Iraq War Honor Roll

Salute Juan Cole, not Ken Pollack or Fred Kagan

Amid the disastrous manner in which most of the American media aquitted itself in enabling the Iraq war, and then for months after exulting in its “successful” execution until the insurgency took hold, there were a number of honorable exceptions. And Tom Engelhardt, whose web site TomDispatch remains an honorable exception in a media world that has long abandoned deep, critical thought, offers this great list as part of the intro to Greg Mitchell’s critical examination of Iraq war coverage. I was meaning to do something like this myself, but I’ll rely on Tom!

He begins by noting the New York Times’ pathetic attempt to assess the war last Sunday:

Just imagine: You run a flagship national newspaper, the New York Times. It’s the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq. Your own record of reportage in the period leading up to the invasion was not exactly sterling. So, for a change of pace, you decide to turn most of your double op-ed page in your Sunday “Week in Review” over to people who can look back thoughtfully on the misapprehensions of that moment.

But who? Now, that’s a tough one. You want “nine experts on military and foreign affairs” who can consider “the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the prewar debate.” Hmm, sounds like an interesting idea. Of course, one option would be to gather together an involved crew who, even before the invasion began, saw in one way or another that problems, possibly disaster, lay ahead. That would be a logical thought?

?But it wouldn’t be the Times, which this past Sunday chose to ask a rogue’s gallery of “experts” who led (or cheerled) us deep into the war and occupation what surprised them most. Leading off those pages were Richard Perle, nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness,” L. Paul Bremer III, the former American viceroy of Baghdad, who so brilliantly disbanded the Iraqi Army and much of the country as well, not to speak of invasion and occupation cheerleaders Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka, and Kenneth M. Pollack. With the exception of Pollack, all of them unsurprisingly pointed the finger elsewhere or claimed they were really on the mark all along.

So, just in case the Times has a sudden, bizarre urge on some future anniversary to ask a cast of characters who didn’t drive us into the nearest ditch to look back, it seems worthwhile to start on a list of suggestions for its editors.

He salutes Mitchell’s own efforts at Editor and Publisher, then adds the following list:

My list would be long indeed, but it would certainly include: the Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) reporters Warren Stroebel and Jonathan Landy in Washington, as well as Tom Lasseter, Hannah Allam, and others in Iraq who never had a flagship paper to show off their work, but generally did far better reporting than the flagship papers; Seymour Hersh, who simply picked up where he left off in the Vietnam era (though this time for the New Yorker); Riverbend, the young Baghdad blogger who gave us a more vivid view of the occupation than any you could ordinarily find in the mainstream media (and who has not been heard from since she arrived in Syria as a refugee in October 2007); Jim Lobe who covered the neocons like a blanket for Inter Press Service; independents Nir Rosen and Dahr Jamail, as well as Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent, who has been perhaps the most courageous (or foolhardy) Western reporter in Iraq, invariably bringing back news that others didn’t have; the New York Review of Books, which stepped into some of the empty print space where the mainstream media should have been (with writers like Mark Danner and Michael Massing) and was the first to put into print in this country the Downing Street Memo, in itself a striking measure of mainstream failure; and Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment website was so on the mark on Iraq that reporters locked inside the Green Zone in Baghdad read it just to keep informed.

Amen to that. But as Bill Moyers noted a while back, having been wrong about Iraq has hardly been a handicap for the career of most of the “pundits” preferred by the mainstream media. Frankly, looking at the career trajectories of the likes of Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, Peter Beinart and George Packer, I’d say that, if anything, having been wrong about Iraq appears to be something of a job-requirement in the mainstream punditocracy.