The Editorial Pages and the Case for War

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/2/mooney-war.asp

The Editorial Pages and the Case for War
Did Our Leading Newspapers Set Too Low a Bar for a Preemptive Attack?

BY CHRIS MOONEY

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now
infamous presentation to the United Nations concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons
of mass destruction and its ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. At the
time, many journalists, members of Congress, and key Security Council nations
remained unconvinced of the necessity of invading Iraq. Laced with
declassified satellite imagery, communications intercepts, and information
gleaned from Iraqi defectors, Powell’s speech sought to bolster the Bush
administration’s case for war by demonstrating an “accumulation of facts and
disturbing patterns of behavior” on Iraq’s part. And it enjoyed a strikingly
warm reception from one key U.S. audience: the editorial page writers of major
newspapers.

“Irrefutable,” declared The Washington Post. Powell “may not have produced a
‘smoking gun,’” added The New York Times, but his speech left “little question
that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one.” Similar assessments came from
four other editorial pages that cjr chose to examine — the Chicago Tribune,
the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. Many foreign
papers viewed Powell’s presentation more skeptically, but the endorsements
from these six leading domestic editorial boards — four of which would
ultimately support the war — strengthened Bush’s hand considerably. “If and
when the administration gets editorial support from the elite media, it’s just
about a done deal, because the public will fall in line,” says David Domke, a
professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle who has
studied editorial page response to 9/11 and the Iraq war.

At the time of Powell’s speech, Bush’s casus belli — it has since changed
considerably — centered on the danger Iraq posed to the United States with its
supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, its quest to build a
nuclear weapon, and the possibility that Saddam Hussein might transfer any of
these arms to anti-American terrorists. In his 2003 State of the Union speech,
Bush directly linked Iraq and the war on terror, asking Americans to “imagine
those nineteen hijackers with other weapons and other plans — this time armed
by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped
into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.”

Powell sought to intensify this sense of imminent threat, while also rubbing
the UN’s nose in Iraq’s history of thwarting weapons inspections. And by
faithfully refracting his message, major U.S. editorial pages conditioned
themselves to treat Bush’s national security argument with deference during
the days leading up to war. Even the antiwar New York Times based its
opposition primarily on Bush’s go-it-alone mentality, while largely accepting
the weapons of mass destruction case and, at least at times, the president’s
good intentions. “It’s not surprising that in the wake of September 11, the
president would want to make the world safer, and that one of his top
priorities would be eliminating Iraq’s ability to create biological, chemical
and nuclear weapons,” wrote the Times on February 23, 2003. Fear itself
reinforced this framing: during the run-up to war the nation fretted through
an orange alert and citizens were urged to purchase duct tape for protection
against a chemical attack.

Hindsight can be 20/20. These editors could hardly have known that Colin
Powell would stake his reputation on flimsy evidence, that the U.S. would fail
to find biological and chemical weapons in Iraq or any evidence of an active
nuclear program, or that the war and its chaotic aftermath would cost more
than five hundred U.S. lives (and rising). Still, there may be no higher duty
for an editorial page than to set a high bar for war, particularly a
preemptive war that most of the world is against. So it’s fair to ask what
these newspapers might have done differently — and, given what we know now,
what they wish they’d written during the days before war early last year.

WHAT THEY WROTE IN THE RUN-UP
Here’s what these six editorial pages did write, during the crucial six-week
period between Powell’s speech and the beginning of hostilities on March 19,
2003. They ranged from hawkish without a shade of doubt (The Wall Street
Journal and, to a lesser extent, the Chicago Tribune), to prowar but
conflicted (The Washington Post and USA Today), to antiwar without United
Nations approval (The New York Times and Los Angeles Times). None of these six
unconditionally opposed war. Neither did any of them throw their weight behind
intellectually appealing, but nevertheless unofficial, prowar arguments. These
included the so-called “liberal hawk” position, which focused less on
Hussein’s status as an imminent threat and more on the moral case for
overthrowing a murderous tyrant. In other words, of the six papers we studied,
for the most part, the ones that supported war also accepted Bush’s
justifications for it.

