Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

In light of the provocative actions the Bush administration has taken over the past year, these words cannot easily be dismissed as mere saber-rattling.

In March 2006, the State Department created an Office of Iranian Affairs, which, along with the Pentagon’s new Iranian Directorate, is tasked with aggressively promoting regime change in Iran. Among those advising the Iranian Directorate are three former associates of the Pentagon’s defunct Office of Special Plans—the same group that promoted the Iraq war on the basis of false or misleading information: Abram N. Shulsky, the OSP’s former director; John Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst; and Ladan Archin, an Iran specialist.

In the April 17, 2006, issue of the New Yorker, in an article entitled “The Iran Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?” Seymour Hersh wrote that U.S. troops are already in Iran and are “in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties.” His source in the Pentagon also claimed that we had already begun “working with minority groups in Iran . . . to ‘encourage ethnic tensions’ and undermine the regime.”

Plans continued apace through the end of last year. On September 30, 2006, the Iran Freedom Support Act, which provides financing for activities that promote regime change in Iran, was signed into law. Then, in late 2006, President Bush changed security policy in Iraq from a “catch and release” program (whereby U.S. forces would secretly capture Iranian “agents” in the country and detain them for a few days) to ordering that Iranian “agents” in Iraq be captured and held indefinitely, or killed.

In an effort to disrupt Iran’s economy, on January 9 of this year, the Bush administration imposed sanctions on Bank Sepah, Iran’s fifth-largest state-owned financial institution, alleging it “is the financial linchpin of Iran’s missile procurement network and has actively assisted Iran’s pursuit of missiles capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction.” Two days later, on January 11, U.S. troops violated international law protecting the immunity of diplomatic compounds, by storming Iran’s consulate in Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and detaining five of its staff while confiscating computers and official documents.

In addition, significant military sea and air operations are now under way. To Iran’s northwest, at the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, the Pentagon has deployed F-16s that can deliver B61-11 nuclear bunker busters, which are theoretically capable of destroying Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. To Iran’s south, Patriot Air and Missile Defense Systems are now in place in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain (where the U.S. Fifth Fleet, the naval arm of U.S. Central Command, is headquartered). The USS Eisenhower Strike Group is in the Persian Gulf, comprising the nuclear aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower, its Carrier Air Wing 7, Destroyer Squadron 28, the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, the guided-missile destroyers USS Ramage and USS Mason, and the attack submarine USS Newport News.

They are now being joined by the USS Stennis Carrier Strike Group, which consists of the nuclear aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, its Carrier Air Wing 9, Destroyer Squadron 21, the guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam, and the guided-missile destroyers USS O’Kane, USS Preble, and USS Paul Hamilton. The combined Carrier Air Wings of the two carrier strike groups allow air operations over a continuous 24-hour cycle. According to Flynt Leverett, former senior official in the CIA and the National Security Council, stationing two carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf “provide[s] the necessary numbers and variety of tactical aircraft” for an attack against Iran.

In addition, the USS Bataan Expeditionary Strike Group, which consists of seven ships and includes helicopters and Harrier fighter jets, has been deployed to the Persian Gulf. A fourth flotilla of eight ships, the USS Boxer Expeditionary Strike Group, is nearby, in the Indian Ocean. Currently at sea and available for deployment to the Persian Gulf are USS Nimitz and three additional carrier strike groups: USS Ronald Reagan, USS Harry S. Truman, and USS Theodore Roosevelt.

