Hey, remember the war in Iraq? The one George W. Bush launched 20 years ago today, based on non-existent “evidence” of Saddam WMDs – a war that killed 4,431 Americans, wounded 31,994 more, and put upwards of 650,000 Iraqis in their graves?
Willful amnesia has likely enabled most Americans to put that catastrophe in the rear-view mirror, and I have no desire to replay the dirty details, except to suggest that anyone who thinks Bush looks good today (at least compared to Trump) would be well advised to bone up on his administration’s track record of deceit during the pre-invasion period. Thanks to our ginned-up war, Iraq today “has a far closer relationship with neighboring Iran than the United States,” according to an Iraq war author, and if we hadn’t stormed into war without even a plan for winning the peace, “many more of the Americans who served there would be healthy and alive today.”
But at this point I’m actually most interested in spotlighting some of the most credulous cheerleaders who helped grease the path to war:
The journalists – editors as well as reporters – who worked for the biggest mainstream media outlets. Especially The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the TV networks. They were supposed to be our watchdogs; instead they were lapdogs who went belly up for the Bush war team.
Why did they fail to hold the war team accountable? Why did they amplify the Bush regime’s bellicose rhetoric and fake intelligence tidbits? Stay tuned for that. But first, some classic samplings from the Hall of Shame:
The New York Times repeatedly hyped the stories authored by Judy Miller, a reporter who helped sell the fiction that Saddam had WMDs; she got her faux-scoops from a guy named Ahmad Chalabi, who was tight with the Bush team. He’d plant a WMD lie in The Times, then veep Dick Cheney would go on Meet The Press and cite The Times story as proof that Saddam had WMDs.
The Times ultimately confessed to its failures, in a lengthy apologia, but not until 2004 when the damage was already done: “We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been….Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the (Bush) claims as new evidence emerged – or failed to emerge…Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors [such as Chalabi] were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.”
The Washington Post was arguably just as remiss. Hawkish Bush statements about Saddam’s so-called “imminent” threat were played on page one; skeptical stories, citing skeptical intelligence sources, were buried. On the eve of war in March ’03, investigative reporter Walter Pincus wrote that, despite Bush’s WMD claims, “U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden.” His story landed on page 17.
A few days later, he and White House correspondent Dana Milbank wrote: “As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged – and in some cases disproved – by the United Nations, European governments, and even U.S. intelligence reports.” Bingo, page 13. Back in the fall of 2002, reporter Thomas Ricks quoted Pentagon officials who were worried that the risks of an invasion were being underestimated. That story never ran.
NBC made a more blatant public decision. On the eve of war, its cable outlet, MSNBC, fired popular talk show host Phil Donahue because he was skeptical on the air about the imminent invasion; according to an internal memo that was leaked to the press, the corporate suits were concerned that Donahue presented, in their words, “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” Meaning, they were worried that someone challenging the war would hurt the ratings. It was more profitable to simply package the Bush spin for viewer consumption.
As for me, I was fortunate at the time to be working for one of the few media companies – Knight Ridder, which no longer exists – that was committed to doing its job. The Washington bureau broke a string of skeptical stories, many of which ran in the KR paper that paid me, The Philadelphia Inquirer. But there was a big hitch: KR didn’t have any papers in New York or Washington, and in that pre-social media era, stories that didn’t run in New York or Washington had little impact. Which was a shame, because here’s one sampling, from October 2002, five months before Bush’s invasion: “A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in Bush’s own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration’s double-time march toward war.”
So much for the canard that the mainstream media is “liberal.” Conservatives 20 years ago chanted the mantra “liberal media” (as they still do today), but the Bush administration knew better. As spokesman Scott McClellan wrote years later, most mainstream Washington journalists were “complicit enablers” who helped “sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it.”
Which brings us to the big question: Why was there such a catastrophic media failure?
The reasons overlap. Particularly inside the Beltway, journalists are often so fearful of being labeled “liberal” that they’ll bend over backwards while covering conservative administrations; the name of the game in Washington is access, and when journalists run seriously afoul of government sources, they risk losing access; and 20 years ago, lest we have forgotten, 9/11 was still fresh in mind – as was the thirst to punish an enemy. The fear of being labeled “liberal” was compounded by the fear of being labeled “anti-American.”
It took the rise of Trump, a quintessential liar and career fraud, to prompt reforms within the mainstream media (albeit in fits and starts). Fact-checking lies is now de rigueur, as is the broad recognition (albeit not a consensus) that bothsides-ism and “balance” are damaging artificial constructs. Here’s hoping that coverage of the next march to war will be vigilant, unlike the shameful performance 20 years ago.