Blame the Media for the Iraq Trap

Four thousand dead U.S. Military Personnel in Iraq, another milestone. The parents and other loved ones of number 3999 couldn’t care less.

The only honest reporting on television anymore, Frontline produced by WGBH in Boston, is doing a report on the deception that led to the war. They are only touching on what I think is the most important issue in the war, the lack of serious questioning by the media in the ramp-up to the war.

At the time, starting just after 9/11/01, I was back at CNN as a Senior International Editor at CNN, on a freelance, day-to-day basis, that wound up being a 2 1/2 year stint. I know of what I write.

Senior management wanted the war, “to win back lost ratings.” That is a quote from a speech that was mandatory for all employees held by the top two executives at the network. As I say, it was mandatory. This is no secret. Ask anyone who worked there at the time.

Sometime after I left CNN, which means after July 2004, I took part in a forum at The Southern Center for International Studies about the war in Iraq. The guests were Eason Jordan, my old colleague and boss, one of those presiding at that mandatory meeting, and Christopher Dickey, Mideast Regional Editor of Newseek. I asked them at the time whether the media had done their job as the fourth estate in the ramp-up to the war. Dickey said, “We were in a situation where you are either with us or with the terrorists” which caused the media to not question the evidence. Jordan said, “If you’re asking whether we asked enough questions, the answer is no.”

I was there, we didn’t question: the aluminum tubes, why Bush attributed the later debunked Niger Yellow cake claim to the Brits in his State of the Union Speech, how mobile labs could be used for both chemical and biological weapons which are two completely different processes, that Iraqi senior officers didn’t know a secure line from an unsecured line when discussing the movement of trucks that the Administration claimed were so important, carpetbaggers like Ahmed Chalabi, the drunk “Curveball,” or the notion of “a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Hell, we didn’t even question any of those after the fact.

So now we are led to believe that we are faced with a choice, Democratic Presidential Candidates who say they will pull out of Iraq, though their rhetoric is softening of late, and the Republican Senator John McCain, who confuses Iranian influence with Al Qaeda and is corrected by another carpetbagger, Senator Joe Lieberman. But is this really a choice? Will the Dems be able to do what they used to promise and from which they are ever so slowly pushing back? You think that the Foreign Affairs advisor to Senator Obama had to quit just because she said that Hillary Clinton is a monster? In the same interview she revealed that Senator Obama would not be able to follow through with his promise to pull out of Iraq, the centerpiece of his campaign. What else does he have to differentiate himself from Senator Clinton?

The media should be like a sentry dog, in the K9 Corps, looking for traps along the path on which the nation is walking. We did not do our job sniffing out this trap, the trap laid on 9/11/01. We let our nation step into a bear trap and now our choices, since we are alone on the path, are to either stay in the trap and die, or gnaw our foot off to get out, in which case we will bleed to death in the aftermath. There is no election choice that will save us from it. I’ve worked in it for 28 years and have heard it throughout, but this time it is true. Blame the media. Like a house on Palm Beach, the Fourth Estate has been sold and it has indeed, as Thomas Jefferson understood, led to our downfall.