Coordinating this military activity is the U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM), one of the Pentagon’s five geographically demarcated unified commands. Spanning 3,600 miles east-west and 4,600 miles north-south, its Area of Responsibility is larger than the continental United States. Of particular note, therefore, is President Bush’s decision to pass over highly qualified U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps Combat Arms officers and appoint Adm. William J. Fallon to head USCENTCOM. Over its 24-year history, USCENTCOM has always been commanded by a general from either the Army or the Marine Corps—never an admiral. That is because USCENTCOM is a land-warfare command responsible for the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least initially, Admiral Fallon will likely be viewed by the staff as an outsider, and combat-arms officers will be wary of a Navy aviator leading Army operations. However, it is possible that Admiral Fallon was appointed not to lead land operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which he has limited experience, but to command the assembled naval forces in and around the Persian Gulf in a joint sea and air attack on Iran—an operation for which he is superbly qualified. Admiral Fallon gained extensive command experience in such operations in the Gulf War and Kosovo, and he is intimately familiar with the Persian Gulf region. As his official biography states, “He has served as Deputy Director for Operations, Joint Task Force, Southwest Asia in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.”

With Admiral Fallon at the head of USCENTCOM and U.S. naval strike forces in the Persian Gulf, the Bush administration is in position to launch a massive air attack on Iran. The very magnitude of the likely area of attack ensures that it would not be a surgical strike. As Time reported in its September 17, 2006, issue,

A Pentagon official says that among the known sites there are 1,500 different “aim points,” which means the campaign could well require the involvement of almost every type of aircraft in the U.S. arsenal: Stealth bombers and fighters, B-1s and B-2s, as well as F-15s and F-16s operating from land and F-18s from aircraft carriers.

Given that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has refused to promise that the White House would consult Congress before attacking Iran, if there is to be an attack, the Bush administration may seek to provoke a Gulf of Tonkin incident. It could then claim that Iran fired the first shot, in order to justify launching a “retaliatory” attack. The immediate aim would be to force the Democratic-controlled Congress to provide all necessary funding for a war to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and neutralize her military capabilities. In so doing, the Bush administration would hope that ensuing political instability would allow ethnic minorities (Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds, and Turkmen) to dismember the state or opposition parties to overthrow the government—in other words, regime change.

Judging by U.S. air campaigns in North Vietnam and Yugoslavia—and, more recently, by Israel’s attack on Lebanon—such an attack would result in significant civilian casualties, which could, in turn, unify Iranians in an outpouring of patriotic support for their government. It would be comparable to what occurred in this country following September 11. The Iranian opposition, ethnic secessionists, and political dissidents would be discredited as fifth columnists. And the Muslim world, from Morocco to Malaysia, would be inflamed against the United States.

What, then, is the purpose of increasing troop levels in Iraq by 21,500, if the President plans to attack Iran? The “Surge” is a political, not a military, action, designed to justify previous policy, show determination to remain in Iraq, and circumvent the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

The overall failure in the strategy of the Bush administration, of which the “Surge” is but one example, is in its refusal to accept the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare—war between a state and a nonstate actor. The Bush strategy denies that insurgencies arise from, and are sustained by, local populations. Instead, the administration is convinced that an insurgency is dependent upon some other state. In the case of the Iraqi insurgency, that state is Iran. The Bush administration may believe that, by neutralizing Iran’s military capabilities, it can defeat the Iraqi insurgents.

The assumption that Iran is sponsoring the insurgency in Iraq is false. First, the insurgents are Sunnis who seek to reestablish the political hegemony of the Sunni minority. Iran is Shiite and supports the right of the Shiite majority that we brought to power in Iraq. Iran is not going to arm Sunnis to suppress Shiites. Second, if Iran were arming Shiites to attack U.S. troops, they would be attacking U.S. troops. Instead, the Shiite militias are killing Sunnis. With the Shiites now in power in Iraq, the only way to foment a Shiite insurgency would be if we attacked Iran. Such an attack would be viewed by Iraqi Shiites as an assault on Shia Islam.

Even without a Shiite insurgency, the “Surge” plan has serious flaws. To begin with, an increase in troops to over 160,000—bringing us back to levels we have had in Iraq before—is no surge. Besides, if “victory” was beyond our reach with 250,000 troops on the ground (the original invasion force), it is not likely to be achieved with fewer—particularly if the additional troops are not being provided additional armored vehicles.

