The Washington Post used to be a great American newspaper, the only one to ever bring down a corrupt president. It did that through the tenacity, intelligence and courage of its reporting.
This past weekend, the newspaper published an editorial marking the fourth anniversary of the start of a disastrous war in Iraq. The Post, through its support of the Bush administration, helped make the war happen.
The piece was breathtaking, in that the Post still refuses to acknowledge reality. And it was depressing, since the paper's editorial board called the piece Lessons of War, but has apparently learned next to nothing since 2003.
Here are some of things the editorial said:
"The easy way out is to blame President Bush, Vice President Cheney or former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld."
Uhhh, yes. That is because they started the war. Mess up, and lie along the way, and you tend to get blamed for stuff. That's how life is. Now, had the editorial writers made that point in order to set up a big journalistic mea culpa on the Post's role as Bush enablers, that would have been fine. But that's not what followed.
"It would almost be comforting if Mr. Bush had 'lied the nation into war,' as is frequently charged." the editorial said. "The best postwar journalism instead suggests that the president and his administration exaggerated, cherry-picked and simplified but fundamentally believed" the intelligence.
I live overseas and from time to time am confronted with American friends who are smart and well informed, but who still live in denial on this particular point; the delusion that President Bush was a victim of bad intelligence. When that happens, I find that the following approach tends to make things clearer for them.
OK - imagine you're watching a movie, and in the immediate aftermath of an historic terror attack (something like 9/11) a president and his defense secretary go to the their chief counter terrorism official (someone like Richard Clark) who has served under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and whose expertise and loyalty are beyond question.
When this fictional president and his trigger-happy defence chief try to pin the blame for the terror attack on a middle eastern country they have previous issues with (like Iraq), the counter terrorism guy tells them they're wrong, that country had nothing to do with it.
Now, fast forward about five years. The war's a disaster. The basis for it has been proven false. The counter terrorism official has been proven right, the administration wrong.
Imagine now, movie viewer, that the president is depicted by the screenwriters as an unwitting victim of an intelligence failure. That the CIA, in fact, let him down by falsely implicating a middle eastern country that just happens to be the same one the president had in his cross hairs in the first place.
As a viewer, would you find that plot line credible? Would you believe the president? Or would you want your money back?
On its own pre-Iraq performance, the Post lamented "clearly we were insufficiently skeptical of intelligence reports" and "we raised...issues in our prewar editorials but with insufficient force."
More tellingly, though, the editorial went on to say that the Iraq "experience has shown the risks of pre-emptive war. Yet it remains true in an era of ruthless, suicidal terrorists and easily smuggled weapons of unimaginable destructive power that not acting also can be dangerous."
That argument is vintage Cheney. Lumping the terrorists together with WMD was the administration's rhetorical modus operandi, the one that got us into this mess in the first place. Five plus years after 9/11, four years after the invasion and rather than denounce this kind of linkage, the Washington Post resorts to it, in order to defend its own sorry record on the biggest story of this generation..
Sometimes newspapers publish editorials in order to inform. More often, they are out to influence. And they tend to write with history in mind, to stake their place.
The Washington Post wasn't trying to inform its readers with this editorial. The truth is already out there. The paper, and the corporation that owns it, sought to influence, pushing the fallacy that the war was more of a mistake than a conspiracy, arguing US troops should stay in Iraq and not pull out.
And as for the historians? When they look back at the Washington Post's performance on the Iraq story, the good ones will go back to pre-April 2003 - pre-invasion. There they will find the true story unvarnished by subsequent re-writes.
That story will include one particularly ironic aspect, the kind historians like to write of; a once great newspaper, less tenacious, intelligent and courageous than it used to be, effectively brought down by an American president and his corrupt administration.