The illegal Iraq War is one of the biggest foreign policy disasters thus far in the 21st century. The invasion was 20 years ago last month. Younger adults may be confused today as they try to make sense of how the war got as far as it did. History notes that not only did the United States see the largest protest ever one month ahead of the start of the war but that the protests were worldwide that February.
So what gives?
Show don't tell?
We're going to tell but we can certainly show as well.
That's PBS' NEWSHOUR from last week.
And the garbage they served is the type of garbage they and other outlets served in the lead up to the start of the war. Watching it, you're left to believe that their boast that "PBS NewsHour is one of the most trusted news programs in television and online" is just one more lie on the long list of lies the network has presented over the years.
Last week, the 'news' program decided it was time for a look back. How they went about it was vintage '00 'news' coverage. With no shame at all, Amna Nawaz introduced the segment as follows:
Now we look back at the decision to invade the bloody American occupation and where Iraq stands today with Paul Wolfowitz. He was deputy secretary of defense during the George W. Bush administration. During the 1980s and '90s, he held a number of senior jobs at the Defense and State Department.
Vali Nasr was an adviser at the State Department during the Obama administration. He's now a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And Charles Duelfer, who helped run U.N. weapons inspections during the '90s in Iraq. After the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq, he led the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, which also looked for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Three hawks. That's what we heard from.
Garbage.
That's what we got last week from PBS and what the corporate media served up over and over in the lead up to the Iraq War. And if you asked CNN, for example, where the peace activists were, we were told that they were 'biased' because they had an objective. And the government officials and generals did not?
"You must hate America" would be the verbal or facial response.
DEMOCRACY NOW!'s host Amy Goodman was noting back then that there were almost 400 interviews regarding war on Iraq in the months leading up to the start of the war and only three of those interviews were with people who opposed starting the war.
That's how they lied and spun. That's how they tried to hoodwink the American people.
And they've never apologized for it. And last week demonstrated, as far as PBS was concerned, that they had not changed one damn bit.
THE NATION's Katrina vanden Heuvel observed last week:
This isn’t surprising, since few of the perpetrators, propagandists, and cheerleaders who drove us into the war suffered any consequence. Their reputations were re-burnished; their stature in America’s foreign policy establishment was retained. Bizarrely, those who led us into the disaster continue to dominate America’s major media platforms, while those who warned against it are largely pushed to the margins.
Putting a blush on the Iraq War is not an easy task. The Bush administration touted its preventive war doctrine, scorned the need for America, at the height of its unipolar moment, to seek authority from the United Nations, approval from NATO allies, or adherence to international law. Iraq was a target for neoconservatives long before 9/11, as the propagandists at the Project for the New American Century made clear. The push for the war began hours after 9/11, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was an avowed enemy of Al Qaeda. The Bush administration campaigned to sell the threat, making it—as Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote at the beginning of the Cold War—“clearer than the truth.” For message advice, the administration hired professional PR gurus—like Charlotte Beers, the Queen of Madison Avenue, straight from award-winning campaigns hawking Uncle Ben’s Rice and Head & Shoulders Shampoo. From the president on down, they sought to associate Saddam Hussein with 9/11, although they had no evidence of a connection that did not exist. Then they focused on the threat posed by Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. To overcome skeptical CIA analysts, Vice President Dick Cheney formed his own intelligence group, while über-lobbyist John Rendon invented an Iraqi National Congress headed by the nefarious financier Ahmed Chalabi, who provided “intelligence” on demand.
Kevin Drum cheerleaded the Iraq War. How was he punished? MOTHER JONES hired him in 2008 to be the magazine's blogger. While it must be tough working with Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery it's not akin to water boarding and Drum collects a check.
When even our left and 'left' periodicals refuse to hold the cheerleaders accountable, some may wonder how we can ever hold the corporate media accountable?