The primary focus of the “Surge” is to pacify Baghdad. However, in the past, when more troops were deployed to that city, violence only increased. The “Surge” doubles the number of U.S. troops for security operations in Baghdad. That brings the number of military personnel up to 15,000 for an operation that, according to the force ratios established by the U.S. Army Manual for Counterinsurgency, requires 120,000. According to the Bush strategy, the difference will be made up by Iraqi troops—Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Yet Kurdish soldiers are refusing to be deployed to Baghdad, and, if Iran is attacked, Iraqi Shiite soldiers may well turn on U.S. troops.

Currently, U.S. troops rely on a supply line from Kuwait for virtually everything—food, fuel, ammo, and medicine. If Iran is attacked, that supply line will be cut—by a general Shiite uprising, armed Shiite militias, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or all of the above. U.S. outposts would be overrun, and Baghdad, encircled, rendering a mass retreat (à la Saigon, 1975) impossible. At that point, the Bush administration will have run out of options. They would be unable to resupply the beleaguered troops or bring in additional troops and armor to end the siege quickly. Nor could they bomb their way to victory without killing U.S. troops along with the insurgents and civilians. Instead of Saigon, Baghdad would resemble Dien Bien Phu, 1954.

Joseph E. Fallon writes from Rye, New York.

This article first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

But then, Will would probably speak condescendingly of the Sermon on the Mount, and, as one wag has quipped, he “could bring an air of pomposity to a nudist colony, with or without his bow tie.” He has announced that the Tenth Amendment is “as dead as a doornail,” which may be true, although that is nothing to smirk about. The U.S. Constitution is related to today’s U.S. government roughly as the Book of Revelation is related to the Unitarian Church, which is to say, rather tenuously; but, like the Devil citing Scripture, Will can use it when he wants to, as in hurling imprecations against McCain-Feingold limits on campaign spending. First Amendment, you know.

Will’s style is simply to announce, as ineluctable facts, things principled conservatives don’t like, with the unspoken counsel, “So, get over it, children.” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy is “an ethic of common provision.” Affirmative action means a “racial spoils system.” As for reversing legal abortion, “the culture has moved on.” Well, that’s that! Will has always treated ordinary conservatives, such as pro-lifers, as disreputable poor relations.

To give him his due, Will has also been a staunch defender of the state of Israel and an unflinching critic—nay, an utterly fearless foe—of holocaust deniers.

Sometimes suspected of plagiarism himself, he has flagged Thomas Aquinas for his “intellectual hijacking” of Aristotle. He has nailed the Catholic Church for antisemitism and Pius XII for his silence about the holocaust. He has also taken the side of the great Victorian scientist Charles Darwin against the benighted apostles of “intelligent design.”

I first met George at National Review in 1972. I was a green editorial writer; he was our new Washington correspondent—smart and well informed, but cocky and priggish, the sort of impressive young man who, knowing how to wow his elders, only gets more precocious with age. I knew of his brilliant father, Frederick L. Will, from my philosophy studies. His grandfather was a Lutheran minister, and with this background, George somehow felt entitled to make snide but not original—in fact, trite—remarks about Saint Augustine. (Luther wouldn’t have approved.)

Egotistical and opinionated without having a really independent mind, George was confident that he was among suckers and could get away with pretty much anything, including a bit of occasional minor plagiarism. And he did and does. Nobody told him to come off it. He quickly made his way as a Washington pundit, rising to the top of the tree in record time. A few critics have pointed out how derivative his views are, but he has never let this slow him down.
Washington is not a city to which would-be martyrs flock in large numbers, and I have never known George to take a position knowing that it would cost him anything. On the contrary, he has always had a shrewd sense of which side his bagel is buttered on. He was among the first in the punditry racket to perceive that neoconservatism could be more lucrative than actual, old-fashioned conservatism. He has been careful not to call himself a neoconservative, but he ran with the neocons rhetorically until they fell into disrepute a couple of years ago, at which point he scolded them as if he’d never known them. He now writes about the Iraq war as if he’d been warning against it from the start. Which is not quite the case.

