Twenty years ago, it was a lonely time in Washington. That is, lonely for anyone—particularly a journalist—who questioned the Bush-Cheney’s administration rush to war in Iraq. I was one such person, doing so in columns and media appearances. In the months prior to the US invasion of Iraq, as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their comrades in and out of government beat the drums for war, only a few reporters and pundits in the capital challenged their argument that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; was tied to al Qaeda, the perpetrators of the horrific 9/11 attack; and posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States that could only be neutralized by full-scale war. In the aftermath of September 11, with patriotism rampant and fear affecting much of the land, few denizens of the commentariat wanted to buck the consensus for war.
I was then the Washington editor for The Nation magazine and no expert on the Middle East. But it was clear that many of the folks pushing the country to war were also no experts on the Middle East and likely would not wage war wisely or manage post-invasion Iraq competently. Consequently, it seemed obvious that an all-out attack on Iraq ought to have been a true last resort. First, the UN weapons inspection teams searching for WMDs should have been permitted to complete their mission. Then, if military action was deemed necessary, limited options or strikes ought to have been considered before a full conquest of Iraq was green-lighted. Short-circuiting the inspections, which had unearthed no significant WMDs or weapons programs, seemed foolish. Moreover, many of the administration’s claims that Saddam was loaded to the gills with WMDs and working covertly with al Qaeda were disputed by experts within and outside the federal government. Even worse, Bush and his crew talked little of their post-invasion plans. One did not have to be an experienced foreign policy professional or military strategist to fret that the war—predicated on contested accusations—could be a disaster.
Yet in post-9/11 Washington, not many pundits or politicians wanted to get in the way of the stampede toward war. (About half of the Democrats in the House and Senate voted for a measure granting Bush the authority to invade Iraq. And many prominent leaders of the liberal intelligentsia were on the side of war.) Most aggravating was that support for the coming war was often based on uncritical acceptance of the administration’s prevailing spin. At one dinner party, a close friend (and a well-known reporter) said there was no choice but to support the pending invasion because maybe Saddam possessed WMDs and opposing the war would brand one as not fully committed to American security. “You’ve got to be for this,” he said.
A few weeks before the invasion, I was doing a radio appearance with another friend who was working for an important newspaper. (He’s now a prominent media figure who has been a passionate foe of Trumpism.) He confided that he was uncertain how to assess the Bush administration’s argument for war. But, he said, since New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was for it, he, too, supported the attack. At the time, Friedman had an odd stance. He believed a war would ignite progressive change throughout the Arab world, though he noted he was “troubled” that Bush was justifying the war by falsely alleging Saddam was allied with al Qaeda. “You don’t take the country to war on the wings of a lie,” Friedman insisted. Nonetheless, this important influencer backed the invasion. I was disheartened to see my friend, a smart fellow and usually an independent thinker, cede his opinion to Friedman. But like many in Washington, he decided that sticking with the herd provided adequate cover.
An aside: Two months into the war, Friedman asserted in an interview with Charlie Rose that the invasion was a necessary response to 9/11, despite the fact that Saddam had nothing to do with that attack: “We needed to go over there basically and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that [terrorism] bubble. And there was only one way to do it…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?…Well, suck on this.’”
Suck on this? That was the level of thought that fueled backing for the war.
In the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003, it was tough to counter the fearmongering, magical thinking, and unsophisticated analysis that drove the cheerleading for war. During the run-up to the invasion, I appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show with Bill Kristol, the godfather of the neoconservative movement and a leading advocate for clobbering Iraq. I pointed out that the WMD inspections in Iraq could be useful in preventing Saddam from reaching the “finish line” in developing nuclear weapons. Kristol responded by exclaiming, “He’s past that finish line! He’s past the finish line!” He was saying that Saddam already had his mitts on a nuclear weapon, bolstering the White House’s assertion that Saddam presented a nuclear threat to the United States.
But Saddam wasn’t past any “finish line.” There was no evidence he possessed nuclear weapons. The UN inspectors had so far found no sign of an Iraqi program to develop them. (Post-invasion reviews confirmed Saddam had not been running a nuclear weapons project.) But in those dreadful months before the invasion of Iraq, the proponents of for war could say anything—and get away with it. The day before we jousted on O’Reilly’s show, Kristol declared that a war in Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.” The pro-war propaganda received precious little scrutiny. Most of the media had abandoned one of the most crucial tools of our profession: skepticism. (See the infamous case of New York Times reporter Judith Miller.)
Humility was also in short supply.The Bushies believed they were smarter than they were. They did not know what they obviously did not know. On the tenth anniversary of the war, I recalled an example:
At one point, I debated David Brooks, then of the Weekly Standard, over the necessity of launching a war against Iraq. He summed up his support for the endeavor by asking: Don’t you believe the people of Iraq desire democracy just as much as we do?