Last Thursday, a day after PBS' garbage, NPR's ON POINT offered some reality as host Meghna Chakrabarti spoke with journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (GUARDIAN). "What have the last 20 years looked like to Iraqi eyes?" was what Meghna wanted to know. "It was anxiety, it was fear but mostly it was what's next?"
Ghaith is the author of A STRANGER IN YOUR OWN CITY: TRAVELS IN THE MIDDLE EAST'S LONG WAR.
He noted the Iraqi people were stockpiling in the lead up to the invasion -- rice, beans, olive oil, cans of tuna. First were the bombings, Ghaith noted, "Turning our cities into urban warfare, that came later."
That reality did not occur to the three American War Hawks PBS elected to interview.
No reality did.
Which is how Paul Wolfowitz got to get off this holler, he claimed the Iraq War was a success because, "There has not been a repetition of the 9/11 attacks or anything like it in the 20 years since."
How damn stupid is Amna Nawaz? Anyone with a brain should have stopped him right there and pointed out the reality that Iraq did not attack the US on 9/11. Instead, 20 years later, the disgusting Wolfowitz was allowed to yet again falsely link 9/11 and Iraq.
That's not journalism, someone needs to inform PBS. And if, 20 years later, Amna isn't prepared to bring facts to a discussion on the Iraq War, she's not a journalist, she's just a whore.
"Of course," Ghaith noted on NPR, "they got rid of Saddam [Hussein] but a horrible Iraq came into existence after that."
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: And throughout the years, I'm always asked the question, "So what was better? The Saddam or the Americans?" As if the Iraqis had no other options than a mad dictator and an illegal occupation. We as people deserve something more.
That thought never occurred to PBS' three experts -- three War Hawks and War Whores.
Vali Nasr was presented as someone who worked in the Obama administration.
And? Rahm Emanuel worked in the Obama administration and he was pro-Iraq War.
Meghna Chakrabarti : Do you think the Americans were willfully blind to the other realities that constituted Iraqi civil and social life?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Worse than willfully blind. They were not only blind but they took the one narrative that was given to them -- fed to them -- by the exiled Iraqi politicians like Ahmed Chalabi and others. These exiled politicians grew up in the claustrophobic circles of exiles. They lost family members. They were chased by the regime. So they grew up in Tehran and Beirut and London within their tiny little communities. Those are the people who explained what was happening in Iraq to the Americans and those people were not in Iraq -- had never been in Iraq, some of them -- left Iraq when they were children. Others grew up -- you know, were born in the west. So when the Americans came, not only were they willfully blind -- because if you are willfully blind and you learn on the ground, that's fine -- no, they came with these misguided policies fed to them by neocons, of course, and the Iraqi exiles.
The neocons. Yeah, them. Vali Nasr is one of them. School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, PBS noted while failing to note that they mined this group early on in the lead up to the war to put one neocon after another on the air advocating for war. . 20 years later, PBS is still pimping them and refusing to call them what they are: Neocons.
Though given plenty of time on PBS last week (and even "the last word"), Nasr couldn't call out the war itself. The closest he could come was this:
And, finally, I would say that, regardless of what we argue about the sagacity of going into Iraq, at some point, the war lost the American public, the cost of it, the outcome of it.
It created a sense of aversion to war on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats. At the base of these parties, there is an aversion to war. In the region, but I'm sure farther away, in China, in Russia, the conclusion is that the United States will no longer go to war that easily. We rely on sanctions.
But, essentially, we are far less capable of getting our way on the world stage, because many friends or foes don't see credibility in our use of threat — threat of force.
That, for Nasr, is the problem with the Iraq War -- it's created a distaste for more war.
And that's the closest, 20 years later, that PBS can come to an anti-war voice.
That's the closest.
Don't believe the lie that PBS is there to serve you, it clearly doesn't give to s**ts about you when it airs garbage like that.
And, by the way, we really wanted someone else to call this garbage out. We wanted to link to someone else's writing and just focus on a light topic. But, as usual, we had to put our heels back on and get back up and do it because so many refuse to do the basics -- despite insisting that they're media critics.
