I was struck by the contrast between two passages I came across recently:

Misurata's population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people--including combatants--have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22--less than 3 percent--are women. If Gadhafi were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties.

--Alan J. Kuperman (Boston Globe, 4/14/11)

In a report to be published in tomorrow's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers have concluded that air strikes [in Iraq] by U.S.-led coalition forces have killed mostly women and children. Thirty-nine percent were children, while 46 percent were women.

--Jason Ditz (Antiwar.com, 4/15/09)

After nearly two months of NATO bombardment, the Libyan government's warfare in Misurata may have become more indiscriminate--a reminder of the often inhumane consequences of "humanitarian intervention." But it's striking to see what degree of violence against civilians is treated by U.S. corporate media as a compelling reason to take military action against an official enemy--compared to the much greater level of civilian killing that passes without much notice when it is committed by the United States itself.

OK, this isn't Sean Hannity's byline in the Post today, but it might as well be. The headline should stop you:

In bin Laden Victory, Echoes of the Bush Years

The piece--actually written by Scott Wilson and Anne Kornblut--lays out the argument:

As President Obama celebrates the signature national-security success of his tenure, he has a long list of people to thank. On the list: George W. Bush.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication. Public tolerance for military operations over the past decade has shifted to the degree that a mission carried out deep inside a sovereign country has raised little domestic protest.

And a detention and interrogation system that Obama once condemned as contrary to American values produced one early lead that, years later, brought U.S. forces to the high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and a fatal encounter with an unarmed Osama bin Laden.

So not only did torture work, but the illegal, baseless war against Iraq "forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication."  In other words, the Iraq War led to catching bin Laden. This could give Fox News a new theme to pound for the next couple of days.

Will Ferrell did a one-man show at the end of the Bush years, in his W. character, called "You're Welcome, America." It was pretty funny. This is not.

Tom Friedman, writing today about the Arab Spring (4/13/11--the same column Jim Naureckas critiqued for FAIR Blog here):

Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states.

It's been a while since I've played an organized sport, but if any coach or referee did anything resembling what the U.S. has done in Iraq, they would be removed from the league, and probably put in jail.

That analogy sounded familiar, though. Turns out he's used it before:

Iraq teaches what it takes to democratize a big tribalized Arab country once the iron-fisted leader is removed (in that case by us). It takes billions of dollars, 150,000 U.S. soldiers to referee, myriad casualties, a civil war where both sides have to test each other's power and then a wrenching process, which we midwifed, of Iraqi sects and tribes writing their own constitution defining how to live together without an iron fist. --3/23/11

The U.S. military is still needed as referee. It still is not clear that Iraq is a country that can be held together by anything other than an iron fist. It’s still not clear that its government is anything more than a collection of sectarian fiefs. --6/18/08

It's time to blow the whistle on Friedman for abusive use of analogy.

Afraid of NATO killing civilians in Libya? The New York Times editorial page (4/8/11) sees the way forward by ramping up the war:

 There is a much better option: the American A-10 and AC-130 aircraft used earlier in the Libya fighting and still on standby status....

But no other country has aircraft comparable to America’s A-10, which is known as the Warthog, designed to attack tanks and other armored vehicles, or to the AC-130 ground-attack gunship, which is ideally suited for carefully sorting out targets in populated areas.

AC-130s were used frequently in the Iraq War, particularly in the bloody fight in the city of Fallujah--which was not often characterized by the careful sorting of targets. The Times established a record of downplaying the civilian deaths there, which might help explain why their editorial page has such faith in the careful sorting properties of these aircraft.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had a discussion last week (3/31/11) about the U.S. role in the Libya War with Col. Jack Jacobs, an MSNBC military consultant. Jacobs described the U.S. military's "ability to jam communications that take place between units or among units of Gadhafi‘s army," then referred to the U.S.'s

ability to jam electronic transmissions that occur when Gadhafi's army, ground forces try to fire at allied planes. The instant that a radar system is turned on on the ground, we can detect it and in very short order, send a precision-guided munition that follows the radar beam all the way down to its source.

