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In doing a
little spring cleaning, I came across this pre-war commentary, which unfortunately
reflects some trust and accountability themes we are still addressing without
real satisfaction, the subject of which media columnist Terry Neal addresses in
Drowning Out The Real Issues,
below. KwC ‘Trust Me’ isn’t good
enough
Jonathan Alter,
Newsweek, Feb.
3, 2003 Imagine you’re a soldier headed into harm’s way in
Iraq. If the system is working
right, you’ve been issued a reliable chemical-biological protective garment,
plus a backup. But if you’re fighting in a contaminated area – a real
possibility given that Saddam Hussein has nothing to lose – the suits only last
a day or so. That means after a few days of combat you’re probably going to
need a third suit, then a fourth.
Unfortunately, those replacement protective suits might be defective. Not likely, you
say. Our military’s the best trained and prepared in world history. Maybe so,
but were you paying attention last October when the Pentagon was finally forced
to admit that 250,000 faulty battle-dress overgarment (BDO) suits manufactured
by Isratex Inc., whose executives are now in jail for fraud, have been lost
amid 800,000 other BDO suits that work just fine? Even now, nobody can track down which are which. Talk about a snafu.
“Someone might still get BDO suits from existing inventory or prepositioned
stock [in the Mideast],” Ray Decker of the General Accounting Office told me
last week, trying to sound cautious about something that clearly worries him. “There are nine different databases [handling
protective-suit inventory], and they don’t talk to each other.” Decker found some military units had
only erasable chalk blackboards to monitor the state of their protective gear;
others kept no records at all. The Pentagon’s
response: trust us, we’re fixing it. Trust. I see the
chem.-bio suits flap as a microcosm of President Bush’s larger problem. After
September 11, we trusted Bush not to let us down, and he didn’t. But Iraq is
not Afghanistan. The main reason Bush is depleting his trust fund is that he is
himself distrustful. Lately he sounds like President Peeve, as if it is someone
else’s fault that he can’t find harder evidence of Iraqi violations. When a speechwriter offers a sentence
he doesn’t like, he sophomorically scribbles “Duh” in the margin (this,
according to a new Bush-friendly book by David Frum). When allies object to his
cowboy rhetoric and his retreat from more than 80 years of collective security,
he treats them as annoyances (or appeasers) rather than partners who happen to
take a different view. “Consulting” our
friends has become a euphemism for browbeating them. So they return the favor. Distrust breeds distrust. At home, the
pattern takes a similar form. Bush will probably get a bounce in the polls
after the State of the Union and again after the war starts; Americans can be
trusted to rally around their leader. But his margin for error is shrinking. During the war in Afghanistan, the
public was willing to accept significant casualties, a factor Bush didn’t make
use of when it came time to sea Tora Bora and catch Osama bin Laden. (He relied on warlords rather than US
troops). Now ironically, he’ll risk more when the tolerance for body bags is
less. Should something go wrong –
say, street fighting in Baghdad, or soldiers killed because of defective
chemical-biological suits – the issue of why we didn’t wait longer will no
longer be abstract. The essence of the
problem is that Bush isn’t squaring with people. This is a hazard of wartime. (During the gulf war, the Pentagon
said the Patriot missile worked magnificently; in fact it scored no direct
hits). But it carries a price. As Britain was losing Singapore in World War II,
Winston Churchill said: “There is no worse
mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.” The same might be said of false fears.
First, Bush asserted that Iraq was connected to Al Qaeda in Prague or
Kurdistan or somewhere, but offered no evidence and dropped it. Then he talked
about a “nuclear mujahedin” with ominous aluminum tubes, but the International
Atomic Energy Agency has said the tubes were not for nuclear use and that the
United States offered no intelligence that Iraq is even in the market for
uranium. We’re told implausibly that Iraq’s failure to disarm as quickly as
South Africa is reason to go to war immediately. And just last week, the
administration insisted it couldn’t specify the Iraqi danger because it was
classified. Churchill (a Bush hero) would never have tried such sophistry. The danger of all
this is that Bush becomes the little boy who cried wolf. During World War I,
atrocity stories about Germans bayoneting Belgian babies turned out to be
false. So during World War II, few people believed the stories trickling out
about the Holocaust. The hawks argue, rightly, that Saddam is evil, too. But
even if you agree, as I do, that he will eventually have to be removed by
force, bold assertions of a direct threat to world peace aren’t the same as
real evidence of that threat.