I was surprised by his naiveté. I was no expert on Iraq, but it was obvious to me that invading and possibly occupying a nation half a globe away could end up rather messy, and that a universal craving for democracy might not trump all else. It seemed to me that Brooks was relying on fairy tale analysis, projecting simplistic assumptions onto an extremely complicated situation. (Sunni, Shiite—how many advocates for war knew the difference?) Yet this was all Brooks needed to champion a war that would cost the lives of nearly 4,500 US troops, injure 32,000 service members, and add $3 trillion to the national credit card—and leave millions of Iraqi civilians displaced and more than 100,000 dead.
Actually, the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the years of violence that followed the US invasion has been conservatively estimated as more than 200,000. It could be much higher.
During the pre-invasion period, a senior Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency shared a disturbing story with me. He had recently spoken to a Washington gathering of the top Middle East experts in the US government and non-governmental policy shops. At the end of his talk, he posed a question: With the Bush White House clearly on the road to war, how many of you have been consulted by administration officials? Not one hand went up. His anecdote made clear to me that the people in charge of the war ahead were not serious people.
Top-secret sources were not necessary to question the WMD allegations and other accusations being put forward to grease the path to war by Bush, Cheney, and their top aides, including Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and others. Newspaper accounts did contain reports of government officials and analysts disputing the most dramatic claims pertaining to Iraq’s supposed WMDs and Saddam’s purported links to al Qaeda. But these infrequent stories were usually published deep inside the papers, surrounded by false or unproven accusations. They did not generate attention-grabbing headlines or shape the broadcast television and cable news chatter about the looming war. Pro-war spin subsumed the media, and there were only pockets of pushback. After Colin Powell, then secretary of state, presented the administration’s case for war to the United Nations in a much-covered speech, the Washington Post ran multiple stories inside the paper that cited sources challenging his specific allegations. Yet the front page and other media accounts cast his performance as masterful.
Even though the problems with the case for war were hiding in plain sight, far too few in the political-media world wanted to acknowledge them. One of the most egregious instances of this phenomenon was an article published in the Washington Post on March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion was launched. Written by reporters Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, the piece was headlined, “Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq.” Here is the lead:
As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved—by the United Nations, European governments and even US intelligence reports.
Ponder this. One of the nation’s major media organizations was reporting that the president was guiding the nation to war with unsubstantiated allegations. A BFD, right? So where did this story appear? Buried on page A13. What a journalistic travesty. (Leonard Downie, then the executive editor of the Washington Post, recently wrote a column on how the news media could boost its trustworthiness.) Bush was lying to gin up support for the war, but this was not front-page news.
And, yes, Bush did lie—a conclusion Iraq war advocates have long contested, claiming that Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the gang really, really, really believed Saddam had WMDs and that the pro-war contingent did not purposefully bamboozle the public. This is a phony narrative, as I noted in a recent essay. (Michael Isikoff and I published a book in 2006 called Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the War, which chronicled how the Bush-Cheney White House peddled the war with lies, falsehoods, misrepresentations, and exaggerations. Rachel Maddow produced a documentary based on our book: Hubris: Selling the Iraq War.)
Back to my main point: One did not need to know more about Iraq than the war champions to be skeptical and question the crusade for war. The key reasons for the invasion were dubious, and the post-invasion plan seemed non-existent. Yet dissent was dismissed.
And many, many people died. Chaos and violence wracked the region for years, with effects that continue to this day. But did anyone pay a price for causing this catastrophe? Suffer a consequence? Bush and Cheney—after their allies swift-boated Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign—were reelected. These days, Bush paints pictures of American veterans, nice dogs, and world leaders. He is paid between $100,000 and $175,000 a speech. Rumsfeld and Powell are dead. Rice is a prestigious professor at Stanford University. Ari Fleischer, Bush’s White House press secretary who helped propagate the false case for war, became a (well-paid, I assume) consultant for professional football teams, golfer Tiger Woods, and others. He recently was working for the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Tour. Kristol remains a highly regarded pundit and a leading figure in Never-Trumpland. Brooks is…well, you know.
Am I bitter? Not at all… Okay, that’s a lie. Many of the Iraq war enthusiasts went on to have wonderful careers. Few publicly expressed any signs of remorse or being burdened by their colossal mistake. (Powell was an exception. For years, he appeared to be haunted by his role in the war.) Those who cautioned prudence and warned a war might not be such a swell idea were hardly hailed for getting it right. But history has rendered its verdict. Being correct—especially on a matter of war—can be its own reward. Journalists are supposed to serve the truth, not spread the spin. Too many did not heed this calling in that terrible time.
On Sunday, as many in the media marked the 20th anniversary of the war, MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan tweeted, “Props to @DavidCornDC and @JonathanLanday who, 20 years ago, were among a tiny handful of DC journalists who challenged & questioned the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq. If only more had done so, that vicious and bloody war might have been avoided. #journalismmatters.”
