Are mere pundits responsible when an administration's policy goes wrong? When their sophistic arguments helped sell and sustain it, very.

Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect,

August 18, 2005

[formatted link: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?...ticleId=10113]

In the information age, wars are not made by governments alone. This is especially true of wars of choice. When America has been attacked -- at Pearl Harbor, or as on September 11 -- the government needed merely to tell the people that it was our duty to respond, and the people rightly conferred their authority. But a war of choice is a different matter entirely. In that circumstance, the people will ask why. The people will need to be convinced that their sons and daughters and husbands and wives should go halfway around the world to ?ght a nemesis that they didn?t really know was a nemesis.

That?s why a war of choice is different. A war like the Iraq War, whose public support before the idea was seriously discussed started out well below 50 percent, needs to be sold -- ?marketed,? as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card once put it -- needs, well, marketers.

And, in the information age, an administration can?t, and doesn?t, market alone. It takes an army of salespeople -- it takes a village, you might say -- to accentuate the positive. And when an administration spreads demonstrable lies and falsehoods, or offers ?evidence? that can?t be wholly refuted but for which there is nevertheless no existing proof, it takes that same army to stand up and say: ?Yes! These assertions are true! Those who deny them are unpatriotic, or simpletons, or both!? And ?nally, when the war goes terribly, terribly wrong, that same army is called to the ramparts one last time, to say, in a fashion that approaches Soviet-style devotion: ?Things are in fact going well! The insurgency is dying! Abu Ghraib is not a scandal! Saddam Hussein did have ties to al-Qaeda; you just don?t know it yet!? And so on.

For its war in Iraq, the Bush administration relied on and bene?ted from the cheerleading of a group of pundits and public intellectuals who, at every crucial moment, subordinated the facts on the ground to their own ideological preferences and those of their allies within the administration. They refused to hold the administration?s conduct of the war and the occupation to the ideals that they themselves professed, or simply to the standard of common sense. They abdicated their responsibilities as political intellectuals -- and, more elementally, as reliable empiricists.

They went far beyond just making the kinds of mistakes that pundits make ? In the information age, wars are not made by governments alone. This is especially true of wars of choice. When America has been attacked -- at Pearl Harbor, or as on September 11 -- the government needed merely to tell the people that it was our duty to respond, and the people rightly conferred their authority. But a war of choice is a different matter entirely. In that circumstance, the people will ask why. The people will need to be convinced that their sons and daughters and husbands and wives should go halfway around the world to ?ght a nemesis that they didn?t really know was a nemesis.

The delusions for which they were apologizing weren?t only the administration?s; they were their own as well. There was an odd sort of integrity to their dishonesty; they believed (most of them did) all the theories that justi?ed the war. But they didn?t present these theories as theories. They presented them -- misrepresented them -- as facts.

Yet by some curious code of Beltway etiquette, the war hawks are still sought out for their judgments on war and peace, geopolitics, and military and political strategy. They are, in varying degrees, the journalistic equivalents of Donald Rumsfeld -- authors of disaster, spared from accountability, still bewilderingly in place. Herewith, ?ve of the top offenders.

William Kristol: The Strategist
Since 1998, it?s been Weekly Standard Editor Kristol who?s argued most persistently that getting rid of Saddam Hussein should be the central goal of U.S. foreign policy. So even before the debris of 9-11 had settled, Kristol -- like his longtime neoconservative compatriot Paul Wolfowitz, and, indeed, like the president himself -- saw an opportunity to take the coming war to Iraq. ?I think Iraq is, actually, the big unspoken elephant in the room today,? Kristol said on National Public Radio?s All Things Considered the day after the attacks. ?There?s a fair amount of evidence that Iraq had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past.?

In the months following the attack, Kristol wrote and spoke about Hussein?s arsenal with exquisite attention to detail, however ?ctitious those details were to prove. On NPR?s Talk of the Nation that October, for instance, he said, ?We know that over the last three or four weeks, he has moved many of his chemical and biological weapons programs in preparation for possible U.S. attacks.?

As intra-administration battles raged among the hawks in the Pentagon and the more cautious voices at the CIA and the State Department, Kristol seized every opportunity to undermine the credibility of those who failed to appreciate that Hussein was the source of all danger. On November 19, 2001, he and his sometimes co-author Robert Kagan wrote, ?Iraq is the only nation in the world, other than the United States and Russia, to have developed the kind of sophisticated anthrax that appeared in the letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. What will it take for the FBI and the CIA to start connecting the dots here? A signed confession from Saddam?? Whatever else Kristol and Kagan may be, the heirs to Holmes and Watson they are not.

During the war itself, Kristol turned his attention to the shape of a post-Hussein Iraq. Characteristically, he dismissed nettlesome complexities that did not bolster his case for war, substituting a more comforting, albeit inaccurate, analysis of his own. "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America - that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all," he reassured NPR listeners in April 2003. "Iraq's always been very secular."

Such misrepresentations of reality lead naturally to their spawn: making excuses when things don?t go according to plan. Kristol consistently downplayed the disasters that attended the U.S. occupation. Of the then-unfolding Abu Ghraib scandal in May of 2004, Kristol told FOX News viewers that "it is insane for this country to be obsessed about a small prisoner-abuse scandal." And this January, while he did forthrightly deplore the U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he introduced to the world a whole new standard of legal and moral culpability by explaining that neither George W. Bush nor Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel who drafted the new prisoner policies (he's now attorney general), were responsible because they never "ordered that these things be done!"