After responding to that with "Wow," Maddow asked:

One of the things that people have questioned is if the U.S. has this high level of electronic capability, why is Libyan state TV still on the air? Is that not one of the things they would want to shut down?

Maddow's questions echo similar calls by U.S. journalists during the Iraq invasion for an attack on Iraqi government TV--calls that were heeded when the U.S. destroyed the TV studios with a missile attack on March 25, 2003. As FAIR wrote in a media advisory, "U.S. Media Applaud Bombing of Iraqi TV" (3/27/03):

Prior to the bombing, some even seemed anxious to know why the broadcast facilities hadn't been attacked yet. Fox News Channel's John Gibson wondered (3/24/03): "Should we take Iraqi TV off the air? Should we put one down the stove pipe there?" Fox's Bill O'Reilly (3/24/03) agreed: "I think they should have taken out the television, the Iraqi television.... Why haven't they taken out the Iraqi television towers?" MSNBC correspondent David Shuster offered: "A lot of questions about why state-run television is allowed to continue broadcasting. After all, the coalition forces know where those broadcast towers are located."

There is a good reason, actually, why Iraqi TV should not have been attacked: Journalists are civilians, even those who enthusiastically support their country's military efforts, and therefore targeting them is a war crime. The idea that journalists reporting in a country the U.S. is at war with deserve protection seems to have been rejected by the Pentagon, however. As FAIR wrote in "IS Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?" (4/10/03):

In the Kosovo War, the U.S. attacked the offices of state-owned Radio-Television Serbia, in what Amnesty International called a "direct attack on a civilian object" which "therefore constitutes a war crime." On March 25, the U.S. began airstrikes on government-run Iraqi TV, in what the International Federation of Journalists (Reuters, 3/26/03) suggested might also be a Geneva Convention violation, since it the U.S. was "targeting a television network simply because they don't like the message it gives out."

The Committee to Protect Journalists declined to count the Serbian journalists killed by the United States in its annual list of murdered journalists, a move that FAIR warned at the time would contribute to a sense that "enemy" journalists are fair game (Extra!, 9-10/00). Maddow's question suggests that treating reporters as enemy combatants has indeed become the new normal.

In a New York Times science article (3/29/11) about the CIA and Pentagon's psychological profiling of foreign political figures, reporter Benedict Carey adds a note of caution:

Yet the assessments can also be misleading, even embarrassing. Profiles of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq that circulated in the early 1990s suggested that he was ultimately a pragmatist who would give in under pressure.

Carey gives no explanation for why such an assessment would be misleading or embarrassing--as if it went without saying that this was a misreading of the Iraqi dictator. In fact, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Hussein made repeated offers to negotiate a withdrawal--offers that were rejected by the elder Bush administration, and all but ignored by corporate media (Extra!, 11-12/90--see "Writing Off Negotiations").

Hussein also destroyed his chemical and biological weapon stocks under pressure from the U.N.; when the younger Bush insisted that U.N. inspectors be allowed to verify his lack of unconventional weapons, Hussein let them in--and Bush invaded anyway. Though the U.N. inspection teams were a major story in the months before the Iraq War began, corporate media sometimes seem to forget that they existed (Action Alert, 12/2/08).

Presenting Saddam Hussein as a madman who could never be reasoned with obviously helped the U.S. government justify military action. Why journalists should accept this depiction in the face of the historic record--well, you might need a psychological profile to explain that.

The Guardian published a piece yesterday (2/15/11) based on an interview with "Curveball," the Iraqi exile whose fraudulent claims about Iraq's WMDs helped the Bush administration sell the Iraq War. "I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime," he explained.

The piece is pretty revealing--as Curveball watched Colin Powell's UN address in February 2003, the Guardian reports that "he had not met a U.S. official, let alone been interviewed by one."

