Iraq War has become a major issue in the 2016 presidential election. Earlier this week, a former top CIA official and intelligence briefer to President George W. Bush before the Iraq War acknowledged Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney falsely presented information to the public. In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Michael Morell was asked about Cheney’s claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons.
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has said he would not have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq presided over by his brother, former President George W. Bush, reversing a stance Jeb Bush took just days earlier. Speaking at a town hall meeting in Tempe, Arizona, last week, Jeb Bush said he would not have invaded if he had known former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. His comments came three days after Jeb Bush told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly he would have authorized the war, despite that knowledge.
Matt Taibbi talking:
from a media standpoint, this whole debate just grinds so much, that all of these media outlets, that shamelessly trumpeted and cheerleaded for this war in 2002, 2003, and in some cases for years beyond that, are suddenly turning around and being sanctimonious and going after people like Jeb Bush, who, of course, should be gone after—I’m not saying that the politicians should be exempt from this kind of questioning—but, you know, people like Chris Matthews are giving people a hard time about their positions on Iraq. Where was MSNBC on Iraq back in the day? I mean, they were letting go of people like Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura for having, you know, unpatriotic positions on the Iraq War. Everybody was in on this thing, except for maybe this program and a few other scattered journalists. And so, for the national mainstream media to act like it’s somehow the arbiter of morality on this issue now with politicians, I think, is extremely hypocritical. And I think it also exposes a serious failing in our business, which is that getting things enormously wrong carries no consequences for pundits anymore whatsoever. I mean, you can be wrong for years on end, and you’ll still have that 780 words of space in The New York Times or whatever newspaper, year after year after year.
2002 Hillary Clinton voted for invation of Iraq. she spoke on the Senate floor, ultimately in support of the Iraq War, when she voted, and kids were being dragged out of her Senate office in New York, students, because they were protesting the Iraq War. Now she is saying it was a mistake.
the problem that I have with all of this is this—again, a revisionist history, this idea that the mistake was that we were misled by this faulty intelligence, and were it not for the fruit of the poison tree, were it not for Judith Miller and a few people in the Bush administration who presented this case to us, we would never have made this decision, we would have gotten it right the first time around. But the reality is, a lot of the people who were looking at this issue saw through all of that. We didn’t need to even consider the intelligence that the Bush administration was trying to present. It was clearly a manufactured crisis. We were invading the wrong country. This wasn’t—you know, this wasn’t a difficult call. It wasn’t like Fermat’s theorem that we had to figure out. This was a pretty obvious manipulation by the Bush administration. And to pretend that, “Oh, yes, we were misled by this faulty intelligence,” I think is going to become the new normal on both sides of the aisle.
the uniformity of the position taken by all these different media outlets, the position that they took on the Iraq War in 2003.
because it’s safe, and everyone’s going to be covering their behinds on this whole thing. I mean, there are a few people who have stood up and said, “Boy, we really screwed that one up.” I can think of a couple of pundits who actually did that. But for the most part, the position is going to be, “Yeah, we got it wrong back then. We were caught up in a patriotic fervor. After 9/11, we all had a desire to do something, and this seemed like the right thing to do. And they were giving us this intelligence, and we believed it.” You know, but, as journalists, it wasn’t our job to believe stuff. It was our job to examine what was going on. And basically nobody did that.
Vice President Dick Cheney holding up The New York Times on that September morning of 2002 as he was alleging weapons of mass destruction. He said, “You don’t have to believe me. Believe The New York Times.” Holding up an article, front page, by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, that of course was based on unnamed sources that we probably can trace right back to the man who was holding up the newspaper.
the whole argument was one dubious supposition piled on top of another. The intelligence was maybe the fifth or sixth element in the chain of faulty assumptions that they asked us to accept in order to go to war. And the idea that Judith Miller’s reporting was something that we could hang our hats on as the reason we went to war is absurd, beginning with the idea that Saddam Hussein had any kind of connection to al-Qaeda, which was implied at every turn by this government. You know, the Bush administration, these are some of the greatest liars in the history of politics, and even they couldn’t come up with a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. And yet this was implied. Seventy percent of the country believed it. And the press unblinkingly allowed that kind of propaganda to be spread in their pages.
I think the problem is, is that what happened before Iraq was a massive failure in our business. Clearly, a lot of people—and I know a lot of people personally who didn’t believe in the Iraq War, who reported on a lot of these issues without protest. It was a huge failure in our business, and we didn’t go back and examine what went wrong, and we didn’t fix it. And what’s going to happen is it’s going to happen all over again the next time. Next time we want to go to war against somebody, there are going to be the same threats of if you don’t agree with us, you’re unpatriotic. There’s going to be the same march to war that we saw on all the cable stations. And we’re going to get ourselves in trouble all over again.
President George W. Bush, who shared in the joke. Remember the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when—that remarkable video that they played where he’s looking in the Oval Office under his desk, under his chairs, and saying “Where are the WMD?” as U.S. soldiers were dying in Iraq.
I feel guilty even laughing about that, but, I mean, that’s the mentality of—I mean, I think that they saw—I think that highlights what was really going on, is that they saw the Iraq War as a political thing, that this is how we’re going to get over with voters, this a move that is going to garner us support. They didn’t actually think about the consequences of what they were doing in any real way. And we let them get away with it.
there was a buildup of sentiment against the war in the summer of 2002. Andrew Card, was the chief of staff of President George W. Bush, and he said, when asked why they weren’t making stronger arguments for the war that they were clearly going to engage in soon, in the summer, he said, “You don’t roll out a new product in August.”
It was a marketing campaign for them. They wanted to save it for the most politically advantageous time. And, you know, journalists should have been on the lookout for that. They should have seen right through it. I think in the old days, when journalists, as a whole, were more skeptical of people in power and didn’t like to see this kind of thing happen, I think that you wouldn’t have seen that kind of unanimity, certainly. It was shocking to see.
— source democracynow.org
Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, is now out in paperback.