I thought this was a bit interesting...Newsbusters, a web site that bills itself as "exposign and combating liberal media bias," gave "Our Children's Children's War" a rave review:
Former “Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel was one of Tim Russert’s guests on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” As amazing as it might seem, he made some truly shocking and compelling statements about the Iraq war and the war on terror that virtually no Democrat or media member is willing to accept or report:
First, Koppel made it clear that America’s premature departure from Iraq would turn the entire Persian Gulf region into a battlefield between Sunnis and Shia, “something the United States cannot allow to happen” Second, he said the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are part of the war on terror that “has been going on for the past 24 years” starting when “the precursors of Hezbollah blew up the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon” in 1983 Finally, he stated that America’s departure from Iraq and Afghanistan, regardless of when it occurs, will not represent the end of this battle, but, instead, that it is just “going to be a different war” after that point.
Well, that's interesting, because I surely did not find Ted's questioning to be out of step with the typical liberal bias.
During the whole program, as he was posing what I'm sure he meant to sound like hard-hitting, insightful questions, I found them to be the usual handwringing, second-guessing comments meant to sow doubt and contempt in the viewers' minds.
I had ambivalent feelings about Blackwater before seeing this show--mainly because I know very little about it--but Koppel's attempts to show them as some kind of out-of-control, private, mercenary army actually had the reverse affect for me: I felt the Blackwater execs came across very professionally in fielding his loaded questions, and I am proud that we have them in our bag of tricks. Fine, call them mercenaries. You know what? America appears to have developed the most professional, best-trained, and ethical mercenary organization in history. If they can do damage to our enemies, then double their pay and let them loose. I sure as heck wouldn't want to be on their bad side.
And the segments on Africa? I honestly had no idea we were making so much good progress in pre-emptively building and restoring infrastructure in places like that. The mainstream media certainly never covers those stories. Mr. Koppel's bias was obviously to paint these as efforts that are too little, too late, and ultimately doomed to failure. But again, listening to the people he was interviewing (rather than to him) gave me a feeling of optimism and pride in our service people.
And finally, did anybody notice the segment near the end where he was talking about al-Jazeera and other players in the information war? Koppel was intoning with much gravitas about how focused they are and how they take the long view in this war against the West, with the implication that they are much better at it than we are.
Did the irony ever occur to Mr. Koppel that he and his colleagues are the reason we don't do so well in this arena? If he and others would devote even 20% of their efforts in highlighting the successes of the battles that THEIR own societies are involved in, to balance the constant negative stories that they churn out, we would be much further down the road to ending this war in our favor.
emcgovern: thanks for offering that nuanced critique of the program, and I hope you'll join in some of the other discussion threads here at the Koppel on Discovery forum. We're interested in getting a wider range of views.
It turns out that conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is a big TK fan, too. This is from a transcript of yesterday's broadcast on his web site:
d Koppel: Iraq Pull-Out Would Bring Disaster
March 12, 2007
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, Ted Koppel. He was on Meet the Press yesterday with Tim Russert during the roundtable with Michael Beschloss, noted presidential historian; Michael Duffy of TIME Magazine, and the Washington Post's Dana Priest. Koppel, by the way, is with Discovery. Speaking of Discovery, as you people know, I am a huge aficionado of High Definition Television. I have been watching some of the most amazing programming on Discovery HD, about the migration of birds. The video shots they get are amazing. It's a two-hour show, hour 45 minutes, about birds from all over the world and how they migrate. There was something I watched over the weekend with some of the most amazing photography.
Watching it in high definition, I can't take my eyes away from it. There's nothing political about it. Some of this stuff is from Animal Planet, which, of course, does tend to be these animal rights wackos, but some of this stuff was just fascinating. The photography is wonderful. Anyway, that's where Koppel is working. But he said some things on Meet the Press that you will never hear from anybody else in the Drive-By Media or the Democrat Party. Russert said, “Ted, the meeting in Iraq -- the Iranians, the Syrians, the Iraqis -- what should we think about it?” We can't even agree that we spoke to them. The Iranians and the United States cannot even agree that they had direct talks. When you can't even agree that you've spoken... Anyway here's what Koppel said.
