You can tell how embarrassed the United States is by each of its wars by the anniversary coverage. The attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent U.S. entry into World War II is still the stuff of flag-waving cable pieces 80 years later; you won't see Gulf of Tonkin memorials when August 2 rolls around. It's now the 20th anniversary of the United States launching the Iraq War, and the nation's Most Important People are all keeping pretty damn mum about that. This evidently isn't one of those anniversaries the powers that be want us to pay too much attention to.
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The New York Times has a brief reminisce examining, literally, "Why Did the U.S. Invade?" That there's still no solid answer for that two decades later is indictment enough of the vapidity with which the nation's elites decided a new campaign of mass murder was needed; the shortest answer was that Republican neoconservatives had been itching to send American troops out to enforce a new world order in which the United States was the only superpower and any smaller nations that didn't like it would get a campaign of overwhelming American military force deployed against them specifically for the purposes of demonstrating, to similar nations, what would happen to them if they got too uppity about it.
The Bush administration staffed itself with conservative hardliners who believed strongly in good war, and when a less satisfying war was delivered to America's doorstep in the form of the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon, those hardliners responded with the bold, supposedly world-shaping war they wanted to fight, rather than the pissant little war Afghanistan's hidden terrorists could provide. There you go, sport, there's the "why." Nobody really disagrees with this assessment; the only arguments are about the nuances of how they got from point A to point B, and whether the rank, grotesque dishonesty used by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and others amounted to intentional acts of disinformation or were instead convenient self-delusions.
What the Times pointedly ignores in its musings is, as always, the role of the damn Times in making sure the war happened whether it was justified or not. The Iraq War was not a war sold to the public by the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. It was sold to the public through a persistent media campaign in which the Times and other papers hyped each of the dodgy justifications one after the next while belittling those who questioned it. The Iraq War was a pundits' war. It would not have happened had America's news media, as in nearly all of it, attached itself to the war campaign and itself led the charge accusing war skeptics of naivety at best, and a lack of patriotism at worst.
For all the mewling that comes from the press when they are asked to take sides on questions like "is an attempted coup a bad thing" or "should presidents be able to commit acts of international extortion" or "are the promotion of false claims intended to undermine faith in democracy inherently anti-democratic?" they took sides hard when it came to declaring that it was time for a war and the "evidence" for that war could be sorted out later.
There were no real disputes here, among the pundit class. The evidence Did. Not. Matter.
A primary media tool of enforcing war support was the incessant claim that only pro-war opinions could be considered serious. Anti-war protests were simply dismissed as rabble-rousing by a far-left fringe; the nation's supposed center-left, on the other hand, was used as the dividing line between serious and unserious opinions. You could be a pro-war vaguely leftish centrist, you could be a neoconservative hawk frothing for a new American empire, or anything between.
And that was it. That was the entire acceptable range. It did not matter whether you had your own little pundit show on a vaguely-pretendishly-left media network; if you expressed skepticism about Bush administration claims, you were out.
It was The New York Times that did that gatekeeping. It was the Times and other outlets that spelled out the case for war—one that was itself impatient with examinations of the actual evidence to instead declare that a new and benevolent "global hegemony" was at hand, and all America needed to do to get it was to bomb and kill until its detractors saw the light.
This logic is indistinguishable from the neoconservative version; there is no daylight. The United States, in a post-9/11 fury that could not be sated by Donald Rumsfeld's drab little Afghanistan skirmishes, would bomb the Middle East into an America-backing peace. That was the logic of the war not just among the hard-hard-right Nixonites still fuming over Vietnam not working out that way, but among the great thinkers of the press tasked, by themselves, with newsplaining the war to a public that news executives, by themselves, insisted had no appetite for alternative theories.
You could be a bomb-them-all hawk or a "reluctant" hawk, but you had to be one of the two to get column space.
Let's not bicker about whether all this talk of inspectors and aluminum tubes was true or false or a mirage, said the editors of the papers meant to inform us. We can all generally agree that there's no good reason not to launch a war.
Over, and over, and over. You were either convinced of the war's merits, or you were on "the left," which was inherently an unpatriotic place to be.
Thomas Friedman was the Iraq War's patron saint, and he used his New York Times perch to parrot the neoconservative dream of American hegemony, note for note.
This column has argued throughout this debate that removing Saddam Hussein and helping Iraq replace his regime with a decent, accountable government that can serve as a model in the Middle East is worth doing -- not because Iraq threatens us with its weapons, but because we are threatened by a collection of failing Arab-Muslim states, which churn out way too many young people who feel humiliated, voiceless and left behind.
Who cares about nuclear inspectors or tittering about unseen weapons of mass destruction; we must invade Iraq so that we can install a "model" government for the other boors of the Middle East to copy.
The president's view is that in the absence of a U.N. endorsement, this war will become ''self-legitimating'' when the world sees most Iraqis greet U.S. troops as liberators. I think there is a good chance that will play out.
A cartoon. The arguments for the war amounted to little more than a cartoon playing inside pundit heads.
[W]e must bear any burden and pay any price to make Iraq into the sort of state that fair-minded people across the world will see and say: ''You did good. You lived up to America's promise.''
And "we" attempted to do it by dropping the neoconservative equivalent of a student council into the "liberated" nation, then throwing up our hands when amateur-hour conservatism fell on its face with a meatier thwap than even its think-tank grandfathers could pull off.
And then the Middle East erupted in a new series of wars, and then we studiously started ignoring all of it because it was getting very awkward, and then at some point Donald Trump, a seditionist, assembled the last pathetic dregs of the "greet us as liberators" crowd and they all started stamping their feet impatiently for an opportunity to give Iran the shock-and-awe drubbing that would see us greeted as double-plus liberators, at long last bombing our way to world peace and proving the last generation of conservative Vietnam War draft dodgers to have been Right All Along, This Time For Sure.