For the fiercely conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, war
was “above all about American self-defense.” Though the Bush administration
alienated much of the world with its bellicosity, the Journal trained its
critical fire almost exclusively on France, Germany, and the United Nations.
If the UN couldn’t deal with Iraq, wrote the paper, responsibility would fall
to the U.S.: “Someone has to prevent the emergence of nuclear- and
biological-armed chaos.” The Journal called Powell’s presentation “persuasive
to anyone who is still persuadable”; it also labored mightily to connect Iraq
and al Qaeda, calling Hussein and Osama bin Laden “brothers under the skin”
and writing, “Mr. Bush has declared a ‘war on terror’ and Saddam’s Iraq is
terrorism with an address.” In an editorial titled “Saddam and the Next 9/11,”
the Journal even speculated, wildly, that Hussein may have been behind the
October 2001 anthrax attacks.

The Chicago Tribune presented a similarly assured prowar case, barely
criticizing the Bush administration while unloading on easier targets like the
“hysterical French.” The Tribune maintained that war should come only as a
last resort. Yet the paper argued that by acting as an “axis of appeasement”
toward Hussein, instead of backing tough Iraq inspections with serious
consequences for failure to disclose weapons, key UN nations had brought an
unnecessary war upon themselves. Faced with Hussein’s intransigence and the
UN’s spinelessness, wrote the Tribune on March 2, the U.S. had no choice but
to deal militarily with Iraq’s “lethal menace.”

A more introspective prowar stance emerged from The Washington Post. The paper
started out hawkishly, echoing many of Bush’s arguments and calling war “an
operation essential to American security” even before Powell’s presentation.
The Post then quickly endorsed Powell’s WMD and al Qaeda claims (though
previously it had been skeptical about al Qaeda connections). Yet as invasion
approached, the paper shifted its tone. In two lengthy editorials, it directly
answered antiwar arguments and responded to readers who’d accused the paper of
“jingoism.” Following this public grappling with dissent, the Post unleashed a
flurry of editorials smacking the Bush administration for “worryingly vague”
postwar planning, for refusing to provide a cost estimate for war, and for
giving up too soon on compromise at the UN. The paper never changed its stance
on war, however.

If the Post was the most self-questioning prowar paper, USA Today often seemed
the hardest to pin down. A long supporter of “regime change” in Iraq, the
paper enthusiastically welcomed Powell’s speech, saying it contained “new and
forceful evidence” of Iraq’s weapons programs and terrorism links. Soon the
paper called disarming Iraq “a critical component to the war on terror.” But
as war neared, USAT amassed serious criticisms of Bush — he’s hasty; he’s
soured things with our allies; he hasn’t really made a strong case — while
stressing the importance of broad international backing for any military
effort and calling war a “last resort.” Despite these grave worries, however,
when Bush hastened to battle in late March with few allies — unilaterally and
hardly as a “last resort” — USAT gave its blessing, calling war “the best of
the bad alternatives.”

By comparison, The New York Times maintained a rigid consistency. Even as the
paper called Powell’s speech “the most powerful case to date” against Hussein,
it also warned that the U.S. “cannot afford to confront Iraq without broad
international support.” The Times maintained this line throughout, applauding
when the administration opted for “coercive diplomacy” — a phrase the paper
seemed proud of — but also criticizing Bush’s “destructive ‘with us or against
us’ approach.” Though willing to support a war sanctioned by the UN, the Times
challenged the notion that Hussein posed an “immediate danger” to the U.S. and
devoted an entire editorial to debunking the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. “This
page has never wavered in the belief that Mr. Hussein must be disarmed,” it
concluded on March 18. “Our problem is with the wrongheaded way this
administration has gone about it.”

Perhaps even more than The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times doubted that
Hussein posed an imminent threat to the U.S., calling claims that he did
“hypothetical.” The paper therefore argued that the Bush administration should
act in concert with the United Nations or not at all. The Times bought
Powell’s WMD claims, but whacked the administration for stressing unproven
Iraq-al Qaeda ties and treating diplomacy like a “demolition derby.” The Times
exhorted recalcitrant European nations to set an enforceable deadline for
Iraqi disarmament, giving Bush some other option than to go it alone. But in
opposing Bush’s “impatient war” on March 18, it concluded that “a U.S.-led
invasion, without sanction from the United Nations, would make this nation and
the world at large more dangerous.”

