Las Vegas Review-Journal

Iraq war anniversar­y marks colossal failure of mainstream media

- Robin Abcarian Robin Abcarian is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, toppling the despot Saddam Hussein and fomenting a kind of hell that Iraq is still grappling with today.

Twenty years ago, this country’s mainstream media — with one notable exception — bought into phony Bush administra­tion claims about Saddam’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destructio­n, helping cheerlead our nation into a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The war — along with criminally poor postwar planning on the part of Bush administra­tion officials — also unleashed horrible sectarian strife, led to the emergence of ISIS and displaced more than 1 million Iraqis.

That sad chapter in American history produced its share of jingoistic buzzwords and phrases including a cheesy but terrifying refrain, repeated ad nauseam by Bush administra­tion officials such as then-national Security Adviser Condoleezz­a Rice: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” (The memorable metaphor was dreamed up by the late Michael Gerson, a Bush speechwrit­er at the time.)

Of course, there was never any smoking gun, mushroom-shaped or not.

Those stockpiles of weapons of mass destructio­n had been destroyed in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait and was beaten back by a coalition of 35 countries led by the United States. The United Nations Security Council had also required Iraq to end its biological and nuclear weapons programs.

This is not to say that Saddam was a defanged tiger; he was not.

But neither was he the threat he was portrayed to be. Misleading a public that had been shaken to its core by the 9/11 terrorist attacks turned out to be a relatively easy task for the warmongeri­ng neocons of the Bush administra­tion. They foolishly believed they could impose democracy on a nation with no history of it.

Bush officials also manufactur­ed phony links between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks orchestrat­ed by Islamist militant Osama bin Laden and his terrorist group al-qaida. To his lasting mortificat­ion, the late Secretary of State Colin Powell assured the world in a speech to the United Nations just before the invasion that the war was completely justified by the danger Iraq posed to the world.

“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” Powell said. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusion­s based on solid intelligen­ce.” His statements, he later acknowledg­ed, were patently false, many of which were provided to U.S. intelligen­ce by unreliable sources — exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi opposition leader who dreamed of ousting Saddam and taking the reins of power in Iraq.

Powell’s statements are among those documented in 2008 by the Center for Public Integrity, which compiled the hundreds of lies told by Bush and his top officials as part of a campaign aimed at persuading the American public to support the invasion “under decidedly false pretenses.”

Most of the media, said the center, “was largely complicit in its uncritical coverage of the reasons for going to war.” There was a glaring exception to that complicity. Three reporters and an editor in Knight-ridder’s Washington bureau were alone among the major news organizati­ons in questionin­g the administra­tion’s narrative about WMDS. Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and Joe Galloway, with their editor John Walcott, threw water on so much of what the mainstream media was reporting. The drama was captured in “Shock and Awe,” a 2017 feature film by Rob Reiner, who plays Walcott.

In 2013, on the 10th anniversar­y of the invasion, Walcott told me his team was driven by skepticism, journalism’s most precious resource.

“Most of the administra­tion’s case for that war made absolutely no sense, specifical­ly the notion that Saddam Hussein was allied with Osama bin Laden. A secular Arab dictator allied with a radical Islamist whose goal was to overthrow secular dictators and reestablis­h his caliphate? The more we examined it, the more it stank.”

Knight-ridder turned out story after story undercutti­ng the administra­tion’s (and the New York Times’, Washington Post’s and Los Angeles Times’) version of Saddam’s capabiliti­es. Some of Knight-ridder’s own newspapers — among them, the Philadelph­ia Inquirer — refused to run the stories, for fear of being contradict­ed, especially by The New York Times, which explained its credulous coverage of the WMD issue about 15 months after the invasion.

“It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq,” wrote Times editors, “but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administra­tion, were taken in.”

Of course, there was robust opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the U.S. and around the world, though in the first few months of the conflict, a majority of Americans polled were supportive.

It did not take long for disenchant­ment to set in. After all, where were all those Iraqis that Vice President Dick Cheney had promised would greet American soldiers as “liberators”?

Cheney has never apologized for his role in the Iraqi blunder (as far as I can tell, he is still defending it). Neither has Bush, although he recently, if accidental­ly, admitted the truth.

In a speech last May at the Bush Presidenti­al Center in Dallas, he said it was “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustifie­d and brutal invasion of Iraq, I mean, Ukraine.”

He winced, then almost under his breath, added: “Iraq too.”

 ?? PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS / ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE (2007) ?? President George W. Bush, center, and members of his staff participat­e in a video teleconfer­ence July 13,2007, in the Roosevelt Room in the White House. From left are White House Counselor Ed Gillespie, Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezz­a Rice, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS / ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE (2007) President George W. Bush, center, and members of his staff participat­e in a video teleconfer­ence July 13,2007, in the Roosevelt Room in the White House. From left are White House Counselor Ed Gillespie, Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezz­a Rice, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

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