In fact, in early 2003, George was applauding the other George for threatening to invade Iraq, using the full arsenal of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon rationales and slogans: “weapons of mass destruction,” “regime change,” “Nuremberg trials,” etc., with swipes at Franco-European cowardice. In fact, to read those columns now is to return to the enchanted land of early Limbaugh. A book I don’t expect to read soon is The Confessions of George Will.
Conservatism? Again, it depends on how you define it. The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, whose name Will used to drop when he was showing the rubes how tony true conservatism could be, warned against using government as “a vast reservoir of power” in pursuit of “favorite projects.” Such talk now sounds archaic. But so, already, do David Brooks’ “national-greatness conservatism” and Fred Barnes’ eulogies of Bush’s “big-government conservatism,” to say nothing of Barnes’ judgment that the Iraq invasion was “the greatest act of benevolence one nation has ever performed for another” and Richard Lowry’s 2005 effusion on the cover of National Review: “We Are Winning!” No wonder conservatives aren’t quoting themselves much these days. Only the neocons, or at least the few who still admit they are neocons, still insist that the war was a splendid idea until Bush & Co. made a hash of it.

How did it come to this? National Review has had to repudiate its own founder, the aging, ailing Bill Buckley, who has written that he would have opposed the war had he known in 2003 what he knows now. Will has taken a wiser approach: Get lost in the crowd, act as if it had all been someone else’s blunder, and pray that nobody digs up your old columns.

And if you write about someone who was right all along, such as Ron Paul, just sneer at him.

This article first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Some Virginians wondered why they should apologize for something that occurred before any of us, white or black, was born. “Get over it,” Virginia Del. Frank D. Hargrove told blacks before the resolution passed the General Assembly in February, which only energized the apology’s spear carriers and got them pounding the war drums.

The apology rage is another front in the culture war against the South, in particular, and American history, in general. The Southern Baptists gibbered an apology for slavery over a decade ago, and newspapers gabble contrition for their soporific coverage of the “civil-rights struggle.” Never mind the old liberal mantra that only individuals, not groups, are responsible for wrongdoing: One group is the sum of all evils. The resolution is clear on that, and its startling rhetoric and risible leftist moonshine show just what its authors had in mind: perpetual guilt and atonement from whites; perpetual grievance for blacks. One likely goal of this apology, given the failed lawsuits filed against venerable corporations over their involvement with slavery 200 years ago, is the procurement of reparations. Another may well be the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

This Virginia resolution is an extraordinary and subtle ideological indictment not just of slavery but of the United States. “For many African Americans,” it says, “the scars left behind are unbearable, haunting their psyches and clouding their vision of the future and of America’s many attributes . . . ” It also quotes President Bush’s apology for slavery, in which he insisted that, “while physical slavery is dead, the legacy is alive.” Indeed, the resolution continues, “The vestiges of slavery are ever before African American citizens.” Their “psyche[s]” are “haunt[ed]” by both the “overt racism of hate groups” and the “subtle racism” they experience “when requesting health care, transacting business, buying a home, seeking quality public education and college admission, and enduring pretextual [sic] traffic stops and other indignities.” Only official apologies, then, can “assuage” their “perpetual pain, distrust and bitterness.”

“Poppycock” is about the only reply this ideological indictment deserves. Words such as “unbearable,” “haunting,” and “perpetual,” as well as the fibs and hyperbole about “subtle racism” in housing, healthcare, and education, all lead to some inescapable observations and conclusions, the first of which is that an event that occurred 200 years ago cannot haunt a man today. This “perpetual pain, distrust and bitterness” is no more real than the “repressed memories” recovered in victims of “past abuse,” who suddenly “remember” events suggested by headshrinkers.