Where was FAIR? Nowhere to be found. They last wrote their own Iraq War critique on March 22nd (and that focused on NYT)*. What of COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW? They produced a reach around circle jerk by Jon Alsop on March 21st -- one that leaned on the 'expertise' of Iraq War cheerleader Spencer Ackerman and his completely non-biased belief that Iraq needs less focus and if we had cheerleading the illegal war on our resume, we'd probably want the anniversary coverage dropped as well.
As two who exposed CJR's original circle jerk in the 00s, we need to point out that Jon is friends with Spencer and how laughable it is that he prints Spencer's complaints about how the corporate press goes with the sources they already know as opposed to expanding their sources. Did Jon not grasp what he was typing?
Apparently not.
This year saw some real push back from some in the media on the lies and nonsense about the Iraq War. Absolutely, NPR's ON POINT deserves credit. So does Amy Goodman's DEMOCRACY NOW! which filed multiple reports on Iraq. We'd also applaud Jon Schwarz of THE INTERCEPT and his efforts at holding both THE ATLANTIC and THE NEW YORK TIMES accountable. And Patrick Martin (WSWS) was there noting how the lies just kept coming from the media this anniversary.
But then we're still left with THE NEWSHOUR. 2.7 million watch the program each night -- about eight million catch it over a week's run. NYT? They have nine million subscribers -- print and digital. Some only read the arts coverage. Some, like a singer-songwriter friend of ours, only read the science coverage. It's a big audience, yes, but that's no reason to let THE NEWSHOUR slide.
Paul Wolfowitz lied on air about Iraq's WMD capabilities. And then said, of Charles Duelfer, "which Charles can contradict me if I'm wrong, but I believe the ISG said
that this would -- could be reconstituted in a matter of weeks or a few
months." But Duelfer didn't contradict him. Instead, we got this garbage.
Amna Nawaz: But, Charles Duelfer, I will turn to you here about those weapons of mass destruction, because they were the primary justification to launch the invasion. And you led the Iraq Study Group to find those weapons of mass destruction in 2005.
Your final report said that the hunt for those weapons had — quote — "gone as far as feasible," and all the headlines ran, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But I'd like to get your reaction to what Mr. Wolfowitz raised about the possibility of Saddam Hussein reconstituting those [bioleogical] weapons. Did you find that to be true?
Charles Duelfer: In a word, yes.
In a word, no.
Unlike Amna, we've attended Congressional hearings. When confronted with Duelfer saying one thing on PBS -- where liars run free (not for nothing is "BS" in the network's title) -- and saying something completely different in a Congressional hearing -- where those testifying are supposed to be under oath, we favor the statements made under oath.
In 2004, Paul Kerr (ARMS CONTROL ASSOCIATION) reported on Duelfer's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee and the ISR report:
The report asserts that “Iraq would have faced great difficulty in
re-establishing an effective [biological weapons] agent production
capability,” but it does say that Iraq possessed “significant dual-use
capability” and scientific expertise. Baghdad also conducted research
with potential weapons applications and could have “re-established an
elementary” weapons program “within a few weeks to a few months.”
However, there are “no indications” that it had plans to do so, the
report says.
But there's the liar Duelfer on PBS insisting that Wolfowitz is right about biological weapons and 'forgetting' that there were "no indications" on the part of the Iraqi government of "re-establish[ing] an elementary" biological weapons program. And there's his 'curious' history regarding weapons inspectors (his lies) that leaves out the fact that, in September 2002, Iraq agrees to let UN weapons inspectors back in, that UN weapons inspectors are back in Iraq on November 27, 2002, and that they only left on March 18, 2003 because of Bully Boy Bush's ultimatum to begin bombing Iraq (with the US government notifying Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, on March 16, 2003 what was coming).
And remember, Duelfer's lies are made possible by grants from the war industry and by whores and hacks like Amna Nawaz. She just sat there as they outright lied, as they rewrote history and as they changed the 2003 goal posts 20 years after the fact.