Wolfowitz quote as proof of the administration’s depraved motivations for an unprovoked war. I may have even mentioned the Wolfowitz quote myself yesterday were it not for an ISP problem that prevented me from posting until this morning.

But it was all completely false. The Guardian, to put it mildly, got it terribly wrong.

Here’s what Wolfowitz actually said: “Look, the primarily difference — to put it a little too simply — between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.”

The Guardian’s version of Wolfowitz’s “sea of oil” line was obviously wrenched from its original context, completely omitting key text and restructuring the sentences to make it look like he said something else entirely.

I disapprove of the Bush administration in general, and Wolfowitz in specific, as much as the next guy, but mistakes like these do far more harm than good. As blogger and award-winning cartoonist Tom Tommorrow put it, “These guys do enough, it’s not like anyone has to make up stuff about them to make them seem worse.”

Ordinarily, I really enjoy the Guardian and read it regularly online. I realize that British journalism standards are not the same as they are here, and that the Guardian doesn’t hide the fact that it’s a liberal paper, but this is truly inexcusable. If Fox News were to pull a stunt like this, I’d be all over them for days.

One can only hope that someone, or some people, will get fired over this.