Yet even an apology bereft of this ideological hokum would be silly, as some blacks are attesting. “I don’t want or need an apology for slavery,” writes Lyle V. Harris, a black editorialist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Said a professor at historically black Clark Atlanta University, “I’m not sure the average [black] guy who works from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. is thinking about this.”

He isn’t thinking about it, of course, and neither are whites who know the politicians’ game. Like Hargrove, they aren’t sorry for anything except electing the politicians who assiduously assist professional race hustlers in attempting to make them feel guilty for something that happened in the 19th century.

Whites are terrified, however. They know what awaits those who cross the Pettus Bridge of modern racial taboo by defending themselves and opposing the antiwhite Zeitgeist: a rubber-hosing with the r-word.

The overall effort exerted by proponents of the Virginia apology suggests a certain desperation: The race hustlers, you see, know their jig is up. No one, least of all young whites, wants to hear about segregation and Jim Crow today, for the same reason Hargrove thinks Virginia’s groveling apology is ridiculous: None of them had anything to do with it. Millions of black Americans are members of the middle class, and others, such as Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods, Colin Powell, and, of course, Barack Obama, have reached the pinnacle of financial, social, and political success. This truth delegitimizes continued caterwauling about racism and discrimination, which is why the race hustlers need the apology. It is a Trojan horse. The real import of the resolution is not the apology per se, but its list of interminable and unforgivable grievances that are little more than an antiwhite bill of attainder.

Everyone, including its authors, knows the apology won’t change anything. Slavery is unforgivable. Its “legacy” is “unbearable,” “haunting,” and “perpetual,” much like Original Sin. All whites bear its stain; all blacks, its pain. But if Baptism removes the stain of Original Sin, surely the War Between the States, with some 600,000 dead, and 50 years of state and federal civil-rights legislation, should have expiated the sin of slavery. It didn’t, of course, which is why we need another “apology.” And the apology, in turn, reminds us why we need more race laws concerning jobs and college admissions and justifies all manner of pernicious discrimination and racial attacks against whites. All of this will further convince some whites, particularly average voters and politicians ignorant of history and uninterested in learning about it, that they bear the guilt for every crime in history since Cain killed Abel.

The Los Angeles Times has dubbed Barack Obama “The Magic Negro.” He’s a “non-threatening” black presidential candidate, the liberals say, for whom a white soccer mom can comfortably vote. As Sen. Joe Biden infamously said, “You got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

So whites can confess and apologize for the besetting sin of slavery. Then they can do penance by voting for Obama.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia. The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run. The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full of rocks, with open spaces so small that vegetable gardens are the only farming. Those hills that have not been denuded of their timber are covered in lush and beautiful hardwood forests. In the summer, they are almost impenetrable; once inside, there is deep shade and a cacophony of sound—a chorus of cicadas, the thump-thump-thump and wild cries of pileated woodpeckers. In the winter, the trees are stripped bare by ice storms, and the forest floor is carpeted with oak leaves.

The Ozarks are beautiful, but one can feel claustrophobic and trapped by them, and their human communities are isolated and somewhat cut off from the larger world. They remain a poor rural backwater inhabited by fiercely independent and often violent clans. Today, the chief occupation of the men appears to be growing marijuana and cooking methamphetamine. The chief means of escape is joining the Army.

Daniel Woodrell is from this place, and he lives there still. Those who have not read his books may yet know something of his work. The excellent screenplay for Ang Lee’s underappreciated 1999 film Ride With the Devil, about a band of Missouri Confederate guerrillas, was adapted, often word for word, from his excellent 1987 novel Woe to Live On. He has set his latest story in the coldest part of an Ozark winter when clouds can be seen “splitting on distant peaks, dark rolling bolts torn around the mountain tops to patch the blue sky with grim,” and “the bringing wind rattled the forest, shook limb against limb.”

