Where is the media mea culpa post Chilcot?
The ignominious role many western journalists played in building a case for war in Iraq — worthy of two of the three little pigs — remains among the unfinished reckoning of that catastrophic conflict.
Stop for a moment and ask yourself this question: Have you read a word penned by Canada’s “keyboard cavalry” concerning the scathing vivisection delivered by Sir John Chilcot on July 6 about every one of their now discredited “rationales” for launching the war?
Like me, I suspect you haven’t encountered a syllable of regret, repentance or introspection lately from the once giddy brigade of war cheerleaders, who reassured themselves and Canadians that the invasion would be a smashing military, geopolitical and humanitarian success for “liberated” Iraqis and the Middle East.
Turns out, Iraq has been smashed into pieces all right, along with the lives of countless Iraqis, who are still paying an almost incomprehensible price for the disastrous miscalculations of an unrepentant band of cocky journalists who, from the comfort of their desks far from Baghdad, joined in the premature, and, ultimately, fictitious Mission Accomplished chorus.
Indeed, by my count, it’s now approaching 20 days since the writers who once derided former prime minister Jean Chrétien with such pious sanctimony for rebuffing membership in the coalition of gullible have, in large measure, stayed strangely mute in the stubborn face of Chilcot’s exhaustive indictment. His official report on Britain’s involvement into the Iraq War not took to task former British prime minister Tony Blair, but, by extension, the very pundits who sided with the equally unrepentant architect of the invasion.
Before revisiting some of the more egregious examples of their inept prognostications, it’s important to encapsulate Chilcot’s key findings for necessary context.
First, Blair chose to invade Iraq before peaceful, diplomatic avenues had been exhausted. From the start, the British prime minister exaggerated the threat constituted by Saddam Hussein to western interests and regional security. Chilcot concluded Hussein posed no immediate threat and the so-called “intelligence” gathered by Britain’s spies about the Iraqi leader’s weapons of mass destruction capability was “flawed.” That’s diplomatic code for “crap.”
Supremely confident of the righteousness of his cause, Blair dismissed warnings about the violent religious fissures that would be unleashed in post-invasion Iraq. As if to compound this blind certainty, Chilcot found Blair had no strategy to deal with the post-invasion chaos and violence. The resulting political and security vacuum, Chilcot reported, helped spawn the murderous malignancy Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
As we know, a cautious Chrétien heeded those warnings and wisely decided against injecting Canada into a perpetual war in Iraq. Still, on the eve of the invasion, one marquee member of Canada’s punditocracy upbraided Chrétien and Canadians for their timidity in the face of what he described as the “Iraq crisis” in early 2003.
“Citizens of other countries may wish their nation to stand for something in the world,” the columnist wrote. “But Canada long ago abjured such a role, neither contributing our fair share to the collective defence nor even lending our allies much in the way of moral support. Instead we reinvented ourselves as honest brokers . . . because it saved us from ever having to take a position on anything.”
So, in not following Blair’s reckless lead, Canada had not only become “irrelevant,” but also failed to “contribute its fair share” morally and militarily to the Blair/Bush project.
Lost in all the anguished hyperbole was the wisdom of knowing that governing shrewdly sometimes means not doing something rash when circumstances seem to demand it.
Not done scolding the nation, the same columnists later wrote a column “rebutting” 12 arguments offered up by the war’s opponents.
In dealing, for instance, with the feared “incalculable risks,” he wrote: “It is not at all clear that the region would be destabilized by a quick and decisive war.” As for the prediction that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would perish: “There is no basis to these forecasts. No one can say with certainty how many will die, on either side,” he insisted.
Well, the region has been destabilized — to put it charitably — and millions of Iraqis have been killed, maimed or become wandering refugees. (Chilcot also deals emphatically with the other, equally laughable “rebuttals.”)
Given the scale of these howlers, you’d think such journalists would be disqualified from offering strategic advice to anyone, about anything. Wrong. See, that’s the beauty of a pundit’s rear view mirror: Objects that previously appeared close, invariably and conveniently fade into the distance and from memory.