Condi Rice has a point when she says that “we don’t want the smoking gun
to be a mushroom cloud.” OK, the gun doesn’t have to be smoking. But there does have to be proof
that a gun exists. And we have to know – not trust – that it is pointed at us. EXCERPTS: Drowning out the real issues
Terry Neal, Washington Post, May 23, 2005 A certain and clear pattern has emerged
when a damaging accusation or claim against the Bush administration or the
Republican-led Congress is publicized: Bush supporters laser in on a weakness,
fallacy or inaccuracy in the story's sourcing while diverting all attention
from the issue at hand to the source or the accuser in the story. Often this tactic
involves efforts to delegitimize the entire news media based on the mistakes or
sloppy reporting of a few. We saw this with the discrediting of CBS's story on
irregularities in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service in the
1970s. Although the CBS "scoop" was based on faked documents, the
administration's response and backlash from both conservative and mainstream
media essentially relieved Bush of having to deal with the story. In other
words, the allegedly "liberal" media dropped the story like a hot
rock. We saw ex-members of
the Bush administration -- former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, former
White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, former chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff John M. Shalikashvili and former director of faith-based
charities John J. DiIulio Jr. -- similarly attacked by conservative bloggers
and columnists. The mainstream media eventually backed away from coverage of
their claims as well. And of course, we saw
this most recently with the Newsweek debacle, in which the news magazine
repeated an accusation that military interrogators had flushed a Koran down a
toilet. The Newsweek report was used by militants in Afghanistan to incite
violent protests in which 17 people died. The ensuing backlash among
conservative critics has included accusations that the report proves that media
hate the military, hate the United States, hate George W. Bush and purposefully
lied to hurt all of the above. It was equally mind boggling listening to
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who used information from a now
discredited source known as "Curveball" to take make the case for war against
Iraq, calling out Newsweek: "Newsweek
hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand
scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this
nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations." It was almost as if the Newsweek fiasco
had occurred in a vacuum, or in an alternate reality, where the Iraq war,
fought over non-existent weapons of mass destruction, had never occurred. The
scenario unfolded over the past two weeks in a Twilight Zone-like atmosphere in
which an administration that has held neither itself nor any of its underlings
accountable for a war that has so far cost more than 1,600 American lives and
tens of thousands of Iraqi lives worked itself into a tizzy for a brief report
in a news magazine -- based on an anonymous source -- that turned out to be
unsubstantiated. It's
a curious line of attack from an administration known for rarely admitting a
mistake. Whatever the case, had the White House
accepted the same kind of accountability it now seeks from Newsweek, Bush would
have taken complete responsibility for the faulty WMD claims, rather than
blaming the intelligence community. He would have accepted Rumsfeld's resignation
last year. And he never would have given Tenet the Medal of Freedom. Since this is the
accountability era, and it is widely agreed upon that Newsweek should account
for its errors and apologize for its mistakes, perhaps we can get back to
applying similarly stringent requirements on the elected officials who make
grave decisions, such as whether to go to war. When the media finish
scrutinizing Newsweek, it should get back to asking tough questions of the Bush
administration. Questions like: �
Who should be held responsible for the faulty intelligence on
weapons of mass destruction that led the United States to declare war against
Iraq? �
Why has the president not apologized for warning America that
Iraq presented an imminent threat, when that turned out to be the case? �
Will Rumsfeld, who claimed prior to the war to know the
precise locations of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, personally apologize
to the families of the troops who died in the search for those weapons? �
Given that McClellan has suggested that Newsweek editors need
to go on Arab TV and explain and apologize for their errors, will Bush also go
on Arab television to explain and apologize for the mistakes made in gathering
and analyzing the pre-war intelligence? �
Will the administration, which downplayed the costs of the
war in Iraq, publicly apologize to taxpayers now that the costs have already
exceeded $300 billion? Some will argue that
such questions are irrelevant or miss the point because Bush's bold action in
Iraq got rid of a tyrant who was abusing his own people and because it will
eventually lead to the spread of democracy in the area. Both may be true. But
the case for war was built neither on humanitarianism nor on spreading
democracy. Those arguments were, at most, used to bolster the main case, which
was that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction and presented an
imminent threat to America and its allies. Some will also argue
that the media only push aggressively to investigate Republican
administrations. That's a difficult case to make. A simple Lexis search shows,
for instance, that the Washington Post ran 415 stories about Monicagate on its
front page in the 1998 calendar year. Some on the left will
argue that the Clinton scandal was trumped up, overblown, media madness. I
disagree. It was an important story and deserved the front-page treatment it
was given. But it
also seems true that questions about a war that was fought on an acknowledged
false premise
are at least as important as questions about one president's efforts to lie
about a consensual affair with another adult. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/23/AR2005052300226.html |
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