One e-mail insisted, "If only Phil Donahue had been on MSNBC but they gave him the axe because they didn't want any anti-war voices or any questioning of the war, so before they started selling their longed for war, they had to purify the airwaves and leave only pro-war voices. We are so lucky to have MSNBC. " The other maintained, "While people in this country and around the world demonstrated against the planned war, not one network would give them even 10 seconds of airtime. We were never allowed to hear from the American people."
In reply to the second e-mail, Janeane Garofalo and others were on Fox News where they were generally ridiculed and shouted out but where they did make the case against war. In addition, in the weeks before the start of the Iraq War, Katie Couric hosted a town hall on NBC's Today Show which was a variety of US citizens (no officials, no celebrities) sharing their opinions on the impending war. Should there have been more? There damn sure should have been. And there probably are a few more TX examples that can be tossed out (including one we'll be sharing at length in a moment) but let's not rewrite history.
In reply to the first e-mail, MSNBC? You mean the prime time gas bags? They've opposed what wars since Barack Obama was sworn in as US president? Phil Donahue was not the only voice of caution. Let's drop back to a program taped September 6, 2002:
MS. CLIFT: No. You know, containment -- containment worked for half a century.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: I want to hear from Tony quickly. Tony's going to be shut out here. (Laughter.)
MS. CLIFT: (Laughs.) I don't think so.
MR. BLANKLEY: Look, it doesn't matter how much else he's got on the plate. You can have a full plate, but if you got a guy with a machine gun at the dinner table, you got to deal with that first.
MS. CLIFT: Yeah, but there are different ways to deal than military ways.
That's Eleanor Clift arguing against a planned Iraq War with Tony Blankley with moderator John McLaughlin on The McLaughlin Group which airs across the country on many PBS stations (and some CBS stations). It's a weekly show where the panelists (journalists) and McLaughlin run through a series of topics quickly and at loud volume.
The Iraq War started March 19, 2003. The roll out started sooner. In fact, the Bush administration was trying to tie Iraq to 9-11 and September 11, 2001. But the roll out proper began in September 2002. As William Schneider (CNN) observed on September 12, 2002, "Why did the Administration wait until September to make its case against Iraq? White House chief of staff Andrew Card told The New York Times last week, 'From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August'."
Let's go to the September 13, 2002 taping of the McLaughlin Group where they are discussing George the Bully Boy Bush's presentation to the United Nations and whether he made the case for war.
MS. CLIFT: Well, curiously, the president never made any mention of arms inspectors, which is what this whole argument is about, getting arms inspectors into Iraq. I think a lot of this flowery language about human rights, he set criteria in his ultimatum that we don't even expect of our allies in the region. So I --
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Can the U.S. live without that --
MS. CLIFT: Yes.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN -- stopping internal repression provision?
MS. CLIFT: Yes.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What else can the U.S. live without, among the five?
MS. CLIFT: Well, I think he would put -- you could put in ceasing terrorism. But, you know, these are words. This is not the core of the argument. The core of the argument is getting the arms inspectors in there. And while the president put out a powerful indictment against Saddam Hussein and the U.N. for not following through on the resolutions, there was nothing new in his bill of particulars about what Saddam Hussein has done. He has not made the case for the urgency of military intervention.
And unlike some of the revisionary history that's followed from the mouths of politicians, Clift wasn't afraid to say there was no case for war or, for that matter, that Democrats knew that but feared the political fallout (mid-terms would take place in November 2002) if they stood against the proposed war. From the September 20, 2002 taping:
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: "The newly bellicose mood on Capitol Hill materialized almost overnight. Last week Democrats wanted the Security Council to act first and were calling for measured consideration of the political and military issues involved in going to war. The haste is unfortunate, all the more so because it is clearly motivated by campaign politics. Republicans are already running attack ads against Democrats on Iraq. Democrats favor fast approval of a resolution so they can change the subject to domestic economic problems. "Congress has a solemn obligation in our constitutional system to weigh issues of war and peace, and to do so as free from partisanship as possible." Do you want to comment on that?
Mr. : John, I --
MS. CLIFT: The Republicans are using the war like a giant wedge issue, and the Democrats are sacred to death, and they're going to get more cowardly the closer --
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We have infomericals, if you want to see them.
MS. CLIFT: If this was a secret vote on passing a war resolution, it would fail. You'd have -- the public position of members of Congress --
MR. BLANKLEY: You don't know that! You don't know that!
MS. CLIFT: The private comments --
MR. BLANKLEY: You don't know that!
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Let Eleanor finish! Let Eleanor finish! (Cross talk.)
MS. CLIFT: I have not. The private comments of leading Democrats and thoughtful Republicans on the Hill are not for a preemptive strike. They're scared of the politics. (Cross talk.)