One "flight of fantasy" Curveball delivered was the  claim that Iraq was manufacturing mobile bio-weapons labs. These did not exist. But if you were watching U.S. television news during the war, you got to see them discovered by at least two networks:

ABC:

On April 26, ABC's World News Tonight led with a major scoop. Anchor Claire Shipman announced at the top of the broadcast, "U.S. troops discover chemical agents, missiles, and what could be a mobile laboratory in Iraq. An ABC News exclusive." But ABC's "exclusive," as it turns out, appears to be false.

And on NBC (5/11/03):

May 11, 2003

—NBC anchor John Seigenthaler introduces a story about trailers found in Iraq that some U.S. officials say are mobile biological warfare labs: "There is new evidence tonight that Saddam Hussein's regime was capable of building weapons of mass destruction." Reporter Jim Avila concludes the report by declaring that the findings present "a set of circumstances military sources contend is very close to that elusive smoking gun."

May 12, 2003
—In a follow-up report, NBC Nightly News correspondent Jim Avila declares that two trailers found by the U.S. military in northern Iraq "may be the most significant WMD findings of the war." Former U.N. nuclear inspector David Kay performs an impromptu inspection—armed with a pointer, he rattles off the trailer's parts: "This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter...." Avila expresses little doubt about the discovery: "A mobile lab capable of manufacturing anthrax or botulism from the back of a truck, with equipment manufactured as late as 2003."

Four months ago, Steve Rendall wrote here (9/10/10) about the militarization of the State Department and its role in the continuing occupation of Iraq--developments that were getting little attention amidst all the talk of the "end" of the war.

Now Aaron Davis of the Washington Post (1/14/11) fills in some of those details, writing that "the contours of a large and lasting American presence here are starting to take shape." Davis adds that:

Planning is underway to turn over to the State Department some of the most prominent symbols of the U.S. role in the war--including several major bases and a significant portion of the Green Zone.

The department would use the bases to house a force of private security contractors and support staff that it expects to triple in size, to between 7,000 and 8,000, U.S. officials said.

The piece is worth reading, despite its unfortunate headline: "U.S. Plans for Presence in Iraq After Pullout." Obviously, if you're planning on being present somewhere, then you're not really "pulling out."

USA Today (1/12/11) continues the tradition of dishonest reporting on the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. In a front-page article, reporter Tom Vanden Brook writes:

Estimates vary among organizations that have tried to count civilian dead, according to a review last year by the Congressional Research Service. The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights reported that 85,694 Iraqi civilians died from insurgent attacks from 2004 through 2008. The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, estimated that more than 111,000 Iraqis died from war-related incidents from 2003 through 2010.

So estimates vary between about 85,000 and 111,000, right? Wrong. As the Congressional Research Service report (10/7/10) that USA Today cites makes clear, the highest estimate from a credible source is over 1 million--that's the number from ORB (9/07), a respected British polling firm. That number is in line with the Johns Hopkins researchers (Lancet, 10/11/06) whose epidemiological survey came up with a likely total of 600,000 violent deaths for an earlier phase of the war.

Different groups, using different approaches to the complicated task of estimating loss of life in a war zone, have come up with a broad range of numbers for the death toll in Iraq. USA Today, however, seems to be using a simple guideline for whether to include such numbers in its reporting: Do they make the U.S. look good?

That's the only reportorial approach that could justify the story's inclusion of this bit of self-serving, evidence-free handwaving:

Despite the imprecision, [Pentagon spokesperson Col. Dave] Lapan said the military believes insurgents killed far more civilians than U.S. and allied forces have in Iraq. However, the military is unable to quantify the claim, he said.

Remember the toppling of that Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad (4/9/03) that signified the "end" of the Iraq War? At the time, there were critics who pointed out that the extensively televised images of a jubilant crowd of Iraqis were misleading. The sense of media excitement was unmistakable; as FAIR pointed out, the Los Angeles Times ran a headline the next day, "Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"

The incident is rehashed and examined in the New Yorker this week by Peter Maass, who was reporting from the scene that day. He states early on that both sides of the war debate got the event wrong:

The toppling of Saddam’s statue turned out to be emblematic of primarily one thing: the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad. That was significant, but everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television--victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq--was a disservice to the truth. Yet the skeptics were wrong in some ways, too, because the event was not planned in advance by the military.

