Mainstream journalists who originally supported the Iraq war are more willing now to acknowledge that the media did not do its job in the lead-up to the war.
One of them, author and Newsweek writer and editor Evan Thomas, appeared on a Minnesota Public Radio call-in show last week, mostly to tout his new book on World War II but also to talk about the Iraq war. What he said lays bare the central idea (obsession) that got us into Iraq and keeps the Bush administration from moving out of the quagmire it's become.
When asked about his original support for the war - along with that of other mainstream political commentators like him who became swept up in war fever - Thomas said he felt bad about it. A listener asked why the rout of Afghanistan wasn't enough, since that was the al- Qaida haven. In answering, Thomas told of a conversation with then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on that subject in which Rumsfeld said defeating Afghanistan was too much a police action. It took only "500 troops" and was over quickly.
As far as Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and President Bush were concerned, Afghanistan didn't show that America had the kind of power terrorists needed to see. The administration was obsessed with the notion that America looked "soft" to terrorists, and we needed to "teach [those] guys a lesson." America had to show a "big force" (shock and awe). Why Iraq? Well, war against Iraq was doable. America could take out a brutal dictator with a display of power Islamic extremists wouldn't want to mess with. The most powerful nation on earth would once again have the most powerful image.
In an interview with Vanity Fair published in July 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy Secretary of Defense, said, "The truth is ... we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [for war]." In other words, the Bush administration was not going to be deterred from pre-emptive war in Iraq; our image in the Arab world depended on it. WMD was just the rallying point to get the American people on board. Looking back, it is hard to understand why the mainstream media did not pin down the danger in that reasoning.
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As we move toward a fifth year of the Iraq debacle, the administration's "doable" war has taken the lives of more than 3,000 American soldiers and wounded more than
20,000 others, many with brain injuries, amputations and life-altering conditions. (Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and injured, with more than 30,000 killed in 2006 alone.) We not only don't look more powerful than we did before striking Iraq, we also don't look very smart. In their eagerness to show American power, they must have forgotten the old saw that the best offense is a good defense, because Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and their neo-con cabal set out to scare Islamic fundamentalist terrorists with a big display of firepower in a country at the time that didn't have them, never seriously considering that in 2007 we would be stuck in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't mess.
Treating the 2006 election results as inconsequential and shrugging off the recommendations of the bipartisan, Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Committee, the administration now wants to lob a "hail Mary pass" of
21,500 more troops into the fray. As the nation collectively grimaces, the only glimmer of hope is that Congress and the American people no longer will put up with more of the same. There's no question that a realistic plan for ending the Iraq War must come from outside the administration, because to get out, America has to face the unpleasant truth of the way we got in - something the Bush administration won't do.
They can't get past image to deal with reality.
Ahlin teaches English as an adjunct faculty member at Minnesota State University Moorhead and is a regular contributor to The Forum's commentary pages. E-mail janeahlin@yahoo.com
