The mea culpas of the pundits

No, there has been none.* 

One of the most dispiriting thing in recent commentary on the ten year long Iraq war has been the clean chit that that most pundits and so called political elites have manage to earn on the TV air waves. None of them have apologized for their deception and lies that cost thousands of lives. John Judis tries to lay this out in his piece below but it is way short of what needs to be done. Look I am not suggesting they all commit harakiri - although I also think the country deserves at least a few victims- but really should they all  be allowed to continue to preen and pretend a knowledge they clearly don't have on the air? There has to be some accountability for being wrong especially if it costs the country a trillion dollars and thousands of lives? Can we not banish them for say a period of seven years from the public discourse and send them to a half way house for the politically inept and cowardly ? Thus when some of them now pontificate like say Fred Hyatt editor of the Washington Post, should not the public know how wrong he was about the Iraq war ? If Paul Wolwowitz deigns to come on TV, should he not have a red mark on his face for his role in this tragedy? In olden times , women were branded as witches so all could beware their machinations, why should we not do the same to these modern day hucksters- none of which have been punished till this date for thie complicity i these crimes? Sometimes I feel the US society is too forgiving and hence ends up with a continuous litany of such crimes. 

There were, of course, people who opposed invading Iraq—Illinois State Senator Barack Obama among them—but within political Washington, it was difficult to find like-minded foes. When The New Republic’s editor-in-chief and editor proclaimed the need for a “muscular” foreign policy, I was usually the only vocal dissenter, and the only people who agreed with me were the women on staff: Michelle Cottle, Laura Obolensky and Sarah Wildman. Both of the major national dailies—The Washington Postand The New York Times (featuring Judith Miller’s reporting)—were beating the drums for war. Except for Jessica Mathews at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington’s thinktank honchos were also lined up behind the war.

In December of 2002, John Judis was invited by the Ethics and Public Policy Center to a ritzy conference at an ocean front resort in Key West. The subject was to be Political Islam, and many of the best-known political journalists from Washington and New York were there. The conversation invariably got around to Iraq, and he found myself one of the few attendees who outright opposed an invasion. He found fellow dissenters to the war in two curious places: the CIA and the military intelligentsia. 

These dissenters were entirely right about the war, and nothing that has happened since then has weakened their case. The United States got several hundred thousand people killed to install a regime that may eventually prove to be as oppressive as Saddam Hussein’s, is closely allied to the Iranian government, and has proven as likely to give oil contracts to Chinese firms as to American firms. And oh yes, Iraq didn’t have “WMDs” after all—a ridiculous acronym that the administration and its supporters used to equate the possession of chemical or biological weapons with the possession of nuclear weapons.

The people who had the most familiarity with the Middle East and with the perils of war were dead set against the invasion. That includes not only the CIA analysts and the military professors, but also the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which rejected the administration’s claims that Iraq was about to acquire nuclear weapons. But they were not in a position to make their voices heard. The CIA analysts were reduced to creating half-cocked schemes for getting a report on the far-flung future to the White House, which they hoped someone would read. The military dissenters, as we know, were silenced by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. And the State Department was ignored by the White House.

Some people in Washington still haven’t recanted (unless we missed an editorial on Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post op-ed page apologizing for the newspaper’s leading role in stoking the flames of war), but most of the people John worked with began to doubt the war within about four months. John;s own experience after Powell’s speech bears out the tremendous power that an administration, bent on deception, can have over public opinion, especially when it comes to foreign policy. And when the dissenters in the CIA, military, and State Department are silenced, the public—not to mention, journalists—has little recourse in deciding whether to support what the administration wants to do. 

While open public discourse is essential on major issues of the day equally essential is the sense of accountability brought on by at least a modicum of punishment. As with children, if we spare the rod, can continuous bad behavior be far behind ?

* I stand corrected, here is David Frum, Bush's speechwriter, in Newsweek:

"Over the past 10 years, there have been few days when the war in Iraq was absent from my thoughts. People often ask me whether I have regrets. It seems absurdly presumptuous to answer the question. I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me. And yet ... all of us who advocated for the war have had to do some reckoning. If the war achieved some positive gains, its unnecessary costs—in human life, in money, to the prestige and credibility of the U.S. government—are daunting and dismaying. If we’d found the WMD, it would have been different. If we’d kept better order in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, it would have been different. If more Iraqis had welcomed the invasion as we expected, it would have been different. If the case for the war had been argued in a less contrived and predetermined way, it would have been different. But it wasn’t different. Those of us who were involved—in whatever way—bear the responsibility."