Was Iraq the Fourth Estate’s Waterloo?
The question that now lurks in the back of everyone’s mind when consuming media is, “Hang on, weren’t you the ones who swore blind Saddam had WMDs?”
“The decision to go to war was a clear misjudgement.”
David Frum, George W Bush’s speechwriter and coiner of the phrase “Axis of Evil”
Worse still is that there has been no accountability for the architects of the debacle. The political leaders have mostly moved on, but with Olympic-level chutzpah, many of the so-called intellectuals who advocated it are still out there, lecturing the American people that it’s treasonous to oppose immersing the US into other conflicts. Is there a word for the complete lack of self-awareness you need to possess to denounce Trump and the new conservative populism even as you are principally responsible for the disasters that ignited it? A better course for those of us who supported that terrible misadventure is to admit our shameful error or, failing that, take an oath of respectful silence.
Gerard Baker, Editor at Large, The Wall Street Journal
[Churning out pro-Iraq War propaganda and traducing any sceptics] was done not out of fear of the secret police but out of sheer enthusiasm: Many of the nation’s journalists and writers gladly volunteered for that work. They set out to make sure an insane thing became common sense among the elite. In doing all this, they betrayed their role as intellectuals for the cheap rewards of clique, career, or conceit. As a rule, this is the easiest class to buy off. They don’t even want a lot of money: you just need to flatter them that their own little notions are important and being made real, that they are not just history’s recorders and witnesses but its authors. Many of these same people now lecture us sententiously about democracy, the open society, and the dangers of creeping totalitarianism. I guess they know whereof they speak.
John Ganz writing in
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
One of the highlights of my journalistic career was spending a few hours drinking and chatting with Christopher Hitchens when he was visiting Australia for the first (and last) time to promote his memoir.
Hitchens remains widely beloved to this day and I was certainly a fanboy when I met him 13 years ago. I’m still an admirer, though I’m less inclined to hero-worshipping him in my early fifties than I was in my late thirties.
When I interviewed Hitchens in early 2010, he was still an impassioned supporter of the Iraq War. But even at that stage, it was clear that things weren’t turning out as he had hoped they would. When I asked him about this, Hitchens didn’t mention Weapons of Mass Destruction, despite previously having been a big believer in them. Somewhat wearily, he told me he had been reporting from the Middle East for decades and large numbers of Iraqis had been dying throughout that period, not least from UN sanctions. Therefore, he argued, we shouldn’t be overly sentimental about lots of Iraqis dying after being invaded by a superpower that Iraq posed no real threat to.
Or as Hitchens somewhat more elegantly put it, “There’s a ruined and maimed and traumatised Iraq in our future either way. The shortest way out of that is to make Iraq not any longer the private property of a psychopathic crime family… of course, I wish it had come at a lower price, but the price was extracted by the crime family.”
But was it really, Christopher?
Oops
Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. You are a high-profile journalist who wakes up one morning and drinks 700ml of clear liquid out of a glass bottle with an Absolut label on it before attempting to drive to the ‘newspaper of record’ that employs you. Predictably enough, you get into a horrific accident. You kill several fellow motorists and a large group of children walking to school. It’s inconsequential compared to the human carnage, but a significant economic cost is also incurred as your out-of-control vehicle demolishes several roadside shops.
Now imagine this happens and neither you nor your employer suffers any serious adverse consequences. In fact, there is so little blowback that you never even feel obliged to apologise for your actions. If you are ever pressed about your ill-considered behaviour, you aver that you sincerely believed the clear liquid in the Absolut bottle was water, not vodka. You’re not an industrial chemist – leaving aside the liquid’s taste, smell, location and labelling, how were you meant to realise it wasn’t life-giving H2O?
Luckily, your career doesn’t take any kind of lasting hit. And while everyone knows what you did, most of those you interact with are diplomatic enough not to mention the unfortunate incident you were once involved in.
At this point, dear reader, you are probably silently protesting that such a scenario is absurd to the point of utter unfeasibility.