The bleak winter landscape mirrors the ordeal of Woodrell’s heroine, 16-year-old Ree Dolly, whose father has disappeared, whose mother has gone crazy, and whose two younger brothers now look to her for provision, protection, and permanence. Woodrell’s lyrical and evocative sentences quicken both physical and mental worlds. “The snow fell first in hard little bits, frosty white bits blown sideways to pelt Ree’s face as she raised the ax, swung down, raised it again, splitting wood while being stung by cold flung from the sky.” “Coyotes howled past dawn, howled from far crags and ridges and down the valley to the end of the rut road where the school bus stopped.” “In the house she slept, and when she woke the sun was red falling west and everybody wanted food.”

Sometimes, all she has to feed Sonny and Harold are “oatmeal suppers,” but there is episodic help from neighbors and family—and hunting. Ree teaches her brothers how to shoot rifles, then takes them into the woods in the early morning to pick off squirrels. “Ree and the boys sat with their backs propped up against a large fallen oak, butts on gathered leaves, boots in thin patches of snow. . . . The needed skill was silence.”

The real drama begins when Ree learns from the deputy sheriff that her father, a skilled cooker of “crank” (meth), has used their house as collateral for a jail bond and is now missing. If he does not turn up in a few days, they will lose the house, its land and trees, and the family will be scattered. Were that to happen, Ree would fare the best, for she is only a year away from being old enough to join the Army, which has been her plan anyway. Instead, she decides to look for her dad, knowing the danger of asking questions of extended family who are likewise involved in the drug trade (and sometimes worse things) and knowing also that she has an easy way out. She chooses the harder, but better, way. Ree, it turns out, would rather stay home, care for her two brothers, and revel in the beauty of her wooded and rocky hills than patrol the sanguinary streets of Baghdad.

Writing of William Faulkner, Russell Kirk observed that

the writer may write much more about what is evil than about what is good; and yet, exhibiting the depravity of human nature, he establishes in his reader’s mind the awareness that there exist enduring standards from which we fall away; and that fallen nature is an ugly sight.

In Woodrell’s Ozarks, even the land is fallen. Forests on private land have mostly been cut down. Ancient springs are poisoned. (“Stuff has leaked to the heart of the earth.”) The soil is barren. Immorality abounds. Infidelity and drug abuse are rampant. There are few good jobs. Both community and family are dysfunctional, yet we cannot help noticing that it is a community—unlike exurban America, which is no community at all. We also cannot help noticing that, while Ree has to grow up too fast, more affluent American adolescents hardly grow up at all, and that, if her family suffers from material deprivation, wealthier families suffer from a deprivation that is normative and spiritual.

As in so much Southern fiction, that other, spiritual world is ever present. Before her mind broke and the parts scattered, Ree’s mother would sometimes beat her with a rake while hung over and depressed after a night of that all-American pastime, “partying.” But one day, an “unsmiling angel pointing from the tree tops” put an end to that. God may seem to have abandoned His world to the wickedness of men, but He hasn’t. And a better world beckons. The boys ask Ree to describe Heaven: “Sandy. Lots of fun birds. Always sunny but never way hot.”

Winter’s Bone: A Novel
by Daniel Woodrell
New York: Little, Brown and Company; 193 pp., $22.99

Herbert Arthur Scott Trask lives and writes in the hills of the Missouri River country west of St. Louis, on the northeastern edge of the Ozarks.

This article first appeared in the May 2006 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The truth is, we are never permitted to contemplate the truth about race and crime. Most interracial crime involves blacks harming whites, and federal statistics show that blacks commit more hate crimes than whites. The news media’s stiff-necked refusal to report these facts is escalating and indisputable, as several recent cases show, and invites us to question why so many news professionals—so dedicated to disclosing so many unwelcome facts about so many subjects—are so unwilling to examine this one. “Liberal media bias” isn’t the only answer. Something else is at work.