This struck me as an example of a sort of media "false balance," where blame must be assigned to both sides, even when one side is clearly more blameworthy. That's unfortunate, because Maass' report pretty clearly demonstrates that war propaganda need not be orchestrated by clever military censorship or clever public relations--corporate media are eager to misconstrue and distort events on their own.

So what did the "skeptics" get wrong? They believed an Army report that credited the statue operation--from the placement of an Iraqi flag on the statue's head to the pulling down of the statue itself--to an Army psychological operations unit.  Maass notes that this report

was picked up by the news media ("Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue," the headline in the Los Angeles Times [7/3/04] read) and circulated widely on the Web, fueling the conspiracy notion that a psyops team masterminded not only the Iraqi flag but the entire toppling.

The report got very little attention when it was released. (I actually remember a prominent journalist asking me to help him find it.) It's strange to call it a "conspiracy notion," unless you believe that a government report taking credit for a particular action qualifies as a conspiracy.

What Maass reports is that a handful of military personnel, some of whom had a keen understanding of the sort of imagery that would appeal to the press corps working from Baghdad, decided largely on their own to deliver a spectacle that would attract substantial media coverage. And they were right. If anything, they were slightly quicker than the psyops unit that was on the scene that day, broadcasting messages in Arabic. Maass wrote:

But problems with the coverage at Firdos soon emerged, including the duration, which was non-stop, the tone, which was celebratory, and the uncritical obsession with the toppling.

One of the first TV reporters to broadcast from Firdos was David Chater, a correspondent for Sky News, the British satellite channel whose feed from Baghdad was carried by Fox News. (Both channels are owned by News Corp.) Before the marines arrived, Chater had believed, as many journalists did, that his life was at risk from American shells, Iraqi thugs and looting mobs.

"That's an amazing sight, isn't it?" Chater said as the tanks rolled in. "A great relief, a great sight for all the journalists here.... The Americans waving to us now--fantastic, fantastic to see they're here at last." Moments later, outside the Palestine, Chater smiled broadly and told one Marine, "Bloody good to see you." Noticing an American flag in another marine's hands, Chater cheerily said, "Get that flag going!"

Another correspondent, John Burns of the Times, had similar feelings. Representing the most prominent American publication, Burns had a particularly hard time with the security thugs who had menaced many journalists at the Palestine. His gratitude toward the marines was explicit. "They were my liberators, too," he later wrote. "They seemed like ministering angels to me."

Maass writes that reporters and executives watching back at home "were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war":

Wilson Surratt was the senior executive producer in charge of CNN’s control room in Atlanta that morning. The room, dominated by almost 50 screens that showed incoming feeds from CNN crews and affiliated networks, was filled with not just the usual complement of producers but also with executives who wanted to be at the nerve center of the network during one of the biggest stories of their lives. Surratt had been told by the newsroom that Marines were expected to arrive at Firdos any moment, so he kept his eyes on two monitors that showed the still empty square.

"The climax, at the time, was going to be the troops coming into Firdos Square," Surratt told me. "We didn't really anticipate that Hussein was going to be captured. There wasn't going to be a surrender. So what we were looking for was some sort of culminating event."

On that day, Baghdad was violent and chaotic. The city was already being looted by swarms of people using trucks, taxis, horses and wheelbarrows to cart away whatever they could from government buildings and banks, museums and even hospitals. There continued to be armed opposition to the American advance. One of CNN's embedded correspondents, Martin Savidge, was reporting from a Marine unit that was taking fire in the city. Savidge was ready to go on the air, under fire, at the exact moment that Surratt noticed the tanks entering Firdos Square. Surratt vividly recalls that moment, because he shouted out in the control room, "There they are!"