THE ARC OF THE ARGUMENT
Reading through these year-old editorials, it’s startling how different the
Iraq war appears today. In his ultimatum speech to Saddam Hussein on March 17,
2003, President Bush told Americans there was “no doubt that the Iraqi regime
continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever
devised.” By contrast, in his 2004 State of the Union speech Bush could only
weakly assert that U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq had uncovered “weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities” — a kind of Monty Python parody of the
case for war advanced less than a year earlier.

None of the papers, in fact, held the Bush administration to an adequate
standard of proof when it came to launching not just a war, but a preemptive
war opposed by most of the world. Given the context of 9/11 and a climate of
deference to the president on matters of national security, perhaps such
questioning of presidential authority seemed inconceivable. Nevertheless, had
the papers shown more skepticism, we might not have as much cause today to
second-guess either the Iraq war itself, or the way leading editorial pages
wrote about it.

THE IRAQ-AL QAEDA CONNECTION
To see how those editorial pages fell short of their responsibilities, first
consider the misleading Iraq-al Qaeda claims presented by Colin Powell before
the United Nations — and warmly endorsed by the four prowar papers. In his
United Nations speech, Powell promised, “every statement I make today is
backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are
giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He then
went on to claim that a Palestinian terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a
poisons specialist, headed a deadly Iraq-based terrorist network. Powell
called al-Zarqawi “an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al
Qaeda lieutenants,” adding that the radical Islamic group Ansar-al-Islam,
linked to al-Zarqawi, had a foothold in northeastern Iraq. In February of this
year, The New York Times reported that U.S. officials had just intercepted a
message, probably from al-Zarqawi, to senior leaders of al Qaeda, asking for
help fighting Americans in Iraq. As the Times reported, the document suggests
evidence of contacts between extremists in Iraq and al Qaeda now, “but it does
not speak to the debate about whether there was a Qaeda presence in Iraq
during the Saddam Hussein era, nor is there any mention of a collaboration
with Hussein loyalists.” “Little evidence,” the Times reported, “has emerged
to support the allegation of a prewar Qaeda connection in Iraq.”

Indeed, Powell’s claim fits a pattern of allegations that have been repeatedly
undercut by more comprehensive assessments. For example, a June 2003 draft
report by the UN Monitoring Group on al Qaeda found no link between al Qaeda
and Iraq. As the Carnegie Endowment notes, “the most intensive searching over
the last two years has produced no solid evidence of a cooperative
relationship between Saddam’s government and al Qaeda.”

Vice President Dick Cheney continues to make noises about Iraq-al Qaeda
linkages, and a November 2003 article in The Weekly Standard published
excerpts from a list of fifty supposed Iraq-al Qaeda contacts compiled by
Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith (the Defense Department strongly
challenged the Standard’s interpretation). Yet the Carnegie report disputes
the very idea that Hussein would have considered passing off weapons to a
terrorist group whose radical Islamist principles he despised.

Not only do we have grounds today to question Powell’s assertion, but
considerable grounds existed at the time. British papers like the Independent
and Guardian scoffed at the claim. The Los Angeles Times and The New York
Times weren’t convinced, either. The latter noted that Powell had failed to
prove that al-Zarqawi had strong al Qaeda ties, and pointed out that
Ansar-al-Islam operated out of a Kurdish-controlled area of Iraq beyond the
control of Saddam Hussein.

Nevertheless, all four prowar papers accepted Powell’s claim. Furthermore,
during the period studied for this article, none of these papers seriously
questioned the Bush administration’s regular assertion of other operational
links that Powell didn’t mention (such as the claim that the 9/11 hijacker
Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague) or the
administration’s wanton efforts to link Saddam Hussein and 9/11 rhetorically.
Therefore, these papers’ ringing endorsement of Powell’s claim can, at the
very least, be read as a passive acceptance of the administration’s larger
strategic campaign to link Iraq with al Qaeda.

