Moreover, the relationship between official Washington and the permanent Beltway media class has become infinitely closer and more cooperative than ever before. Rather than acting as adversarial to one another, the most powerful political officials in Washington and the most influential media stars are part of the same system and nearly all are abundant beneficiaries of it. Many elite national journalists are incentivized to protect and defend powerful political leaders with whom they so frequently interact and on whom they depend for their access and their “scoops.”
They have come instinctively to believe that Washington officials are intrinsically good people. Journalists live in the same social and socioeconomic circles, and the most powerful Washington figures are thus their colleagues and friends, not their investigative targets. Thus, many journalists have become implacably resistant to the idea that these political leaders are lying about profoundly important matters, let alone engaging in serious or illegal misconduct. Many journalists have come reflexively to believe what their closest government associates say and to refrain from searching for or trying to uncover serious wrongdoing, because they simply do not believe it is there or, if it is there, have no desire or incentive to expose it. Anyone who doubts any of these observations need merely consider the conduct of our national media in reporting on Iraq—not only in the run-up to the Iraq War but for a substantial period of time after the invasion.
Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who covered the Bush White House during the lead-up to the Iraq War and attended the president’s press conferences on behalf of the Times, made one of the most extraordinary—and certainly one of the most revealing—admissions about the media’s prewar failures. After the invasion, Bumiller confessed that she and her colleagues were afraid—afraid—to ask the president questions about the justifications for our invasion of Iraq because they did not want to be too antagonistic:
I think we were very deferential because…it’s live, it’s very intense, it’s frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you’re standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country’s about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.
The image described by Bumiller—national journalists paralyzed by fear, literally afraid to “get into an argument with the president”—seems like one that has prevailed in many countries during many time periods in history—but (with some exceptions) not in America. Yet that is the climate that the president succeeded in imposing on the nation, all by depicting the world in dualistic terms.
Accusations that the media works subversively against America have been a staple of the Bush presidency. Even as late as 2006, the vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and, after complaining about CNN’s broadcast of video showing insurgents shooting at American troops (which Cheney described as “terrorist propaganda”), she demanded to know of Blitzer: “Do you want us to win?” Blitzer thereafter eagerly sought to assure her: “We want the United States to win. We are Americans. There’s no doubt about that.” The attempt to force the media to choose to be “on the side of the Bush administration”—upon pain of being accused of being on the “other side,” i.e., the side of the Evil terrorists—has been an effective weapon in putting the media in a defensive and even compliant posture.
Bumiller’s confession revealed nothing new to anyone observing the behavior of national journalists throughout 2002 and 2003. They treated the president with an uncritical respect so great that it can only be described, without hyperbole, as reverence.
This overwhelming respect for Bush led journalists to renounce their role as adversarial watchdogs over government statements and instead become virtual propaganda arms of the Bush presidency. And it was the media, at times even more effectively than the president himself, that depicted our most complex and challenging foreign policy matters as little more than the trite battles against Bad Guys which one finds in League of Justice cartoons.
No matter how many times one thinks or writes about it, for instance, it never ceases to amaze, or to horrify, that our national media outlets actually disseminated playing cards—playing cards—with pictures of the Bad, Wanted Iraqis underneath their comic book villain nicknames. To this day, one can go to the websites of newspapers and explore the many interactive features of the card deck. Samir Abd Al-Aziz was the four of clubs, Kamal Mustafa Abdallah the Queen of Clubs, and Abid Hamid Mahmud was the Ace of Diamonds (Saddam, of course, was the Ace of Spades). Headlines and articles such as the following, on CNN’s website, were commonplace:
U.S. MILITARY HOLDING DR. GERM, MRS. ANTHRAX
The U.S. military says women are not held at the two prisons named—the notorious Abu Ghraib in Baghdad and Umm Qasr near Basra—cited by the group known as Unification and Jihad but has acknowledged it is holding two female “security prisoners” elsewhere.
They are Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha, a scientist whom some American officials called “Dr. Germ” for helping Iraq make weapons out of anthrax, and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a biological weapons researcher known as “Mrs. Anthrax.”
When the women were seized in May 2003, U.S. officials told CNN they were optimistic that Taha’s apprehension would prove to be extremely significant, given the scope of her work with biological agents.
The article went on to note that Mrs. Anthrax was listed as “the five of hearts in the deck.” It bears repeating that while these playing cards were prepared by the Bush administration, they were disseminated and used as tools to “report” on the situation in Iraq.
The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function. The nation suffered from a profound failure of its journalistic institutions throughout the Bush presidency; a principal cause of that failure has been the intimidating Manichean framework, in which there exists no middle ground between fighting the terrorists on George Bush’s terms or being one of them.
