April 10, 2013

Various observations marked the tenth anniversary, last month, of the beginning of the Iraq war, including a few qualified recantations. For example, in The Washington Post, David Ignatius offered a limited mea culpa:

Ten years ago this week, I was covering the U.S. military as it began its assault on Iraq. As I read back now over my clips, I see a few useful warnings about the difficulties ahead. But I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense.

However, in determining whether the war "made sense" he turned to secondary issues including, rather bizarrely, that the country "didn’t have the stomach for a protracted war that President George W. Bush couldn’t explain and the public didn’t understand." Bush couldn’t explain it, nor could Ignatius, because the war was, in concept as well as execution, wrong.

Another form of limited reappraisal came from Paul Farhi, who "covers the news media" for the Post, under the revealingly evasive headline "On Iraq, journalists didn’t fail. They just didn’t succeed." There were some skeptical stories, he said, which is true, but "[s]ome of these stories — too many — were not given prominence and, in the case of newspapers, didn’t make the front page." However, "it wasn’t impossible for skeptics of the war to connect the dots." Again true, but there’s the rub: in his view, it was up to the rest of us to see through the false rationales and criticize the war because the Post didn’t have the wit or courage to do so. Why? According to him it was because of "Congress’s unwillingness to stand up to the president . . . . There were no hearings that could have featured skeptical government experts disputing the official line." Also true, but is Congress’ cowardice an excuse? Apparently so; he quotes Leonard Downie Jr., the Post’s executive editor at the time: "Downie believes that no amount of media skepticism would have stopped the administration. ‘We were going to war,’ he said." It’s going to happen; why fight it? What a stirring slogan; for this we have freedom of the press?

Howard Fineman, on Huffington Post , offered this:

It began with fear and, for some journalists including me, misguided patriotism. Washington and New York, the centers of the American media, had been attacked on 9/11. We all knew, or knew of, people who had been killed. We had only one president, and as incurious and unprepared as he was, there was a natural desire to see him somehow grow in office to meet the moment.

The last comment is a variation on rallying-around, which certainly was one of the factors creating support for an illegitimately selected president of obviously limited ability. It doesn’t, though, explain the easy acceptance of the administration’s dubious arguments in favor of invading Iraq, especially as eighteen months elapsed between 9-11 and that event. Fineman noted, but did not explain, the failure: "Of course for journalists, the most patriotic thing we can do is our jobs — which meant that we all should have doubled down on skepticism and tough questions. Some did. I wish I could say that I was one of them."

"Fear" in the first sentence seems to refer to the shock of the 9-11 attacks and the concern that more might follow. However, another sort of fear affected some, as pointed out by Chris Hedges: "The war boosters, especially the ‘liberal hawks’ . . . did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer."[39] By contrast, supporting the war had no price: Media Matters quoted pro-war statements by various pundits and noted that most of them, despite being so wrong, haven’t recanted and all still have platforms from which to offer up opinions to further mislead us.[40]

It may be too much to expect that national policy would be altered significantly by the fact that the Iraq war was unnecessary, unjustified, wasteful of lives and money, and just plain stupid. In part because coverage and commentary by the news media on the invasion of Iraq were so pro-war, the public does not even now appreciate just how wrong and disastrous it was.

Our problems did not end with the withdrawal from Iraq or the end of the term of G. W. Bush. The presidency has become even more imperial since Arthur Schlesinger so dubbed it in 1973. Congress, so assertive and conservative in domestic matters, has become passive on matters of war and peace, content to let the president wage war at will. Fears about national security, whether sound, exaggerated or imaginary, lead to extreme actions almost by default. In addition to fear, there’s the irresistible drive to be tough. As Seymour Hersh put it in The New Yorker, "Nothing succeeds in Washington like being tougher than the next guy. And woe to those who express doubt." His comment referred not only to Iraq but to the Obama administration’s policy of assassination by drone. There has been little adverse comment about that, even though American citizens are, contrary to the Constitution, included in the targets. We had secret memos authorizing torture; now we have secret memos authorizing remote-control killing.

As Hersh said, "Vietnam. And Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have a lot of anniversaries to forget." As with economics, so with war: we never seem to learn.

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39. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_treason_of_the_intellectuals_20130331/

40. http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/03/19/where-are-the-medias-iraq-war-boosters-10-years/193117