The Wall Street Journal — whose editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, declined to
be interviewed for this article — pushed questionable al Qaeda theories the
hardest. The Journal not only called Powell’s evidence about al-Zarqawi
“worrisome,” but, acting as a kind of low-level intelligence analyst, also
attempted to read the tea leaves of the Iraqi state-controlled media, citing
articles that expressed approval of al Qaeda’s anti-American activities as
evidence of a sinister, deeper collaboration. “Saddam Hussein is probably too
clever to get caught openly canoodling with Osama bin Laden,” wrote the paper,
“but the evidence . . . shows that they share the same evil purposes.”

The Chicago Tribune also endorsed Powell’s al Qaeda evidence; the secretary of
state, wrote the paper, “fleshed out evidence that Iraq harbors an active
terrorist network linked to Al Qaeda.” In an interview, the Tribune’s
editorial page editor, Bruce Dold, defended that description, calling the al
Qaeda issue an “open question.” Absence of evidence does not equal evidence of
absence, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pointed out with respect to
Iraq and al Qaeda collaboration. But at some point, the burden of proof should
shift onto those continuing to assert an Iraq-al Qaeda link without compelling
evidence.

Although before Powell’s speech USA Today had questioned the Iraq-al Qaeda
connection, the paper wrote that Powell had made “the most convincing case to
date” that it did indeed exist. Today, editorial page editor Carol Stevens
comments, “We found the idea of a cell operating in Iraq credible after
listening to Powell, but I don’t think we ever found it credible that there
was an operational connection” between Iraq and al Qaeda. The paper did not
make that distinction in its editorials at the time, however.

The Washington Post has also proven willing to reassess the subject of Iraq-al
Qaeda connections. Like USA Today, before Powell’s speech the Post had seemed
unconvinced that such ties existed. But the paper concluded that Powell
offered “a powerful new case” that Hussein was in cahoots with a branch of al
Qaeda. In a lengthy October 2003 editorial entitled iraq in review, however,
the Post seemed to swing back again, accusing administration officials like
Dick Cheney of pushing “exaggerated” ties between the two groups, adding, “For
our part, we never saw a connection between Iraq and 9/11 or major
collaboration between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

By e-mail, the Post’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, clarified that
Powell’s al-Zarqawi evidence would not have constituted a “major”
collaboration by the standard set forth in the paper’s October iraq in review
editorial. Yet though the Post now says it wasn’t convinced that Iraq was
working with bin Laden, during the period between Powell’s speech and war, it
did not challenge Bush administration insinuations to this effect.

THE INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Even as the four prowar papers endorsed Colin Powell’s sketchy al Qaeda
claims, they showed little predisposition to take seriously much stronger
evidence, presented by the UN inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei,
questioning the U.S. case for war. Indeed, some showed an almost knee-jerk
tendency to distrust international perspectives, verging on xenophobic in the
case of The Wall Street Journal.

When Saddam declared that he had no weapons of mass destruction — which now
appears to have been the truth — the Journal nastily retorted, “If you believe
that, you are probably a Swedish weapons inspector.”

Consider what was arguably the most important rebuttal to U.S. intelligence
claims, a report to the UN by El Baradei, director general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency and chief UN nuclear inspector. The Bush
administration had repeatedly asserted that in addition to possessing
stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam was on the verge of
going nuclear. “We cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that
could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” Bush observed in an October 2002
speech. Yet on March 7, 2003, confirming his preliminary findings of January,
El Baradei told the United Nations he had found no evidence of any active
Iraqi nuclear program. In dismantling this central tenet of the U.S. case for
war, El Baradei challenged the assertion — made, among other places, by Bush
in his 2003 State of the Union speech — that Iraq had attempted to obtain
uranium from Niger, alleging that it was based on forged documents (as we now
know to have been the case). The Egyptian inspector also debunked repeated
U.S. claims that Iraq had sought aluminum tubes for the purpose of uranium
enrichment.