ANTIWAR “RADICALS”
Conventional Beltway wisdom now insists, as established fact, that with respect to the issue of Saddam’s WMDs “everyone” was fooled. We were all—the president included—victimized by bad intelligence. After all, the whole world thought Saddam had WMDs. Who, then, could blame the press or the president for favoring the war? That exculpatory position has become the prevailing orthodoxy of the political and media establishment, which sponsored and urged on this war and now seeks to excuse itself for having done so.
But the claim at the heart of this excuse-making is patently false. There most assuredly were individuals who were not fooled by “bad intelligence.” They questioned the evidence presented as being sketchy and unconvincing, rather than blindly believing the administration’s assertions. Others urged that the U.N. inspection process be allowed to verify the president’s assurances that Saddam possessed WMDs. Moreover, many war opponents emphatically warned that invading Iraq would spawn uncontrollable violence and sectarian warfare, engulf the United States in a protracted and brutal occupation, and weaken the ability of the U.S. military to confront greater threats. They insisted that there was no connection between Saddam and the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and they warned that waging war on Saddam would drain away resources vital to finding and apprehending the actual terrorists. War opponents insisted that there were far more urgent threats to U.S. security than a contained, weakened dictator who had never attacked the U.S., never threatened to attack the U.S., and lacked the capacity to do so.
But those anti-invasion views were barely acknowledged by the mainstream political and journalistic forces that controlled the terms of the prewar “debate,” and when they were acknowledged, it was usually for the pur
pose of mocking and deriding them. Individuals who made such arguments—arguments that turned out to be completely right, as a pure and demonstrable matter of fact—were scorned and demonized by the all-knowing pundit class, by our nation’s media stars, and by the president’s core supporters. Because they opposed the president and his crusade against Evil, individuals urging caution and deliberation were weak and unserious; they were pacifistic, borderline subversive losers who, like the hippies in the generation before them, were not even worth listening to. Saddam was Evil and had to be stopped; and, by definition, no serious person could deny that. Those who did immediately stood revealed as fringe, radical figures who were at least indifferent to threats posed by the terrorists, if not actually on the terrorists’ side.
One of the most prominent—and most pilloried—preinvasion opponents of the war was Howard Dean. Dean is a medical doctor and was the governor of Vermont, having been elected five consecutive times by the citizens of that state. During his ten years governing Vermont, Dean was best known for his extreme frugality with taxpayers’ money and his unyielding refusal to present anything other than a perfectly balanced budget, which is what Vermont enjoyed for his entire governorship. He battled endlessly with the progressives of his state over his relentless budget cutting.
Dean was also one of the most favored political officials of the National Rifle Association due to his steadfast opposition to gun control laws—a view that was grounded in his unusually firm commitment to states’ rights, i.e., if hunters in Vermont want to live without gun control but residents of a state with high urban crime rates (such as New York or California) want such restrictions, the autonomy of both states should be respected. Prior to becoming governor, Dean had a small-town medical practice, and he and his wife raised their two children in the Green Mountain State. Until he exploded onto the national political scene in 2002, Howard Dean had lived as a typical American, and there had been nothing remotely radical about him, his life, or anything he had said or done.
In 2002, Dean witnessed the entire country, the president’s loyal supporters, the national media, and even a sizable bulk of Dean’s own party, sycophantically joining in, or standing meekly by, as the president marched the country to a preemptive, offensive war against a sovereign country that had not attacked us. He saw that there was virtually no opposition to this war march, and almost no questioning of the president’s highly precarious claims. Worse, there was little evident concern for both the foreseeable and unintended consequences of this invasion—a blithe indifference to what a physician would see as “side effects.” As a result, this previously unremarkable doctor and always-mainstream, small-state governor stood up and objected to the uncritical national war dance. And he voiced these objections at a time when very few individuals of any political prominence were doing so.
Because of his questioning of the president’s assertions and his opposition to Bush’s insistence that we attack Iraq—and because his candidacy was consequently opposed to the entire war-supporting Beltway political and media establishment—Dean was immediately depicted as a wild-eyed, fringe radical who was so far “to the left” that he was even outside the mainstream ideological spectrum. Almost overnight, this moderate, completely nonideological figure became demonized—by Republicans, prowar Democrats, and the mindlessly Bush-adoring press—as some sort of unholy, unhinged mix of Ward Churchill, Joan Baez, and Fidel Castro. Dean was the new Abbie Hoffman, a freakish creature whose insanity and emotional instability were matched only by his rabid affection for socialism, Saddam Hussein, and Islamic terrorism. That vilification project proved so potent that even now when Dean has been proven right about virtually every geopolitical issue with respect to Iraq, the stigma persists today and will likely never be expunged from many minds.