I wish I could agree, but it’s pretty much what happened with the media’s fervent drum-banging for the Iraq War. As far as I’m aware, there has been no mea culpa (the afore-quoted Gerard Baker honourably excepted) issued by any of the major media players – a crew that encompasses everybody from New York Times’ editorial writers, to Rupert Murdoch’s reliably compliant newspaper editors and network CEOs, to talking heads on supposedly progressive public broadcasters such as the BBC and ABC – that were so vocal about the need for regime change in Iraq. Indeed, some of those with bloodstained hands still possess the unfathomable level of shamelessness required to write an op-ed entitled “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War”.
How the media went AWOL
Sure, the media lied America, as well as several of its (pathetically eager) allies, into a disastrous war. Granted, that war resulted in the deaths of thousands of Western military personnel, not to mention the psychological and physical maiming of many more soldiers who were at the business end of the Coalition of the Willing’s grand plans. Of course, several hundred thousand Iraqis died, many of them civilians. And, yes, the US blew trillions of dollars on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and will likely be on the hook for trillions more in the years to come.
But, hey, what did you expect an estate that endlessly wanks on about holding the powerful to account and afflicting the comfortable to do to prevent any of that?
That the media could have pointed out attacking Iraq after 9/11 made about as much sense as bombing Fiji back to the Stone Age would have done after Pearl Harbour? That the media might have paid a little more attention to the involvement of the Saudis in 9/11? That the media would have observed that The Blob had long been spoiling for a war with Iraq and was cynically exploiting the American public’s grief and rage to achieve a long-standing goal? That newspaper editors would have turned the front page over to one of the many intelligence and military experts who questioned the claims Iraq possessed weapons capable of inflicting damage on the US or its allies? That the media would have cautioned that it’s a lot easier to get into wars than to get out of them and that military conflicts typically have unintended and unpleasant consequences, and not only for those on the losing side? That TV networks should have continued to employ journalists such as Phil Donahue and Peter Arnett? Worldly individuals who had the gall to note that while the Iraq War was all but guaranteed to turn out exceedingly well for the military-industrial complex, it might not turn out to the best advantage of any of the nations involved in it.
What are you, a cheese-eating surrender monkey?
We’re all Chomskyites now
Those who’ve studied the media, most famously Noam Chomsky, have periodically made convincing arguments that the mainstream media manufactures consent for ruling elites (rather than holding them to account on behalf of the common man).
Chomsky and his ilk hypothesise that respectable media organisations facilitate passionate debate within the Overton window (e.g. thirteen-year-olds should/should not be able to undergo gender reassignment surgery) but give short shrift to any subversive ideas that truly threaten the interests of the powerful. (For instance, the arguments for a Royal Commission into why Murdoch controls so much of the media. Or the case for national governments demonstrating a little more curiosity about the use of offshore tax havens by ultra-high-net-worth individuals.)
It's near impossible to prove this, but I suspect that prior to the Iraq War most media consumers assumed they were usually getting, to use the industry jargon, straight reporting. That is, while both individual journalists and media outlets often got things wrong, these were usually innocent mistakes that had to be expected of those putting together “the first rough draft of history”.
Post-Iraq War, it’s indisputable that most Americans, Brits and Australians don’t believe media outlets are acting in good faith. It’s not just that they believe that the left-leaning or right-leaning media is untrustworthy. It’s that they suspect even the ideologically sympatico media they choose to consume is untrustworthy. (Albeit marginally less untrustworthy than the truly despicable progressive or conservative media that those on the other side of the political fence mindlessly partake of.)
There are several causes for the decline of the mainstream media and the concomitant rise of independent media over the last decade or two. But I would argue that one of the main reasons for the success of podcasters such as Joe Rogan and Russell Brand, Substackers such as
and , YouTubers such as Jordan ‘Friendlyjordies’ Shanks and newish media moguls such as Bari Weiss and Ben Shapiro is that people believe they are more likely to get straight reporting – or at least reporting that is upfront about its agenda and biases – from the independents.It's almost as if you can’t actually get away with trying to memory hole the story of how you got once behind the wheel when you shouldn’t have and destroyed the lives of many, many people as a result.
Even if it all happened such a long time ago.