Reviewing the evidence today, El Baradei appears to have been vindicated on
all counts. As the former chief U.S. weapons inspector, David Kay, told
Congress last October, “We have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook
significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce
fissile material.” In the weeks before war, however, the four prowar papers
largely shrugged off El Baradei’s critique (which thoroughly anticipated Kay’s
eventual conclusion, announced this January, that Iraq lacked a
“reconstituted, full-blown nuclear program”). The Chicago Tribune didn’t even
mention it.

The Post took perhaps an even more dismissive approach to El Baradei, calling
his March 7 presentation a “diversion” and noting that the debunked Niger
uranium claim “did not even form part of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s
recent presentation to the Security Council.” The Post didn’t ask why such a
dubious piece of evidence made its way into President Bush’s State of the
Union address, however. Nor did it explore what it says about the uses and
abuses of U.S. intelligence that the president presented information to the
American public that Colin Powell considered unfit for the United Nations.
(Asked about the Post’s treatment of El Baradei, Hiatt said the paper had
based its case for war more on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons
stockpiles than on concern about nuclear weapons.)

The Journal was equally dismissive. “Mr. El Baradei made a public fuss last
week about one British-U.S. claim that turns out to have been false, but which
was in any case peripheral to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” it
editorialized. But again, El Baradei had challenged the entire notion that
Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons, not “one British-U.S. claim.” The inspector
knocked out an entire leg of the Bush case for war — and moreover, the one
that had seemed to present the strongest need for urgent action against Iraq
(to prevent the country from achieving nuclear status). ElBaradei’s report may
help explain why so many UN members were reluctant to endorse an immediate
invasion along the timetables urged by the U.S. and Britain.

USA Today covered El Baradei’s report in three sentences — in some ways a
better job than the other three papers. Yet, while it rebuked the U.S. and
Britain for relying on apparently poor intelligence with respect to the Niger
claim and aluminum tubes, USAT didn’t seem to grasp that El Baradei was
challenging the entire nuclear weapons argument, rather than a few details.
Moreover, the paper mentioned El Baradei’s speech in the context of a “pox on
both your houses” editorial that rebuked both sides for using sketchy evidence
in the Iraq debate. Asked about her coverage of El Baradei's speech, editorial
page editor Stevens commented, “I think that we assessed it fairly, given what
was going on at the time.” In examining the generally dismissive reactions to
the UN’s chief nuclear inspector, one comes face to face with the strongly
nationalistic character of many U.S. editorial pages’ writings in the run-up
to war with Iraq. As the Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, a dissenter
from his paper’s editorial stance on Iraq, put it during the weeks preceding
war, “Here in America, there is general agreement that we are right and
everybody else on Earth is wrong.” This sardonic assessment certainly
dovetails with these four papers’ approach to El Baradei’s presentation.

The editorial pages’ nationalistic impulse was only strengthened by the 9/11
context, suggests the University of Washington’s Domke. Against the backdrop
of terrorist threats and a strong emphasis on national security, major
newspaper editorial boards tended to play it safe, deferring to the president
and his advisers when it came to protecting Americans. Thus Powell’s claims
were instantly ratified, El Baradei’s ignored or dismissed. “Because the
papers started from that position” of giving the administration the benefit of
the doubt, says Domke, “they let down their guard.”

MISSING THE BIG PICTURE
Generally, the antiwar papers did not dismiss international evidence in a
knee-jerk fashion. If these papers had a major shortcoming, it was, instead,
something they shared with the prowar pages to a much greater extent: a
passive willingness to write about the Iraq debate on the president’s own
terms. By closely following the back and forth at the United Nations, they
often missed the forest for the trees.

There were no angels at the UN (except possibly the Canadians, who advanced a
very workable compromise plan for stepped-up Iraq inspections that could have
resolved the impasse). The Bush team may have been committed from the outset
to war and was diplomatically obtuse, but the French and their allies took a
hypocritical stance in first supporting Iraqi disarmament Resolution 1441 and
then blocking serious measures to enforce it.