He immediately switched the network's coverage to Firdos, and it stayed there almost non-stop until the statue came down, more than two hours later. I asked Surratt whether, by focusing on Firdos rather than on Savidge and the chaos of Baghdad, he had made the right call.

"What were we supposed to do?" Surratt replied. "Not show what was going on in the square? We did the responsible thing. We were careful to say it was not the end. At some point, you’ve got to trust the viewer to understand what they’re seeing."

That problem of reporters being told to go find the news that was on TV, as opposed to the things they were actually seeing firsthand, was apparently common:

A visual echo chamber developed: Rather than encouraging reporters to find the news, editors urged them to report what was on TV. CNN, which did not have a reporter at the Palestine, because its team had been expelled when the invasion began, was desperate to get one of its embedded correspondents there. Walter Rodgers, whose Army unit was on the other side of the Tigris, was ordered by his editors to disembed and drive across town to the Palestine. Rodgers reminded his editors that combat continued and that his vehicle, moving on its own, would likely be hit by American or Iraqi forces. This said much about the coverage that day: Rodgers could not provide reports of the war's end because the war had not ended.

And:

Anne Garrels, NPR's reporter in Baghdad at the time, has said that her editors requested, after her first dispatch about Marines rolling into Firdos, that she emphasize the celebratory angle, because the television coverage was more upbeat. In an oral history that was published by the Columbia Journalism Review, Garrels recalled telling her editors that they were getting the story wrong: "There are so few people trying to pull down the statue that they can't do it themselves.... Many people were just sort of standing, hoping for the best, but they weren't joyous."

[Newsweek photographer] Gary Knight...had a similar problem as he talked with one of his editors on his satellite phone. The editor, watching the event on TV, asked why Knight wasn’t taking pictures. Knight replied that few Iraqis were involved and the ones who were seemed to be doing so for the benefit of the legions of photographers; it was a show. The editor told him to get off the phone and start taking pictures.

And Maass reports the same happened to at least one newspaper reporter:

Robert Collier, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, filed a dispatch that noted a small number of Iraqis at Firdos, many of whom were not enthusiastic. When he woke up the next day, he found that his editors had recast the story. The published version said that "a jubilant crowd roared its approval" as onlookers shouted, 'We are free! Thank you, President Bush!" According to Collier, the original version was considerably more tempered. "That was the one case in my time in Iraq when I can clearly say there was editorial interference in my work," he said recently. "They threw in a lot of triumphalism. I was told by my editor that I had screwed up and had not seen the importance of the historical event. They took out quite a few of my qualifiers."

Given all the evidence he collects, it's odd for Maass to spend any time at all on how "skeptics" believed in a conspiracy that the statue toppling was a manufactured event. It most clearly was; as he documents, it was manufactured primarily by major U.S. media outlets. In a way, that's far worse than blaming it on official military propaganda efforts.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush's new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10):

As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of Iraq's weapons systems so as to suggest that any other president given the same set of facts would have gone to war. "I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war," he writes. On that score, he is simply not credible.

The accumulating evidence at the time showed that Iraq lacked a nuclear weapons program and did not have biological weapons either. As for its chemical weapons program, while harder to ferret out, it not only no longer existed, but even if it had, it was insufficient reason to go to war. Poison gas has been around since the Second Battle of Ypres. That was 1915. "The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat," Bush writes. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

The late 2010 version of Richard Cohen is certainly up to speed on the pre-war Iraq intelligence. Unfortunately, the 2003 Richard Cohen wasn't, as he most memorably wrote about Colin Powell's UN presentation (2/6/03):

The evidence he presented to the United Nations--some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail--had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool--or possibly a Frenchman--could conclude otherwise.

In that column, Cohen acknowledged the nuclear evidence was weak, but the chemical/biological weapons case was "so strong--so convincing--it hardly mattered that nukes may be years away, and thank God for that."

