Hitchens propels the myth

While Don Rumsfeld & Co. are under attack and in full damage-control mode over the Iraq debacle today, and veteran UK war correspondent Max Hastings resurrects the spectre of Vietnam, the US media are once again doing their best to neglect the issue of how we got into this mess in the first place. Remember the Downing Street Memo?

Congratulations to professional contrarian Christopher Hitchens for propelling the US media's self-serving myth that the DSM is not and never was news because everyone in America supposedly already knew that the Bush administration was going to go to war with Iraq. In a piece in Slate.com, Hitchens argues, "I am now forced to wonder: Who is there who does not know that the Bush administration decided after September 2001 to change the balance of power in the region and to enforce the Iraq Liberation Act, passed unanimously by the Senate in 1998, which made it overt American policy to change the government of Iraq?" The answer is simple: The American people did not know this! Maybe Hitchens and his chattering-class peers "knew" or think they knew what Bush's Iraq policy really was, but the American people - in whose name this probably illegal invasion took place - did not know that Bush wanted a war, and would do anything to make it happen - including, of course, misrepresenting himself to the American people. And just how many Americans in July 2002 knew anything about the Iraq Liberation Act? Most Americans naturally took Bush at face value when he argued that war was a last resort. (In an Op-Ed piece in today's NY Times Paul Krugman quotes veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who apparently told an audience in November 2002, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - an then made it clear that President Bush was the first.)

So Hitchens gets himself an "Officer Barbrady award" - for what it's worth.

Look, it's clear that, following last week's brief spike in coverage commensurate with John Conyers's Capitol basement session - and in spite of the emergence of a whole clutch of incriminating UK memos and minutes - the whole DSM issue is being efficiently buried again (and this time, I'm sure the MSM hope, it'll be for good). So Hitchens is kicking the issue when it's down. Oh well. But he's still wrong, and it's necessary to clearly recognize why he's wrong because that explains so much about what's wrong with the US news media today

So again, I turn to Joe Conason, whose Salon piece (which I discussed here) provides clear contemporary evidence (from 2002) that the media did not know Bush's true intentions:

Consider Michael Kinsley, the Los Angeles Times editorial page editor and columnist, who recently [in June 2005] derided the memo's importance. According to him, "you don't need a secret memo" to know that "the administration's decision to topple Saddam Hussein by force" had been reached by then. Anybody could tell that war was "inevitable," he wrote. "Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before," he wrote, citing an opinion column by Robert Scheer and a Times story about Pentagon war planning.

But let's also look at what Kinsley himself wrote on July 12, 2002, after those war plans were leaked. On the Post's Op-Ed page, he suggested that despite all the logistical planning and bellicose rhetoric, "Bush may be bluffing ... Or he may be lying, and the leak may be part of an official strategy of threatening all-out war in the hope of avoiding it, by encouraging a coup or persuading Hussein to take early retirement or in some other way getting him gone without a massive invasion."

So Kinsley himself wasn't quite certain whether Bush had decided on war, yet now he says we all knew.

On that same [Los Angeles Times] Op-Ed page two months later, fervent hawk James Hoagland, whose views on the war closely reflect those of the paper's editorial board, wrote a column about the president's U.N. speech. Hoagland described Bush as "diligent prosecuting attorney, sorrowful statesman and reluctant potential warrior.

"Bush wisely did not base his appeals for collective action against Iraq on a doctrine of preemption ... Instead he explained how the need for such drastic steps can be avoided by concerted international action." War, that is, could still be avoided, or so Hoagland believed as of Sept. 15, 2002.

A few days earlier, an editorial in the Times had likewise lauded the president's speech: "While Mr. Bush reserved the right to act independently to restrain Iraq, he expressed a preference for working in concert with other nations and seemed willing to employ measures short of war before turning to the use of force. These are welcome and important statements." So despite what Times reporters and analysts claim today, their newspaper clearly did not consider war inevitable several weeks after July 23, 2002.

And on Oct. 8, 2002, the Times noted approvingly that in requesting a congressional war resolution, Bush had said: "Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." The next day, the paper of record reported that around the world, politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens had derived hope from those words.

So what impression did all this leave in the minds of ordinary Americans? Not that war was inevitable or desirable, of that I'm sure. But no matter: A new myth is being carefully constructed by the media, and no amount of Internet or blogosphere criticism seems able to fully deconstruct it. (Btw, here's another excellent piece Joe Conason from June 10, 2005, also in Salon.)