Charles Krauthammer: W.'s Maggie
Of all those public voices urging the overthrow of Hussein on Bush, the most insistent and hectoring was columnist Charles Krauthammer?s. Krauthammer was to George Bush Junior what Margaret Thatcher had been to George Bush Senior, whom she famously instructed, as he was considering his response to Hussein?s invasion of Kuwait, ?Don?t go wobbly.? That, in fact, was the headline of one Krauthammer column during the run-up to war; it could justly have been the headline to a dozen such columns.

Krauthammer?s self-assigned mission, even more than Kristol?s and Kagan?s, was to discredit those in the administration who in any way impeded the rush to war; he became the outside voice of those in the Pentagon, the vice president?s office, and elsewhere who raged at such caution. In the spring of 2003, with then?Secretary of State Colin Powell seeking to slow down the rush to war, Krauthammer thundered: ?No more dithering. Why does the president, who is pledged to disarming Hussein one way or the other, allow Powell even to discuss a scheme that is guaranteed to leave Saddam Hussein?s weapons in place??

Krauthammer?s contempt was directed at ?old Europe? as well. ?There should be no role for France in Iraq,? he proclaimed on March 12, 2003 (the eve of the war), ?either during the war ? or after it. No peacekeeping? -- as if patrolling post-Hussein Baghdad would be some rare privilege.

Since Hussein?s fall, Krauthammer has been walking the compulsory cheer beat, largely echoing the administration?s upbeat prognoses for Iraq. When the interim government of Iyad Allawi was about to come into office, Krauthammer opined on fox News that ?it?s the beginning of the end of the bad news. I mean, we?re going to have lots of attacks, but the political process is under way.? Not surprisingly, he deemed the public horror at Abu Ghraib ?a huge overreaction. Nobody was killed. Nobody was maimed.?

Victor Davis Hanson: The Analogist Apologist
Hanson has been called President Bush?s favorite historian, and for good reason. Soon after 9-11, the San Joaquin Valley classics professor began writing regularly for The National Review, demanding we go into Iraq, imparting martial lessons from Greece and Rome to an America abruptly at war. In short order, Hanson became a fellow at Palo Alto?s Hoover Institute, a dinner companion of Bush and Dick Cheney, and the most unswerving defender of administration policies -- even the ones the administration barely bothers to defend.

Hanson, you see, knows things you and I don?t. His considerable certainty as to the strategic soundness of the war has been rooted not just in supposition but in historical analogy. ?In the same way as the death of Hitler ended the Nazi Party and the ruin of the Third Reich ?nished the advance of fascist power in Europe,? he predicted in 2002, ?so the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi dictatorship will erode both clandestine support for terrorism and murderous tyranny well beyond Iraq.? Oops.

On his second try, Hanson foresaw an end to the strife once Hussein was killed or captured. ?The Romans realized this,? he wrote, ?and thus understood that Gallic liberation, Numidian resistance, or Hellenic nationalism would melt away when a Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, or Mithradites all were collared, dead, or allowed suicide.? Hanson is living proof that you can?t take historical analogies to the bank.

In August of 2002, as Cheney raised the idea of taking the war to Iraq in a major speech to a Veteran of Foreign Wars assemblage, Hanson not only endorsed the idea but proposed that the government place ?as many as 250,000 [troops] in immediate readiness? (to his credit, that number suggested he was an abler military strategist than anyone in Rumsfeld?s shop). And yet, somehow, when his quarter-million soldiers failed to materialize, he managed to decide that 150,000 (the actual number) was just ?ne -- even writing, as the occupation descended into bloody hell, that more troops might have meant more casualties in the war?s opening days.

As anti-war sentiment began to mount, Hanson dismissed it. ?We are told,? he wrote contemptuously in February 2002, ?an attack against Iraq will supposedly in?ame the Muslim world. Toppling Saddam Hussein will cause irreparable rifts with Europeans and our moderate allies, and turn world opinion against America.? What to Hanson was nonsense looks like pretty fair prophecy today.

It was Abu Ghraib, though, that tested Hanson?s true mettle as supreme apologist, and he rose to the occasion. ?We do not know how many of the abused, tortured, and humiliated prisoners in the war?s aftermath either belonged to the cohort of 100,000 felons let lose by Saddam on the eve of the war or were part of the Hussein death machine or themselves were recent killers who had assassinated and blown apart Americans,? he wrote.

To Hanson, what Abu Ghraib imperiled wasn?t America?s honor or reputation for decency; after all, what dishonor attended the torture of prisoners suspected to be Hussein?s thugs? No, the danger was that even conservatives had begun to call for Rumsfeld?s scalp, threatening the architect of the war and the occupation that Hanson had defended with every analogy he could adduce. Desperate times require desperate measures, and it was not until Abu Ghraib that Hanson termed Rumsfeld ?America?s ?nest secretary of defense in a half-century.?

Our failures in Iraq, Hanson now insists, are failures not of planning but of will. Though there are no anti-war demonstrations to speak of, and though hardly any political leaders are demanding withdrawal, Hanson smells a ?fth column. ?Whether this in?uential, snarling minority -- so prominent in the media, on campuses, in government, and in the arts -- succeeds in turning victory into defeat is open to question,? he laments. He?s counting on Bush -- bolstered by his references to Churchill -- to stay the course.