Wordyard

I, along with many others in the blogosphere, picked up on what seemed like a key quote in the New York Times’ story on the new Bush administration strategy document: “The president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago.” This statement was presented in quotes in the Times’ story as if it were part of that document itself.

But as several readers wrote in to point out, it’s not. The Times corrected itself a day later: “The comment… was the writer’s summation of interviews with senior administration officials.” I e-mailed the story’s author, David Sanger, whom I knew a couple of decades ago when we worked together on a student newspaper, to ask what happened, and he said it was a copy editing error — which, from my years in a daily newsroom, I can entirely believe. (Before you copy editors start e-mailing, I assure you that some of my best friends are — or were — copy editors.)

None of this makes the Bush administration’s strategy document any less of an aggressive attempt to rationalize a new American claim to the right of “preemptive” intervention. And key passages in it support Sanger’s interpretive generalization, most notably this one: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” But it’s only fair to set the record straight here.