How the media and the Democrats betrayed America.
The Iraq war was a disaster; I’m pretty sure we can file that one under “Stuff We Already Know.” Only the most extreme right-wing yahoos and Republican zealots are still out there arguing it was actually a good idea. But hindsight, as they say, is 20/20; and those of us on the left who so smugly oppose the war today shouldn’t absolve ourselves of blame for what happened.
The fact is that, though this debacle was the product of conservative pathologies and enacted by neoconservative ideologues, one can hardly blame the Republicans for getting themselves into this mess. You might as well blame a puppy for soiling the carpet. Yes, it was probably a mistake to put people like Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith in actual positions of responsibility, but that’s to be expected from a crowd that’s opposed to responsible governance in the first place (see Norquist, Grover). Destroying stuff in calamitous ways is practically the Republican mission statement. No matter how hard Colin Powell might have tried to be a voice of reason, this bunch was clearly headed for quagmire, and everyone who paid attention to politics knew it.
No, the significant failure here came from the media and the Democratic center-left, whose responsibility it was to restrain the president and oppose this war. A small child could have told you in 2003 that this thing was transparently a stupid idea — the blogger Atrios summed up the argument: “war is bad” — yet American public discourse managed to entirely miss the basic fact that our default position should be not going to war. There was an overwhelming public consensus for aggression that, to the rest of the world, looked frighteningly like cultism.
Think back to that time, when George W. Bush’s approval ratings were in the 60s and fervent patriotism was the order of the day. The term “freedom fries” was used completely unironically. Dissent, on any significant level, was given no quarter in party press conferences and network studios; anti-war sentiment was left to the fringe and the academics, many of whom were accused of treason by the frothing right wing. It was an all-encompassing mania. No matter how applicable were the arguments against war — there was no evidence of WMDs, the U.S. is not a colonial power and is not in the occupation business, the Middle East was inflamed enough, preemptive invasions are always a poor choice — they couldn’t make their way into “respectable” discussion. Meanwhile, enormous majorities of the public had no trouble holding the entirely fictional belief that Saddam Hussein or some nebulous Iraqi conspiracy had produced the hijackers of 9/11. Without a real democratic argument, Americans defaulted to patriotism, and launched into a conflict that would soon cost an unthinkable number of lives.
There are two axes on which we can chart this failure. The first is the media’s; elite journalistic institutions were entirely stricken with war fever. At the New York Times, Judith Miller produced article upon article about Iraqi weapons programs, which were instrumental in the White House’s case for war and were later proven to be as accurate and realistic as a Tom Clancy novel. Meanwhile, at that bastion of liberal media bias CNN, captions screamed “America Strikes Back!” while the anchors gave their coverage all the caution and nuance of announcers at a monster-truck rally. It was exciting television, but it wasn’t exactly journalism. Everywhere you looked you saw the same thing: critical thinking abandoned in favor of chest-pounding. Now, this is an understandable choice in this era of corporate media consolidation. If a news outlet wishes to survive, its accountability is not to truth so much as marketing — and as we all know, reasoned arguments for restraint don’t sell. It’s understandable. But that doesn’t make it acceptable.
Secondly, the center-left “opposition” failed in its duty to produce a real public discourse. The Democratic Party, in perhaps the saddest and most destructive political concession in American history, simply folded itself into Republican talking points and hoped some of President Bush’s machismo would rub off on them. Out came Joe Lieberman, then a respected former vice-presidential nominee, to moralize on the Iraqis’ crying need for democracy; into the closet went Al Gore, who as early as September 2002 had opposed the Bush war agenda and who consequently was marginalized by the party establishment. The Iraq Resolution passed the House 296–133. It wasn’t until the insurgency of Howard Dean in 2004 that Democrats finally dared to present an anti-war face and begin to mobilize public opinion, by which point the damage had long since been done.
Now, again, this is an understandable choice; Democrats had been beaten and bruised on national security issues since the age of Ronald Reagan, and their political position was tenuous enough as it was. Opposing the war was an incredibly dangerous political move for Democrats, and if the party itself went out on such a limb it risked extinction. The center and the establishment chose instead to ride it out. It’s understandable. But again, that doesn’t make it acceptable.
Today, opposing the war is the fashionable position, and there are all kinds of people in political and journalistic establishments doing good work to put an end to it. But in 2003, when it counted, these establishments failed us out of sheer spinelessness and self-interest. And what scares me is, I can see it happening again; I look at the groups of political nerds streaming from Harvard’s IOP and Crimson into public life, and I can easily imagine another situation decades down the line where these intelligent people are the only thing standing between the world and a government run by Dr. Strangelove-caliber lunatics. I can see them, sweating profusely behind their desks in Washington and New York, contemplating whether it’s worth public scorn and career suicide to do the responsible but unpopular thing. The question: will we have learned anything?
Markus Količ ’09 (mkolic@fas) is a blogger for the Harvard Democrats. Check out more of his wit and witticisms at harvarddems.com/blog/109.