Interesting isn't it that the media when "dealing" with the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War the other day, just doesn't want to hear from those who were right, at the time, in challenging the then drum-beat to attack Iraq.
John McArthure takes up the subject in a piece "No Reward for Being Right on Iraq -Where were the voices of conscience on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War?" in Harper's Magazine.
"What’s the use of being right, in journalism or politics? I gave a lot of thought to this question during the tenth anniversary of the American–British invasion of Iraq, and I’ve come to the conclusion that being right is not much use at all, at least as far as career advancement goes.
I feel I speak with some authority. Having described as early as October 2002 key elements of the Bush White House’s fraudulent portrayal of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capability — and again in numerous published pieces and television and radio interviews right up until the bombardment of Baghdad began the following March — I’m struck by how little credit was accorded my fellow dissidents and how well, relatively, the wrongheaded hawks fared after President George W. Bush posed in front a sign declaring “mission accomplished.”
Setting the tone was the New York Times, which did so much to promote Bush’s (and Tony Blair’s) scam by publishing the “reporting” of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. The headline of its March 20 story summed up America’s willful amnesia: “Iraq War’s 10th Anniversary Is Barely Noted in Washington.” So too was it barely noted in the Times — the article appeared on page A10, with no reference made to it on the front page.
But worse than the Times’s institutional indifference was its choice of “critics.” In this, the paper of record was on a par with other media, but it’s still remarkable that the principal opponents of Bush’s corrupt enterprise were almost nowhere to be found in U.S. retrospectives.
Where, for example, was Hans Blix, redoubtable leader of the U.N. inspection team that failed to find any evidence to support the White House fantasy that Saddam was on the verge of launching nuclear missiles at Tel Aviv, London and New York? Why didn’t we hear from Mohamed ElBaradei, former director of the International Atomic Energy Commission, who would not toe the Dick Cheney/Paul Wolfowitz/Donald Rumsfeld line? And what about Scott Ritter, the courageous former U.N. Special Commission inspector and ex-Marine, who tried his utmost to halt the rush to war armed only with fact and reason?
My copybook is blotted by decades of media criticism, so I didn’t expect to be invited on American talk shows to talk about Iraq and the failure of the press to counteract the propaganda campaign (though I did appear on a French radio program, Le Grand Bain). But where were Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and John Walcott, the ace reporters for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, who separated themselves from the gullible pack and early on contradicted many of the major Bush fabrications? Why not publish recollections by Bob Simon and Solly Granatstein, who on the Dec. 8, 2002, 60 Minutes broadcast (on which I also appeared) permitted the physicist David Albright to demolish the fiction fomented by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were destined for use in building nuclear weapons? I haven’t done an exhaustive search, but I’m not aware that any of these stellar citizens were given the time of day by the U.S. media.
In the Times news story we did encounter one critic of the invasion, an ex-Army lieutenant colonel named John Nagl, whose chief qualification for being interviewed by reporter Peter Baker seemed to be that he fought in Iraq (which evidently gave him moral credibility) and that his op-ed piece was published in the same edition on Page A23. But despite his posture as a “critic,” Nagl managed to find in the Iraq invasion a “silver lining” in the form of “three flickers of light that offer some hope that the enormous price was not paid entirely in vain.”
John McArthure takes up the subject in a piece "No Reward for Being Right on Iraq -Where were the voices of conscience on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War?" in Harper's Magazine.
"What’s the use of being right, in journalism or politics? I gave a lot of thought to this question during the tenth anniversary of the American–British invasion of Iraq, and I’ve come to the conclusion that being right is not much use at all, at least as far as career advancement goes.
I feel I speak with some authority. Having described as early as October 2002 key elements of the Bush White House’s fraudulent portrayal of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capability — and again in numerous published pieces and television and radio interviews right up until the bombardment of Baghdad began the following March — I’m struck by how little credit was accorded my fellow dissidents and how well, relatively, the wrongheaded hawks fared after President George W. Bush posed in front a sign declaring “mission accomplished.”
Setting the tone was the New York Times, which did so much to promote Bush’s (and Tony Blair’s) scam by publishing the “reporting” of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. The headline of its March 20 story summed up America’s willful amnesia: “Iraq War’s 10th Anniversary Is Barely Noted in Washington.” So too was it barely noted in the Times — the article appeared on page A10, with no reference made to it on the front page.
But worse than the Times’s institutional indifference was its choice of “critics.” In this, the paper of record was on a par with other media, but it’s still remarkable that the principal opponents of Bush’s corrupt enterprise were almost nowhere to be found in U.S. retrospectives.
Where, for example, was Hans Blix, redoubtable leader of the U.N. inspection team that failed to find any evidence to support the White House fantasy that Saddam was on the verge of launching nuclear missiles at Tel Aviv, London and New York? Why didn’t we hear from Mohamed ElBaradei, former director of the International Atomic Energy Commission, who would not toe the Dick Cheney/Paul Wolfowitz/Donald Rumsfeld line? And what about Scott Ritter, the courageous former U.N. Special Commission inspector and ex-Marine, who tried his utmost to halt the rush to war armed only with fact and reason?
My copybook is blotted by decades of media criticism, so I didn’t expect to be invited on American talk shows to talk about Iraq and the failure of the press to counteract the propaganda campaign (though I did appear on a French radio program, Le Grand Bain). But where were Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and John Walcott, the ace reporters for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, who separated themselves from the gullible pack and early on contradicted many of the major Bush fabrications? Why not publish recollections by Bob Simon and Solly Granatstein, who on the Dec. 8, 2002, 60 Minutes broadcast (on which I also appeared) permitted the physicist David Albright to demolish the fiction fomented by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were destined for use in building nuclear weapons? I haven’t done an exhaustive search, but I’m not aware that any of these stellar citizens were given the time of day by the U.S. media.
In the Times news story we did encounter one critic of the invasion, an ex-Army lieutenant colonel named John Nagl, whose chief qualification for being interviewed by reporter Peter Baker seemed to be that he fought in Iraq (which evidently gave him moral credibility) and that his op-ed piece was published in the same edition on Page A23. But despite his posture as a “critic,” Nagl managed to find in the Iraq invasion a “silver lining” in the form of “three flickers of light that offer some hope that the enormous price was not paid entirely in vain.”
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