KOPPEL: Everyone is concerned about the United States being in the middle of a civil war inside Iraq. But they forget about the fact that if US troops were to pull out of Iraq, that civil war could become a regional war between Sunnis and Shi'a. The idea of pulling out of there and letting the national civil war extend into a regional civil war is something the United States cannot allow to happen.
RUSH: Stop the presses. Have you ever heard anybody in the Drive-By Media -- well, yes, sort of. We had the audio sound bite from last Thursday where Michael Ware of CNN talked about basically the same thing. If we pull out of there, it will be an utter disaster. But where else do you hear that? You don't hear from the Democrat Party, who's invested in defeat. They're doing their best to get it. They own it, and they want to clamp down. They don't want to even have a mortgage on it, folks. They want to own defeat outright. Ted Koppel said the United States cannot allow this to happen. Now, in this next one you'll hear Russert and Koppel admit that Iraq is part of the war on terror. You don't hear that from the Drive-By Media or the Democrats. They say, "Iraq was unnecessary. It was a diversion from Afghanistan! Why, we should never have gone there. Bush lied, people died," and all that. Russert said, “Ted Koppel, you are tonight airing on the Discovery Channel a special called Our Children's Children's War, the long war, as you call it, called it repeatedly, that this war on terror is much more than just Iraq and it's going to go on for a long time.”
KOPPEL: If you look back at the elements of the war against terrorism, that war was going on and has been going on for the past 24 years. We just didn't connect the dots. Twenty-four years ago, the precursors of Hezbollah blew up the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. That was 1983. Two hundred forty-one Americans were killed. In the interim between then and now, you had two attacks on the World Trade Center. You had the blowing up of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. You had the attempt to blow up the USS Cole. You had the bombing of the two US embassies in east Africa. This war's already been going on for 24 years. We were just a little bit slow to recognize it.
RUSH: Should I pollute this by pointing out that a number of those incidents happened in the nineties, or should I just let this stand on its own? What do you think? The majority of these incidents happened in the 1990s. We just weren't connecting the dots. We weren't taking it seriously. I know Bill Clinton says he was obsessed with bin Laden and he was obsessed with terrorism. In fact, his administration, he said, was telling him he was spending too much time on it. Anyway, you don't hear this in the Drive-By Media. You don't hear this from the Democrat Party. Here we have a couple of Limbaugh echoes in this next bite. Russert said, “Ted Koppel, what do you see in Washington?”
KOPPEL: The Democrats are making a great deal of hay out of saying we have to get out of Iraq, and indeed we do at some point or another, but the notion that the war will be over when we pull out of Iraq, and even after we pull out of Afghanistan? You heard what General Abizaid had to say. It's not going to be over. It's going to be a different war, but the war continues. You know, language means something. You said something a moment ago about it is the Democrats' goal to have all the troops out of Iraq by August of 2008. Sometimes goals are met. Sometimes goals are not met. The Democrats are going to find themselves in a terribly uncomfortable position when this becomes their war.
RUSH: Well, they think they can always make it Bush's war, but he's right on the money. Words mean things; language means things. The Democrats own defeat in this war. Right now that's just not been firmly established in people's minds because Bush remains the focal point as the commander-in-chief. But the Democrats are doing their best -- well, actually, they don't want to own the war. They want Bush to get out of there before they become president. Hillary Clinton even said that she would resent it if Bush doesn't wrap this Iraq thing up by the time she is inaugurated in 2009. I wonder if she'll be similarly upset if Bush didn't wrap up this Iranian thing by then; if he doesn't wrap up the North Korean thing by then; if he doesn't wrap up the Venezuelan thing by then; if he doesn't wrap up the China problems that we have by then. I wonder if she wants a clean slate. I think this is just absurd.
To surge or not to surge, that question is over. The surge is on, despite what some in Congress may want. And guess what? It seems to be working.
I know, I know. Don't speak too soon, John. OK, it may be working. It would be nice if it kept working, too.