The issues Dean raised in defending his objections to the war were of vital importance, yet they were barely discussed. Instead, those highly pragmatic concerns were steamrolled by Manichean depictions of the Evil Nazi-like terrorist dictator about to create mushroom clouds over American cities. Only those who were weak or indifferent to the fate of Americans would oppose invading Iraq. As a result, not only was Dean himself demonized, but the arguments he attempted to make—with the objective of galvanizing a debate that the country needed to have before embarking on such a dangerous war—were utterly distorted, caricatured, then safely ignored.
To review Dean’s speeches against the war is to read, in essence, an almost exact roadmap of what has happened, a predictive list of the now-realized consequences of invading Iraq that have made it one of the worst strategic disasters in our nation’s history. By stark and tragic contrast, those who pilloried Dean (and urged that we start a war with Iraq because of the threats posed by Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax), those who scorned him as an unserious radical who was weak, naïve, and lacking even limited credibility, were wrong about virtually everything they predicted—not only about whether Saddam had WMDs but about the consequences of removing his regime.
As but one example of his prescience, Dean gave a speech at Drake University in February 2003, a month before the invasion, in which he explained why he opposed the president’s imminent decision to invade Iraq. Reviewing that speech, and similar ones, provides an abject lesson in the dangers of replacing free and rational debate with moralistic certainty and borderline-religious reverence for political leaders. Dean explained why he had spoken up:
I am worried that many of the policies the Bush Administration is pursuing today do not provide the best means of defending our interests, and do not reflect the fundamental values of our people…. I would not be doing my job as a citizen if I did not state my own conviction about where I believe we could do better…. The stakes are so high, this is not a time for holding back or sheepishly going along with the herd.
I believe it is my patriotic duty to urge a different path to protecting America’s security: To focus on Al Qaeda, which is an imminent threat, and to use our resources to improve and strengthen the security and safety of our home front and our people while working with the other nations of the world to contain Saddam Hussein.
Had I been a member of the Senate, I would have voted against the resolution that authorized the president to use unilateral force against Iraq—unlike others in that body now seeking the presidency.
Dean was a steadfast supporter of the invasion of Afghanistan. He thus opposed the war on Iraq not because he was opposed to use of the military to defend America, but precisely because invading Iraq would drain our military resources and thus prevent the use of the military to defend against actual, imminent threats. As Dean asked: “What happened to the war against Al Qaeda? Why has this Administration taken us so far off track?”
For Dean, it was never in doubt that Saddam was a brutal, homicidal tyrant. Nobody doubted that. As Dean readily acknowledged: “I agree with President Bush—he has said that Saddam Hussein is evil. And he is. He is a vicious dictator and a documented deceiver.” But many dictators around the world have always been, are now, and always will be brutal, tyrannical, and evil. That Saddam was these things was beyond dispute, but not remotely sufficient to justify starting a war. A whole slew of other considerations—which the president and most of the media systematically ignored—compelled Dean to warn about the dangerous and ill-advised course the country was about to undertake:
As a doctor, I was trained to treat illness, and to examine a variety of options before deciding which to prescribe. I worried about side effects and took the time to see what else might work before proceeding to high-risk measures.
We have been told over and over again what the risks will be if we do not go to war.
We have been told little about what the risks will be if we do go to war.
If we go to war, I certainly hope the Administration’s assumptions are realized, and the conflict is swift, successful and clean.
I certainly hope our armed forces will be welcomed like heroes and liberators in the streets of Bagh
dad.
I certainly hope Iraq emerges from the war stable, united, and democratic.
I certainly hope terrorists around the world conclude it is a mistake to defy America and cease, thereafter, to be terrorists.
It is possible, however, that events could go differently, and that the
Iraqi Republican Guard will not sit out in the desert where they can be destroyed easily from the air. It is possible that Iraq will try to force our troops to fight house to house in the middle of cities—on its turf, not ours—where precision-guided missiles are of little use….
There are other risks.
Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.
Iran and Turkey each have interests in Iraq they will be tempted to protect with or without our approval….
And, perhaps most importantly, there is a very real danger that war in Iraq will fuel the fires of international terror.
Anti-American feelings will surely be inflamed among the misguided who choose to see an assault on Iraq as an attack on Islam, or as a means of controlling Iraqi oil.
And last week’s tape by Osama bin Laden tells us that our enemies will seek relentlessly to transform a war into a tool for inspiring and recruiting more terrorists.
And while it became virtually heretical to question the administration’s WMD warnings once General Colin Powell appeared before the U.N. with his war-justifying slide show, Dean remained insightfully skeptical:
Secretary Powell’s recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope. Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness.
A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency Page 15