When prowar papers ventured into these waters, they tended to selectively slam
the French. When the antiwar Times covered UN happenings, meanwhile, they
inevitably wound up even-handedly criticizing both the administration and the
French alike. This framing aided the Bush administration by centering the
debate around whether UN Resolution 1441 should have been enforced, or whether
the United States should still go to war without the UN, instead of around
more central issues. Just because the UN was behaving hypocritically didn’t
make it incumbent upon the U.S. to wage war on that body’s behalf just for the
sake of consistency, after all. To determine whether the United States should
go to war alone, it was far more important to weigh such matters as the Bush
administration’s preemptive war doctrine, whether Iraq posed an imminent
threat to the United States, and whether this country could be expected to
effectively handle the postwar period and leave Iraq better off than it was
before. But though in some cases the newspapers discussed these topics
earlier, they paid relatively scant attention to them during this crucial period.

Take the question of “preemptive war.” Officially outlined in a National
Security Strategy document released in September 2002, the Bush
administration’s preemption doctrine drew some debate at the time of its
inception, including in many of the papers discussed here. During the critical
time period examined for this article, however, none of the six newspapers
devoted an editorial to examining the doctrine. The most thorough discussion
came in a single paragraph from the Los Angeles Times:

    An Iraq invasion without U.N. sanction would be a preemptive attack by the
world’s only superpower. It would probably be successful in the initial
military phase — but at what cost? A preemptive strike can be justified if the
threat is imminent and unavoidable. With neither of those conditions proven, a
preemptive attack yields the moral high ground. The U.S. would be cast as the
global bully, seeking to arrogate the installation of governments in other lands.

That’s certainly helpful, though brief. Editorial editor Janet Clayton also
points out that her paper discussed the Bush doctrine of preemption still more
thoroughly in editorials falling outside the time period covered in this
article. USA Today’s Carol Stevens made a similar point during her January 29
interview with CJR, and added, “we are writing tomorrow on how [the latest]
faulty intelligence undermines the preemptive war doctrine, so we do see the
two issues as linked.” So clearly, USA Today now sees the broader picture.

Yet as war neared, the country could have profited from a much more searching
examination of the so-called preemption doctrine. The papers might have noted,
as the Carnegie Endowment report does, that preemption has always been a
legitimate strategy to head off an imminent military attack, so long as the
anticipation of such an attack is based on sound intelligence. But what the
Bush administration contemplated wasn’t really “preemption” at all — instead,
writes the Endowment, it was “a loose standard for preventive war under the
cloak of legitimate preemption,” even in the absence of an imminent threat.
Now that we have invaded Iraq and found that it apparently had no weapons with
which to threaten the U.S. — and certainly did not pose an imminent threat —
the holes in such a doctrine are plain for all to see. But the matter of the
need for high-quality intelligence to justify a preemptive invasion should
have been laid out in the days immediately preceding war.

Similarly, consider the question of how the U.S. would manage postwar Iraq.
The Wall Street Journal was, as usual, extreme compared with the rest of the
papers on the question. Following a late February speech to the American
Enterprise Institute in which Bush laid out his glowing vision for a postwar
democracy in Iraq, the Journal announced that the address “made instantly
irrelevant a forest of columns demanding to know, ‘What about after the war?’”
No other paper gave Bush a completely blank check based upon one lofty but
vague speech. But many papers raised questions about the postwar situation as,
at best, a compulsory aside, rather than as a central ground upon which to
weigh the Bush administration’s plans.

The Chicago Tribune, for example, included the following sentence in its major
prowar editorial of March 2: “The gauzy vision that proponents of war offer
for a post-Hussein Iraq is, to be frank, unconvincing.” But then the paper
quickly followed up, “But at least that will be post-Hussein Iraq, with his
destructive capability gone.” That’s hardly a serious consideration of the
difficulties the U.S. would be getting into as it attempted to run a (likely
hostile) Middle Eastern country and set it on the path to democracy.

USA Today worried somewhat more about postwar Iraq, noting after Colin
Powell’s speech that the Bush administration should “give allies and the
American public an equally persuasive explanation of its Iraq game plan and
exit strategy.” Yet even though the administration did not do this by USAT’s
own admission — Bush “provided little new substance about the war costs, goals
and sacrifices that may lie ahead,” the paper wrote in response to Bush’s Iraq
ultimatum speech — it nevertheless supported war.

