Media, Democrats Complicit in Rush to War
by Patrick J. Buchanan October 24, 2005
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=7736
While President Bush and his War Cabinet bear full moral
responsibility for Iraq, they could not have taken us to war without
the complicity of the "adversary press" and "loyal opposition."
Today, this town is salivating over the prospect that Karl Rove and
"Scooter" Libby will be indicted for outing Joe Wilson's wife as a CIA
operative. Thirty months ago, many of those anxious to see the White
House brought down were hauling its water. Consider the role played by
our newspaper of record, The New York Times.
To stampede us into a war neoconservatives had been plotting for a
decade, Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3, set up an Office of
Special Plans. Its role: Cherry-pick the intel that Saddam was
acquiring weapons of mass destruction and was hell-bent on using them
on the United States. Then, stove-pipe the hot stuff to the White
House Iraq Group (WHIG) and ignore the contradictory evidence.
A primary source of the hot Intel about poison gas vans and nuclear
bomb programs was a tight-knit exile group led by Ahmed Chalabi, head
of the Iraqi National Congress and neocon-Pentagon favorite to lead
the new Iraq.
But once the hyped Intel suggesting Saddam was an imminent and mortal
threat had been extracted, the WHIG needed to run it through a media
centrifuge to convert it into hard news.
Enter Judy Miller, self-styled "Miss Run Amok" and the go-to girl for
the War Party. Miller took the cherry-picked Intel and planted it on
page one, enabling War Party propagandists to hit the TV talk-show
circuit and reference ominous stories in The New York Times about how
imminent a threat Saddam had become.
These propagandists were parroting their own pre-cooked intel, but it
now had the imprimatur of the Times. The White House had seduced the
good Gray Lady of 43rd Street into turning tricks for war.
While the Times has played this role before, it was usually in leftist
causes. In the early 1930s, Walter Duranty got a Pulitzer for covering
up Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainians. In the late 1950s, Herbert
Matthews used the Times' front page to introduce Fidel Castro to the
world as the "Robin Hood of the Sierra Maestra." And who can forget
the Times columnists who assured us how much better off the Cambodian
people would be under the benevolent rule of Pol Pot?
But the indispensable enablers of war are the New Democrats and
potential presidential nominees, Sens. Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, Biden,
and Bayh. Fearful that Bush and Rove would use their refusal to
authorize war in October 2002 to impeach Democrats' patriotism, they
voted to give him a blank check for war. Six months later, Bush cashed
it.
The Democratic Senate could have slowed the stampede. And if it could
not have stopped it, it might at least have gotten answers to crucial
questions. How many troops would be needed? What was the probability
of guerrilla war? What was our exit strategy? Instead, the Senate
surrendered the war powers the Founding Fathers reserved for Congress
to the president and abdicated its constitutional duty.
And what of the punditocracy, which cheer-led us into war? Did they
serve their country, or did they service the king and his courtiers by
reciting such fairy tales as Mohammed Atta's secret meeting in Prague
with his Iraqi controllers?
In the run-up to war, from left, center and right, voices were asking
exactly what threat Saddam posed to America.
His nation had been crushed in six weeks and his army routed in 100
hours in Desert Storm. His weapons factories had been demolished.
Terrified of U.S. retaliation, he had not used one WMD. The United
Nations had rummaged through Iraq and destroyed other WMD and their
factories. He had not imported a tank, plane, or gun in 12 years.
Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency had
scoured Iraq and found nothing. Saddam had invited the CIA in to have
a look.
Though 40,000 U.S.-British sorties had been flown over Iraq since
1991, he had been unable to shoot down a single plane. There was no
evidence he or his regime had any role in 9/11, any connection to the
anthrax attack, any tie to al-Qaeda, or committed any act of terror
against us.
Why, then, was it necessary to go to war?
Whatever the sins of the WHIG in savaging critics, however, at least
most of them believed in this war. But what is to be said for those
who transmitted to a trusting public what they had to know or at least
suspect were propaganda fabrications to dupe the people into sending
their sons and daughters to fight and die in an unnecessary war? This
is the greater scandal. This is the real scandal.
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=7736
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