He also wrote that at the UN presentation, "when the by-now hoary charge was made that a link existed between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad, it was Powell who made it--and it hit with force." So a hoary charge sounded convincing coming from Colin Powell. Is the idea that Powell's just a better liar than Bush?

Patrick Cockburn has a wonderful piece in the Independent (11/23/10) on the hazards of embedded journalism that is a must-read. He points out:

"Embedding" also puts limitations on location and movement. Iraq and Afghanistan are essentially guerrilla wars, and the successful guerrilla commander will avoid fighting the enemy main force and instead attack where his opponent is weak or has no troops at all. This means that the correspondent embedded with the American or British military units is liable to miss or misinterpret crucial stages in the conflict.

Much of the British and American media reporting in Afghanistan since 2006 has been about skirmishing in Taliban strongholds such as Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south of the country. Problems are often reduced to quasi-technical or tactical questions about coping with roadside bombs or lack of equipment. Until recently, there was little reporting or explanation of how the Taliban had been able to extend their rule right up to the outskirts of Kabul.

Cockburn also writes about how embedding can lead journalists to draw false conclusions about certain military tactics, like the conventional wisdom about the "troop surge" in Iraq winning the war, and will do the same in Afghanistan:

There is a more subtle disadvantage to "embedding": it leads reporters to see the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts primarily in military terms, while the most important developments are political or, if they are military, may have little to do with foreign forces. It has become an article of faith among many in the US that the American military finally won the war in Iraq in 2007-08 because it adopted a new set of tactics and sent 30,000 extra troop reinforcements known as "the surge". US troop casualties fell to nothing and Iraqi casualties dropped from their previous horrendous levels. This explanation was deeply satisfying to American national self-confidence and rescued the reputation of the US army. In the months before the 2008 presidential election, it became impossible for any American politicians to suggest that the "surge" had not succeeded without attracting accusations of lack of patriotism.

Yet the developments that ended the worst of the fighting in Iraq mostly had little to do with the US, which was only one player in a complex battle. The attacks on the US military came almost entirely from Sunni Arab insurgents , but by 2007, the Sunni were being heavily defeated by the predominantly Shia security forces and militias and could no longer afford to go on fighting the Americans as well. Al-Qa'ida had overplayed its hand by trying to take control of the whole Sunni community. The Sunni were being driven from Baghdad, which is now an overwhelmingly Shia city. Facing the annihilation of their community, the Sunni insurgents switched sides and allied themselves with the Americans. In this context it was possible for the US to send out penny packets of troops into Sunni areas which were desperate for defenders against Shia death squads and al-Qa'ida commanders demanding that they send their sons to fight.

But the same sort of tactics cannot be replicated in Afghanistan, where conditions were very different. Despite this, until a few months ago, it had become the accepted wisdom of American opinion pages and television talking heads that the US army had found an all-purpose formula for victory in its post-11 September wars. The author of victory, the present US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, became America's most popular, prestigious and unsackable military officer. The failure hitherto of "surge" tactics to work in southern Afghanistan has begun to undermine this faith in the new strategy, but American and British policy is still modelled on the "surge": foreign forces backed by Afghan troops will gain control on the ground; they will then hold it and prevent the Taliban coming back; and, then, finally, they will hand over power to Afghan soldiers, police and officials sent from Kabul.

It is unlikely ever to happen this way. As in Iraq, military actions on the ground in Afghanistan don't make much sense separate from political developments. The Afghan government is notoriously crooked and is regarded by most Afghans as a collection of racketeers. All the media reports of small unit actions whose ultimate purpose is to install the rule of Kabul in southern Afghanistan make little sense since the government is so feeble that it barely exists. In some 80 per cent of the country the state does not exist.

"The reality of the war in Afghanistan," one diplomat told me, "which embedded journalism never reveals, is that 60 per cent of the Afghan government soldiers sent to Helmand or Kandahar desert as soon as they can. They are mostly Tajiks terrified of being sent to the Pashtun south. They are taken from the training camps and put on buses and the doors are locked before they are told where they are being posted." But it is these same terrified soldiers, often not even speaking the language of local people, who are at the heart of Nato's plan for victory in Afghanistan.