The lesson of the Iraq War, twenty years later, is that there is no lesson. It is not allowed to have a lesson; if you stumble across one, you can be absolutely certain that The New York Times will come to your door to break your kneecaps and tell you no such thing happened.
There has been no public accounting for the political press' willingness to act as shills for pre-planned ideological hoaxes. None. Instead there has been an increasing apathy to the truth, with political "journalists" and pundits alike brushing aside the truth or falsity of political claims in favor of simply rattling those claims off, unendingly, with attached analysis of how effective the falsehoods might be in swaying the political base they are aimed at.
That is why the press now cannot muster an opinion on grotesque acts of corruption or come to its own conclusion on the fitness of Donald Trump, orchestrator of an attempted coup, to hold future public office. It is why the political press curdled when it came time to refute obvious Republican lies about Trump's election loss, unwilling to state with any certainty that the Republican Party was, in fact, engaging in overt acts of propaganda for the purposes of delegitimizing that loss.
There has been no press accounting that explains why, throughout recent years, Rudy Giuliani and other Republican hacks could so effortlessly disseminate mountains of cheap conspiracies, even as those conspiracies escalated from obscure claims backing Russian oligarchs to more pointed ones aimed at democracy itself. We all know why conservative outlets have eagerly pushed such disinformation. We have yet to hear why the Times and other supposed neutral watchdogs find it quite beyond their skills to assert that spreading disinformation is inherently corrupt. It would be taking sides, we are told. Can't do that.
Correction: Can't take sides unless we feel like it.
Indeed, the message of the Times and other national press outlets has been that disinformation is legitimate, so long as it is political. It exists outside of its own truth or falsehood, and must be analyzed only as such.
There has been some attempt to account for the new brazenness of political lies, mind you. After the Iraq War, there was a new press push for "fact-checking" columns. The premise was to brush the questions of whether a political claim was true or was false off, off over there, under the purview of an entirely different department so that that political reporters would not have to themselves challenge the falsehoods. The task could be done elsewhere, by individuals who did not need to cultivate sources or probe for hallway quotes and who therefore would not suffer from retaliatory shunning for piping up to tell the public that no, actually, a particular politician was spouting fictions invented to deceive them.
As has now been seen, this solved the problem forever. If you want to know whether you are being lied to, do not look to section A of your preferred newspaper. Do not ask Wolf Blitzer to clue you in. All of that can be found elsewhere, and you are perfectly free to try to find it if you are that sort of person.
Mostly, though, there has been no public accounting for the consequences of being wrong. Not a little wrong, as all pundits and politicians are from time to time, but the sort of preening, violent, intentional wrong that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths. There are no consequences for starting a war based on false pretenses. There are no consequences for carrying out that war with stumbling incompetence in service to ideological pipe dreams. There are no consequences for lying to the American public, good and hard and blood-spattered, about matters of war, or of peace, or of catastrophe, or public health, or to spur the first violent rebellion against our government since the Civil War.
Not a stitch, because the New York Times and other outlets have deemed it not in their interests to categorize dishonest arguments as dishonest. Attaching penalties to fraud would scrub us of half or more of our discourse; what would happen to the papers? Who would staff the talk shows?
Crooked speech and flat-out lies are so enmeshed into the American political discourse that the current press could not stomach doing without them. Who would the Sunday talk shows invite, if lying to the public was deemed consequential enough to disinvite them? If you can't get a quote from Jim Jordan breaking the foundations of reality on any given day, is there any point to being on Capitol Hill in the first place?
The lesson of the Iraq War is that the "political" press considers itself part and parcel of Washington, D.C.'s ideological debates. Not as a watchdog policing the bounds of such claims, but as explainers willing to chew, digest, and regurgitate the claims to the public in a hundred different columns analyzing who will Win or Lose if they gain traction. The press is neoconservative when convenient. The press is for the underdog when Republicans are out of power, and institutionalists when Republicans are in power, and powerful when a right-wing provocateur writes a book of exciting but unproven claims, and powerless when a right-wing president lies to the nation, over and over again, with such utter contempt for the facts that his own private circle questions his fitness for office.
There are no fact-checkers in the political press. That job has been outsourced. The duty of the pundits of the Times and the other papers is to get quotes, and analyze the quotes, and burble to each other about the wisdom of the quotes. Perhaps the next bloody war will spell good news for those who advocated for it; perhaps the next war's Thomas Friedman will botch things so terribly that his next book advance will have a 5 where a 6 should be.
Perhaps it will not matter, because the bill for two generations of blatant political lies about pollution and climate is now coming due, with not one of those eager liars facing the consequences for a global catastrophe no comic book villain would have a chance of pulling off. That, too, is the lesson. If you consider government-backed lying to the public to be inconsequential—a mere trick of phrase, intended more for decoration than consumption—then there was no free press to begin with. The door of the cage was always open, but none in the political press could stomach a life in the wild.
You know about the DSCC and DCCC, but have you heard of DASS? You'll want to! We're talking with Kim Rogers, the executive director of the not-especially-well-known but crucially important Democratic Association of Secretaries of State on this edition of The Downballot.
Rogers explains how her organization helps recruit candidates, deploy resources, and win races for secretary of state across the country—and why these elections operate so differently from many others. She also tells us about what Democratic secretaries are doing to fight disinformation and expand voting rights, and the most bonkers thing she heard come out of the mouth of a 2022 election denier.