First, a few examples. The murders of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian in Knoxville, Tennessee, merited almost no attention from the national news media and none from the New York Times. According to police, on January 7, a band of black criminals carjacked the pair, then treated them to a nightmare of sexual torture. The gang raped Newsom, shot him, burned him with gasoline, wrapped him in bedding, then set him ablaze. Afterward, they dumped his body on nearby railroad tracks. They forced Christian to watch this and repeatedly (and savagely) raped her, then sprayed liquid cleaner in her mouth to erase their residual DNA. After killing her, the thugs placed her in trash bags and stuffed her in a garbage can. Five suspects await trial.

On Halloween, three white girls approached a haunted maze in the backyard of a home in Long Beach, California. A group of a dozen black boys, according to newspaper accounts, began taunting them. The boys grabbed their crotches, asking, “Are you down with it?” The girls went through the maze, but when they returned to the front yard, the boys were waiting to taunt them again. Then they heard another male voice declare, “I hate white people.” “White bitches,” others shouted. The girls started to leave, but a mob of about 30 blacks, including young girls, gathered and pelted them with pumpkins and lemons. “We hate white people,” they hollered, “f--king white people.” When the defenseless girls tried to flee, the mob attacked in full force, beating and stomping the first victim to the ground. When she tried to fight back, a black man smashed her head with a skateboard, then hit her again when she was on the ground, unconscious. The mob kicked her anyway. When one friend tried to rescue her, the mob swarmed, punched her until she dropped, then stomped, and kicked her on the ground. She received 12 facial fractures and severe damage to one of her eyes. The third girl also tried to help, but the mob beat her to a pulp—again, kicking and stomping her when they got her on the ground.

The judge tossed out DNA evidence from a victim’s blood on one attacker’s clothes because, one news report said, it would complicate the case. Ultimately, he sentenced those found guilty to house arrest and probation. Again, the New York Times and other national news media mostly ignored it. No wondering how it could happen. No soul-searching. No lectures on racism from the university professoriate, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton.

In April 2005, a mob of 30 blacks attacked four white girls at Marine Park in Brooklyn, New York, shouting “black power,” according to the small weekly that covered it, and invoking Martin Luther King, Jr. Two of the victims landed in the hospital, one with a broken nose. Immediately, police denied this was a hate crime. The national news media ignored it. And again, the Rainbow Coalition took a powder.

On December 14, 2000, two black brothers, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, invaded the Wichita home of Jason Befort and his two friends, Bradley Heyka and Aaron Sandler, who were entertaining Befort’s girlfriend, Heather Muller, and Sandler’s former girlfriend (“H.G.”). (Sandler was then studying for the priesthood.) As with the carjacking in Knoxville, the black men, ending a week-long feral rampage, subjected their five white victims to an orgy of sexual torture nearly beyond description. After beating the men senseless, they forced the women to have sex, attempted to force the men to have sex with the women, then raped and sodomized the women. They robbed them and drove the naked (the women were clad only in sweaters) victims to a field and executed four of them. H.G., having been shot in the head and run over repeatedly with a truck, managed to survive. Despite H.G.’s testimony, which indicated that the brothers made numerous racial slurs while torturing and attempting to kill her, prosecutors hotly denied that this was a hate crime. Again, the national news media ignored the story.

Stories about all these crimes appeared in local newspapers and on local television news. (Even local media often omit the race of the suspect.) Somehow, these stories never rocketed to the editorial stratosphere of CBS, CNN, the Washington Post, or the New York Times. Some national-news websites published a smattering of AP stories about these crimes. Had they involved whites attacking blacks, all of these news organizations would have dispatched staff writers, photographers, producers, and cameramen to get the story.

That is exactly what happened when three white lacrosse players at Duke University were accused of raping a black stripper at an off-campus party; the national news media descended in full force. The charges smeared the team, and the Duke lacrosse season was canceled. Hundreds of stories appeared about this fictive crime—a case in which the prosecutor was forced to quit and may be disbarred for egregious ethical violations. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television networks unlimbered a blunderbuss and sprayed us with stories. It was time to search our souls for racism. For intolerance. For bigotry. For a crime that never happened. Of course, Durham was recently the site of a rape at an off-campus party at which men from Duke were present. The national news media ignored it, and the Raleigh News and Observer eliminated race in its description of both the party and the suspect. A black fraternity hosted the party. The suspect is black; the victim is white.

