This appears to be the case, but the Times’s collective sins of incompetence and credulity were also Miller’s sins. Instead of retaining the Duke of Wellington as counsel, Miller wishes always to apologise and explain. Her defence is a sustained plea of diminished responsibility. Her parents’ divorce made her susceptible to seduction by influential older men, especially those bearing career-enhancing gifts. She was never trained as an investigative journalist: the Times hired her in order to dodge an affirmative action lawsuit, and let her learn on the job. Steven Engelberg, the superior who had restrained her overstatements, took another position, forcing her to write her own articles. She never spoke with “Curveball”, the source of the mobile germ lab story. She would have investigated the aluminium tubes, had her father not distracted her by dying. The Iraqis “behaved like they had weapons”, and the “intelligence assessments” believed them. She was only following the story.
Yet Miller does not follow her own story. Her accurate articles are footnoted, with links so that we can admire them online. But her Iraqi WMD stories receive neither footnotes nor links. Having handicapped the reader, she exculpates herself by lawyerly quibbling over details that cannot be checked; so much for the legal spirit. Not that Miller is good on details. Her claim to have been “present at the creation” of the anti-American jihad in Beirut insults the hostages taken at the American embassy in Tehran.
Miller’s defence proves the prosecution’s case. The injustice lies not in the conviction, but in the sentence: Miller was no worse than her colleagues, and her editors shot an unpopular messenger. Miller tells that story — she buries her hatchets in the back, not the ground — but she misses its meaning. The real “story” here is not Miller, but the machinery of her rise and fall: an easy, corrupt collusion between anonymous politicians, eager journalists, and desperate editors.
The empty grandeur of the Times’s staff resembles that of estate agents who, familiar with desirable properties, assume the airs of owners. Miller was part of that vanity. She mourns the glory days of the open expense account and the closed shop: before the “pernicious” bloggers took over, the Ritz Carlton in Washington, DC embroidered her initials on its pillows. Proudly, she relates how, over dinner, she and her husband, the publisher Jason Epstein, convinced President Bush’s adviser Philip Zelikow that W.W. Norton would be the ideal imprint to publish The 9/11 Report. She seems not to understand that this scene might, like her Iraq reportage, exemplify the decay of public life.
“I don’t blame myself,” Noah Cross says in Chinatown. “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING.” The Iraq disaster has incapacitated America. Four years after President Obama promised that “the tide of war is receding”, he is up to his ankles in Iraq, and in over his head with Iran. The “pivot to Asia” sank in the sand, and the blood-dimmed tide is rising. Intelligence, faulty or otherwise, is still in short supply. The story must finish before it can be written, and who now expects a happy ending?
