Guardian correction posted

Thanks to Kevin Murphy for alerting me to the correction that the Guardian has published on their main web page. Here's the text:

Correction
Paul Wolfowitz
A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the department of defence website, "The ... difference 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 sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

I have to wonder, though, if they've noticed (or been alerted) yet to the fact that they had previously published a story with the correct quote? (Sorry, I just find that to be almost comical. Sure, I can understand well how something like that can happen - I'm sure I've probably done similar things myself, and this blog is nowhere near as complicated as a large-scale newspaper, but it still amuses me for some reason. Ah well. Some of us are just more easily amused than others, no?)

Posted by thorswitch at June 5, 2003 12:18 PM | TrackBack