MR. BLANKLEY: Let me respond to that for one second. Because if these politicians that you're talking to are telling you that in the national interest they ought to vote no, but are going to vote yes, then you ought to reveal their names so we can find out what kind of scoundrels they are.
MS. CLIFT: They have serious questions about the war, but politically --
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Eleanor --
(Cross talk.)
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Okay, hold on. We got to get back -- we got to get back to Mort here.
MS. CLIFT: He doesn't just get to yell at me, and he gets to yell at me too.
MR. ZUCKERMAN: I understand. No, no. I would never do that. But let me just say this --
MS. CLIFT: I think that's what you're doing, sir. It's called hectoring. (Laughs.)
As you may have noticed in the above, Clift didn't say her peace and the panel applaud. She's described the show publicly as "a political food fight." And that's really all most of the public affairs shows are in one form or another. But if you're going to speak out against a war a White House wants, you better be strong and willing to push back.
And Clift was. She'd demand her right to speak and sometimes win.
To finish out the month, this is from the program taped September 27, 2002:
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Issue two: "Liaison Dangereux"?
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: (From videotape.) (In progress) -- distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad and equally as evil and equally as destructive.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The war on terrorism got a whole lot bigger this week. All of a sudden, Iraq and al Qaeda, if you believe the president and his Defense secretary, are joined at the hip. They are one and the same. On Wednesday, in Warsaw for a NATO meeting, Donald Rumsfeld was asked whether there was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, and what exactly that link was.
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: (From videotape.) I have no desire to go beyond saying the answer is yes.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Where's the evidence? Unstated. On Thursday at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said he had intelligence of senior al Qaeda members operating in Baghdad, and that Iraq and al Qaeda have ties that stretch back for 10 years. Could the Secretary identify who the al Qaeda members in Baghdad are?
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: (From videotape.) I could, but I won't.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Leading Democrats who have been briefed with classified information said they were surprised to hear this.
SENATOR TOM DASCHLE (D-SD): (From videotape.) Well, it is a reversal of information the administration shared with us earlier this year.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: British intelligence this week also stated that it had no evidence of an al Qaeda Saddam or Iraq connection. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld allowed that the reliability of the data was far from satisfying.
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: (From videotape.) It's based on a lot of different types of sources of varying degrees of reliability.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The Pentagon press corps has grown extremely skeptical -- reinforced, doubtless, by history. In September of 1990, when George H.W. Bush was still drumming up support for his incursion into Iraq, his Pentagon officials cited top-secret satellite images of what they said were 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks massed on the Saudi-Iraqi border about to roll into our key U.S. oil supplier's territory, Saudi Arabia. But commercial satellite photos of the same area taken at the same time show no Iraqi troops at all, just an empty desert. Question: Why are we only hearing now about the Iraq/Al Qaeda link? Eleanor Clift?
MS. CLIFT: Well, they trotted out some of these arguments early on, claiming that there was an Iraqi representative that met with an al Qaeda representative in Prague, but they were never able to substantiate that. This is weak evidence. It weakens their case. It looks like a desperation move. It's opportunistic. I can't come up with enough negative adjectives.
MR. BLANKLEY: Try! (Chuckles.)
MS. CLIFT: And the point is, the point is, if you're worried about Saddam using connections with terrorist groups, you're more likely to provoke him to do that than to prevent it with all this talk about --
MR. BARONE: Oh, he wouldn't do anything bad, except if we get into it. Please!
MS. CLIFT: If he's cornered, he might use it. But he has no cultural (affinity ?) with al Qaeda. They're a --
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you think --
MS. CLIFT: They're a bunch of --
MR. BARONE: So it would only be the result of the "evil United States." Please!
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: James?
MS. CLIFT: They're a bunch of religious fanatics, and he's a hedonist, if anything.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: James?
MR. BARONE: Eleanor, if you read Michael Ledeen's book, "The Terror Masters," you will find that the secular and the religious terrorists and the terror masters work together all the time.
MS. CLIFT: No evidence.
MR. BARONE: You ought to take a look at the book. There is a great deal of evidence.
MS. CLIFT: No evidence!
No evidence she insisted. And she was correct. Then and now.
And what strikes us as important to notice beyond that is that Eleanor Clift doesn't get any credit for that. In fact, we've named three women in this piece that rarely get credit. Katie Couric hosted a townhall on live TV (NBC) where citizens got to weigh in -- include object -- to the impending war. Janeane Garofalo, more than anyone else in 2002 and 2003, went on Fox and any other program -- radio or TV -- that would let her discuss the planned war. And PBS viewers saw Eleanor Clift calling it out repeatedly.
Strange, isn't it, when you read lists --usually by men at The Nation magazine -- of 'people' who were right about the Iraq War, the lists are nothing but a list of men. Strange, isn't it?
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Ty note, 3-26-2012: First sentence corrected to "9th anniversary" from "19th." Thank you to readers Sabina, Mitch and Andy for e-mailing on that.