The leftists who run the national news media know what they are doing, and they won’t confront the truth about race and crime; that would require reforming their thoughts about the world and undermine their declared agenda. The news media are obsessed with “diversity,” as Bill McGowen demonstrated in Coloring the News, his book on how the media spins stories because of race. Some topics, including affirmative action, are taboo in newsrooms. For example, when the New York Times exposed rank incompetence and rampant criminality among rookies in the NYPD, it failed to disclose how or why such incompetence and criminality crept into the ranks: Hiring standards had been lowered to promote minorities in the name of “diversity.”

In journalism, the last few years have been one long chin-wag about diversity. The potentates of journalism discuss it with religious fervor. Editors receive dogmatic flyers and evangelical videotapes importuning them to hire minority applicants and interns and to attend minority job fairs. They receive surveys designed to measure the racial and sex complexion of newsrooms. The American Society of Newspaper Editors proclaims, “We count the number of journalists, their gender [sic] and race” in order to “help newsrooms think about diversity.” The society sponsors a silly project called “Time Out for Accuracy and Diversity.” Of course, accuracy never trumps diversity. The publisher of the New York Times has said that diversity is the most important issue facing his newspaper; this is how Jayson Blair, a serial liar with a long rap sheet of plagiarism and mendacity, slipped through the cracks.

This leftist obsession with diversity and race in the newsroom informs the media’s coverage of crime, particularly interracial crime. In a letter posted on the forum at Romenesko, on the website of the Poynter Institute, David Mills, a former writer for the Washington Times, hammered the Los Angeles Times for ignoring the mob melee at Long Beach. “You don’t have to be a card-carrying Klansman,” Mills wrote,

to point out that the LA Times surely would be treating this story differently if three black women had been attacked by 30 white teenagers hurling words like “F--- black people.” Columnists and editorial writers would be rending their garments, agonizing over the meaning of such a brutal crime. . . .

The Halloween mob assault appears to be the worst instance of black-on-white violence in Southern California since Reginald Denny took a cinder block to the head. Why is the LA Times covering it so grudgingly? The only reference to the beatings on the op-ed page came last Sunday, when Michael McGough, a senior editorial writer, wrote of this case: “I wouldn’t dare to prejudge [it] even if the facts weren’t so murky.” He then fretted that an “unintended consequence” of hate-crime laws is that “such laws could end up punishing blacks who commit violence against whites—which is a far cry from the historical experience that inspired hate-crime statutes.”

Say what? I didn’t realize that hate-crime laws were supposed to punish only white people. Presented with a shocking instance of black-on-white violence, the Times thinks the only larger issue worth discussing is whether hate-crime legislation is wrongheaded?

McGough’s point was that blacks are incapable of racism and hate crimes; they are perpetual victims. No wonder the national news media refuses to report horrific black-on-white crimes. Just as “diversity” trumps competence in the newsroom, white-on-black crime always trumps its converse.

The media’s morality play about unbridled white racism is a perilous fairy tale that justifies the media’s racial agenda not just for newsrooms but for society at large. Moreover, whites are increasingly angry about the media’s treatment of blacks and crime, which undermines what little credibility the media have and energizes unfair and unjust remarks and rage about blacks in general. This, in turn, breeds the very racial animosity the dim bulbs in the news media claim they want to erase. Yet admitting the truth would undermine the media’s hectoring, obnoxious propaganda, which insists that whites are oppressors and blacks are victims, and would deprive the race hustlers and cultural leftists of the crowning symbol that permits them to rig the courts and spin the news: the racist white bogeyman.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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ON THE COVER

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Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson and Nicholas Garrie.