The Washington Post was still more eloquent about postwar uncertainties. But
again, such worries didn’t seem to prevent the paper from supporting war.
Given the insurgency that is still occurring, and the current threat that Iraq
may succumb to Iran-style theocracy, it seems clear that all six papers should
have spent far more energy examining the Bush administration’s blithe plans
for democracy-building.

A LACK OF SKEPTICISM
But the biggest flaw, for all of the papers, goes back to the way they
responded to Colin Powell’s speech. At best, the presentation should have been
taken to represent one side in a continuing UN debate about Iraq’s weapons
capacities — exactly how international papers like the Guardian reacted to it.
After all, that paper noted, UN inspectors Blix and ElBaradei had their own
analyses, which often conflicted with Powell’s.

Yet without appearing to weigh such contrary evidence, the U.S. papers all
essentially pronounced Powell right, though they couldn’t possibly know for
sure that he was. In short, they trusted him. And in so doing, they failed to
bring even an elementary skepticism to the Bush case for war.

Why did the papers trust and defer? For most of them, notes Todd Gitlin, a
Columbia journalism professor, “the default position seems to have been that
the administration was well meaning — and that there was a tight logical
connection between admirable purpose and clear fact.” Gitlin thinks the papers
should have known otherwise at least from the time, in mid-2002, when it
became clear that central players in the administration like Vice President
Dick Cheney were devoted to war no matter what — and advocated proceeding
without even bothering to win United Nations approval.

As a group, the papers failed to exercise skepticism at this exacting a level.
It’s not that they should have magically intuited that Iraq didn’t have any
weapons at all. They simply should have demanded more proof that they could
verify with their own eyes.

A LOOK BACK
Given that the case for war against Iraq appears far weaker today, and that
the White House’s intelligence claims have lost their authority, what does
that say about these six editorial pages that took Colin Powell’s claims
almost entirely at face value? “All these papers are on notice,” says Thomas
Powers, a highly respected writer on intelligence issues for The New York
Review of Books and author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from
Hitler to al-Qaeda. “They’ve seen what happened. They were hustled.” In
Powers’s recent NYRB article “The Vanishing Case for War,” he reached this
jaw-dropping conclusion:

    In the six months since the President declared an end to major combat in
Iraq not a single one of the factual claims about Iraqi weapons and links to
al-Qaeda has been robustly confirmed, and in most cases there has been no
confirmation of any kind whatsoever.

Attempts to prompt self-reflection from the six editorial page editors about
this astonishing failure met with only moderate success. Paul Gigot of The
Wall Street Journal declined to be interviewed, while Gail Collins of The New
York Times e-mailed to say, “We don’t discuss the process that goes into
writing the editorials. After they’re written, we feel they should speak for
themselves. I try never to elaborate on them.” But Collins added: “I will go
off my normal rule to say I wish we’d known there were no weapons of mass
destruction.”

Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post, Bruce Dold of the Chicago Tribune, and
Carol Stevens of USA Today consented to telephone interviews, while the Los
Angeles Times’s Janet Clayton responded by e-mail to a lengthy list of
questions. Of these respondents, Stevens and Dold — who said there was “sharp
disagreement” on the Tribune editorial board about the war, and that he took
ultimate responsibility for the paper’s prowar stance — seemed most unwilling
to consider what their papers could have done differently.

“I’m not going to second-guess what we wrote in the course of the build-up to
this,” Dold commented. He argued that the Tribune would have supported war
even had it known that Iraq lacked WMD, simply because of Saddam Hussein’s
failure to comply with UN resolutions. “If indeed he did not have weapons —
and I think it’s all still an open question — the fact was that he didn’t
comply, and the UN had looked the other way while hundreds of thousands of
people had died in Iraq,” said Dold. Open-mindedness is certainly a virtue.
But at this point Dold’s insistence on keeping an open mind about the
administration’s WMD case could be likened to bending over backwards.