I agree with Keith Olbermann (11/15/10) about the dubious value of "objectivity" as a journalistic value; he makes a telling point about how journalistic icons like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow are most honored for the moments when they reached conclusions and asserted values.

And I think he's right that the U.S. media establishment's failure to see through the lies that sold the Iraq War is a singular failure of our journalistic system--one that does indeed suggest that we need an entirely different system that better serves our democracy.

Olbermann's MSNBC forerunner, Phil Donahue, was fired in the run up to the war not because he wasn't neutral enough, after all, but because he would hamper the network's ability to be "waving the flag" like its competitors (All Your TV, 2/25/03). What NBC and its corporate parent GE were looking for was not objectivity but the right kind of bias.

Which is to say, Olbermann is right that it's necessary to have journalists who express values and draw conclusions--but not sufficient.  We also need to talk about which values our corporate-dominated media system is likely to tolerate, and which conclusions are allowed to be drawn.

NBC star Matt Lauer's one-on-one interview with George W. Bush revealed very little in the way of information, though some lessons could be drawn from Lauer's mediocre performance. Here was one comment from near the top of the interview:

The Florida recount.  Hanging chads.  A divided Supreme Court.  George Bush had a rough road to the White House.

Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by half a million. By many reasonable standards, he should have lost the Florida recount too. The Supreme Court made him the president. I'm not sure "rough" is the right way to describe what happened to him.

And then there was this passage on the Iraq War:

LAUER: He says he eventually decided to go to war based on Saddam Hussein's defiance… and what seemed to be rock-solid intelligence.  [To Bush:] On the subject of WMD, George Tenet famously said, "It's a slam dunk."

BUSH: Yes. The intelligence.

LAUER: The intelligence is.  So by the time you gave the order to start military operations in Iraq, did you personally have any doubt, any shred of doubt, about that intelligence?

BUSH: No, I didn't.  I really didn't.

LAUER: Not everybody thought you should go to war, though.  There were dissenters.

BUSH: Of course there were.

LAUER: Did you filter them out?

BUSH: I was--I was a dissenting voice.  I didn't wanna use force.

Saddam Hussein's "defiance" of... what, exactly? The U.N. weapons inspections were underway (and were finding little to support U.S. claims about Iraq's WMD programs). The U.S. failed to win Security Council approval for the military strikes and invasion, but went forward nonetheless.

The problem isn't merely that Lauer did so little to push back against Bush's version of history-- in this case, he provided it. If Lauer is going to bring up the fact that there were "dissenters"--Bush's absurd claim that he was one surely deserved some response--he should have pointed out that some of that dissent came early, from people who believed the "slam dunk" intelligence on Iraq's weapons wasn't a slam dunk at all. But then you'd be pointing out that one of the favorite media tropes about the Iraq War--that "everyone got it wrong"--is false. And the kind of journalist who would do that is the kind of journalist who wouldn't win an exclusive interview with George W. Bush.

"I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do." That's how George W. Bush referred to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in his new book Decision Points. The quote is featured in Time magazine's Verbatim section (11/15/10), and has been discussed pretty widely.

This is an interesting claim. When Bush appeared at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner on March 23, 2004, his sickening feeling was gone--and replaced by his funny bone . Bush's speech included a routine where he joked about the fruitless search for Iraq's deadly weapons, showing slides where administration officials hunted around the White House offices for the weapons. (You can see a partial video of that speech here or here; both include commentary critical of Bush.)

The media reaction at the time, as FAIR noted (Extra!, 5-6/04), was to defend Bush's jokes--the L.A. Times had an editorial called "Commander in Comedy." Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly said, "You know, trying to be funny at these things is so difficult, and he is quite good at it. I mean, he really is very good at self-deprecating humor. The pictures were funny. I laughed at the photos. I mean, he looks goofy, and he's got that great deadpan delivery." You can bet few media outlets will recall this now.