Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, overthrowing the despot Saddam Hussein and unleashing a kind of hell that Iraq still struggles with.
Twenty years ago, with one notable exception, this country’s mainstream media bought false claims from the Bush administration about Hussein’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and helped push our country into a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands Americans. Iraqis have. . The war — coupled with criminally poor post-war planning by Bush administration officials — also spawned horrific sectarian strife, sparked the rise of ISIS and displaced more than 1 million Iraqis.
This sad chapter in American history spawned a number of jingoistic catchphrases and phrases: “WMD,” “the axis of evil,” “regime change,” “yellowcake uranium,” “the coalition of the willing,” and a cheesy but terrifying chorus , repeated ad nauseam by Bush administration officials such as then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: “We don’t want the gunshot to become a mushroom cloud.” (The memorable metaphor was coined by the late Michael Gerson, then a Bush speechwriter.)
Of course there was never a smoking gun, mushroom or not.
Iraq’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was destroyed in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait and was repelled by a coalition of 35 countries led by the United States. The United Nations Security Council also demanded that Iraq end its biological and nuclear weapons programs.
This is not to say that Hussein was an angry tiger; he wasn’t.
But he was also not the threat he was portrayed. Deceiving a public shattered by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was a relatively easy task for the belligerent neoconservatives of the Bush administration. They foolishly believed they could impose democracy on a nation without history.
Bush officials also fabricated links between Iraq and the September 11 attacks, orchestrated by Islamist militant Osama bin Laden and his terror group al-Qaeda. To his lasting humiliation, the late Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a speech at the United Nations just before the invasion, assured the world that the war was fully justified by the danger Iraq posed to the world.
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed by sources, solid sources,” Powell said. “These are not allegations. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He later admitted that his statements were blatantly false, many of which were passed on to US intelligence by unreliable sources – exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi opposition leader, who dreamed of ousting Hussein and seizing power in Iraq.
Powell’s comments are among those documented in 2008 by the Center for Public Integrity, which collected hundreds of lies told by Bush and his top officials as part of a campaign aimed at convincing the American public to stop the invasion of the United States to reject Iraq. under decidedly false pretenses.”
According to the Center, most media outlets were “largely complicit in their uncritical coverage of the causes of the war”. There was one glaring exception to this complicity. Three reporters and an editor from Knight-Ridder’s Washington bureau were the only major news organizations to question the administration’s WMD narrative. Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and Joe Galloway, along with their editor John Walcott, have questioned so much of what the mainstream media reported. The drama was captured in ‘Shock and Awe’, a 2017 movie directed by Rob Reiner, who plays Walcott.
In 2013, on the 10th anniversary of the invasion, Walcott told me his team was driven by skepticism, journalism’s most valuable resource.
“Most of the government’s arguments for this war made absolutely no sense, especially the idea that Saddam Hussein had ties to Osama bin Laden. A secular Arab dictator allied with a radical Islamist whose goal was to overthrow secular dictators and rebuild his caliphate? The more we examined it, the more it smelled.”
He also said that instead of relying on senior officials, they looked for lower-level staffers who were not political appointees and were less likely to parrot the president to stay in his good graces.
Knight-Ridder has fabricated story after story to undermine the government’s (and the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times) account of Hussein’s abilities. Some of Knight-Ridder’s own newspapers—including the Philadelphia Inquirer—declined to publish the stories, fearing they would be contradicted, particularly by the New York Times, which published its gullible reporting on the issue of weapons of mass destruction some 15 years ago. lasted for months. declared invasion.
“It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons may be unearthed in Iraq,” wrote the Times editors, “but in this case it appears that we have been framed with the government.”
Of course, there was strong opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the US and around the world, although in the early months of the conflict a majority of Americans surveyed were in favour.
It didn’t take long for disillusionment to set in. After all, where were all the Iraqis Vice President Cheney had promised to greet American soldiers as “liberators”?
Cheney has never apologized for his role in the Iraq bug (as far as I know he’s still defending it). Neither has Bush, although he recently admitted, albeit accidentally, the truth.
In a speech last May at the Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, he said it was “one man’s decision to launch a totally unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq, I mean Ukraine.”
He flinched and added almost softly, “Iraq too.”
Source: LA Times