And Dold’s argument can be challenged on another front. In its editorials the
Tribune tended to cast the United States as an anointed enforcer of the United
Nations resolutions, as well as a kind of UN hypocrisy monitor — as if
Hussein’s failure to comply with the UN, on its own, justified a unilateral
U.S. invasion of Iraq. Yet even given a lack of Iraqi compliance, there would
remain the question of why we should risk American lives and spend countless
billions to deal with Hussein.

Unlike the Chicago Tribune, USA Today reached a “broad consensus” on all of
its editorial statements on Iraq. In fact, says Carol Stevens, editor of the
page, the paper doesn’t write anything without such agreement. “In hindsight,”
Stevens added, “some of our worst fears came true” about the war — such as the
disastrous consequences of desultory postwar planning.

One might think the realization of such fears would lead to a fundamental
questioning of the prowar case. But Stevens diverted the question of what she
wished the paper had done differently. “I don't know if it’s a question of
what we know now,” she said, “but I guess I’d like to ask Powell what he knows
now that he wishes he’d known then.”

Janet Clayton of the Los Angeles Times wishes her paper had known “that the
intelligence that the administration was using was flawed, and was often
skewed to favor the administration’s preconceived ideas.” In hindsight, she
adds by e-mail, “I do wish we’d been more skeptical of Powell’s WMD claims
before the UN. His personal credibility was on the line, and we didn’t think
he’d take that lightly.” After the war, as it became increasingly clear that
Iraq lacked the arsenal the Bush administration claimed it had, the Times
sharply whacked the administration for its exaggerations on the subject of
Iraq’s WMD.

THE POST RECONSIDERS
Of all the prowar editorial page editors, Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post
was by far the most willing in an interview with cjr to reconsider his paper’s
stance in light of recent evidence. “I feel like we’re always asking people to
talk to us,” Hiatt explained. “It’s hard to tell journalists that we’re not
going to talk to them.”

Hiatt has also discussed these questions with his readers. In the paper’s
lengthy October 12 iraq in review editorial — an impressive work of
introspection — the Post conceded the absence of Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction, as well as an absence of evidence of al Qaeda ties. Remarking
upon the violent postwar situation, the paper also harshly criticized the Bush
administration’s prewar lack of sound long-term planning. Without renouncing
its prior prowar stance, the paper concluded that the case for war currently
stands on the edge of a knife:

    Success or failure in the effort to stabilize Iraq under a reasonably
representative government that poses no threat to the world will provide the
ultimate answer to the question of whether the war should have been undertaken.

Hiatt says he wishes the Post had not accepted the WMD claims during the days
before war: “If you look at the editorials we write running up, we state as
flat fact that he has stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. If that’s not
true, it would have been better not to say it.” But Hiatt adds that he doesn’t
feel hung out to dry by the administration — at least not yet. “If it turned
out that Powell had deliberately lied to me, I would feel suckered,” he says.

Hiatt’s candor is admirable. Still, he has tough questions to answer. It is
true that the Post couldn’t have known the administration’s WMD claims would
evaporate. And in the days before war the paper’s editorial page raised sharp
questions about the Bush administration’s alienation of allies, its failure to
adequately plan for postwar Iraq, and its refusal to level with the American
public about how much war would cost and what our long-term commitment would be.

So why did the Post continue to support war given very good reasons for
doubting that the Bush administration knew what it was getting into? “As an
editorial writer, you don’t get to choose your ideal administration,” answers
Hiatt. “You deal with what’s there, and if you think there’s a threat to
American security, is the administration you have more capable of dealing with
it than not?” In a subsequent e-mail exchange, Hiatt added, “It is easy to
write an editorial, as some papers did, saying, ‘Saddam Hussein is dangerous,
and we support the war, if the French go along,’ or ‘if Bush were more sincere
about wanting democracy,’ or whatever. It is harder to write an editorial
accepting the real-world choices (the French are not going to go along) and
offering your best judgment under those circumstances.”

To the Post’s credit, the newspaper has shown a refreshing willingness to
reconsider that best judgment. For other pro-war papers, as for the Bush
administration, that day of reckoning has not yet arrived.


_______________________________________________
heads mailing list
[email protected]
http://ballistichelmet.org/mailman/listinfo/heads/
http://ballistichelmet.org/donate/