What's the evidence? Well, a few writers have been talking about it in the newspapers. Even Ted Koppel spoke up over the weekend saying it didn't look good that some were trying to make hay against the surge and the current effort in Iraq without giving it a chance.
I don't get these accusations of Ted Koppel having "liberal bias." He's always been a conservative of the Brit Hume mold, going back to his days as an ABC News State Department correspondent covering Henry Kissinger, whom he seemed to hold in awe. Koppel's support for the Bush Administration's Iraq surge--which is a Kissinger-influenced policy--is totally consistent with that.
As for the documentary, I think some of Koppel's premise is questionable. He sees the war on terror as starting in 1982 with the Iranian-supported Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. The problem with that view is that is assumes linkage and common goals between the Iranian Shiites and the predominately Arab Sunni extremists such as Al Qaeda. In reality, these two groups have very different ideologies, motivations and goals, even if they sometimes use similar methods. The Sunni extremists want to replace the corrupt authoritarian regimes of their countries with a pan-Arab theocracy, and to get U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia. The Iranians primarily are interested in making their own country the primary regional power in the Middle East. The Sunni Arab extremists hate the Shiite Persians and vice-versa. Viewing these two separate forces as a common enemy is totally wrongheaded.
peacemom: Although I don't disgree with your observations, I do disagree with your conclusions.
I agree that Ted Koppel has shown more integrity than most of his peers in analyzing situations and being willing to express opinions that do not fall in lock-step with prevailing liberal attitudes. But that hardly makes him a conservative, and I cannot see much more in common between him and Brit Hume than that they both have really cool deep voices.
And I agree that we as a society need to have a much better understanding about the forces that oppose us in the Middle East. Yes, we need to understand that they are Persians and they are Arabs, and that they are Shi'ites and they are Sunnis, and that they sometimes hate each other more than they hate us. But I disagree that it is totally "wrongheaded" to view them as a common enemy. They ARE a common enemy, and the distinctions between them are less important now than they were twenty years ago: you now have Iranian (Persian) Shi'ites supporting Arab Sunni terrorists in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. I agree that we owe it to ourselves to understand the distinctions between them (if for no other reason than to better understand how to divide them and conquer them), but if I'm threatened by an IED built by Shi'ites and delivered by Wahhabists, I really don't feel like I'm oversimplifying things too much by considering them a "common enemy". Was it wrongheaded to consider the Japanese and the Germans a common enemy in WW II?
But this is a Koppel "Children's Children's" thread. Although I still consider his bias to be primarily liberal, I will give him credit for acknowledging the reality of the generational struggle we have before us.
Well-put, emcgovern...it's refreshing to see another conservative speak out on this forum.
I think it's hard to figure out exactly where Ted Koppel stands, ideologically. He sensibly admits to the long-term threat of radical Islam, but in interviews, he's criticized the Iraq war for supposedly creating more terrorists (ha!), and he's a bit too hung up about supposed violations of terrorists' civil liberties.
I'm not totally convinced that this conflict has to be "our children's children's war," either. Sure, it could go on for decades--if inaction or a lack of resolve allows the problem to get worse. On the other hand, if we can defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq and crush the Iranian-backed Shiite militias, force the Iranians to abandon their nuclear ambitions (even if it takes a U.S. bombing strike), and then go into Pakistan after Osama bin Laden...we could just about crush radical islam in maybe 3-5 years tops. That is, if we as a nation have the will to do it.
emcgovern: thanks for such a well-reasoned and fair-minded critique of my position. I would disagree, however, with some of the assumptions behind the one-big-enemy approach. It is true that the Iranians have, at times, aligned themselves with non-Shiite, non-Persian players--the Palestinian Sunni group Hamas and the secular Baathist regime in Syria, for example. But they've never been on the same team as the Sunni extremists in Al Qaeda. The Iranians and Al Qaeda have very, very different motivations and objectives, and pose distinctly different sorts of threats to U.S. security. Lumping them together as one common movement is just going to hinder the U.S. from dealing effectively with either of them.
Forums 
