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Did Our Leading Newspapers Set Too Low a Bar for a Preemptive Attack? by Chris Mooney 
Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 2, March-April 2004 Did Our Leading Newspapers Set Too Low a Bar for a Preemptive Attack? BY CHRIS MOONEY On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now infamous presentation to the United Nations concerning Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and its ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. At the time, many journalists, members of Congress, and key Security Council nations remained unconvinced of the necessity of invading Iraq. Laced with declassified satellite imagery, communications intercepts, and information gleaned from Iraqi defectors, Powell's speech sought to bolster the Bush administration's case for war by demonstrating an "accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior" on Iraq's part. And it enjoyed a strikingly warm reception from one key U.S. audience: the editorial page writers of major newspapers. "Irrefutable," declared The Washington Post. Powell "may not have produced a 'smoking gun,'" added The New York Times, but his speech left "little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one." Similar assessments came from four other editorial pages that cjr chose to examine - the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. Many foreign papers viewed Powell's presentation more skeptically, but the endorsements from these six leading domestic editorial boards - four of which would ultimately support the war - strengthened Bush's hand considerably. "If and when the administration gets editorial support from the elite media, it's just about a done deal, because the public will fall in line," says David Domke, a professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle who has studied editorial page response to 9/11 and the Iraq war. At the time of Powell's speech, Bush's casus belli - it has since changed considerably - centered on the danger Iraq posed to the United States with its supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, its quest to build a nuclear weapon, and the possibility that Saddam Hussein might transfer any of these arms to anti-American terrorists. In his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush directly linked Iraq and the war on terror, asking Americans to "imagine those nineteen hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." Powell sought to intensify this sense of imminent threat, while also rubbing the UN's nose in Iraq's history of thwarting weapons inspections. And by faithfully refracting his message, major U.S. editorial pages conditioned themselves to treat Bush's national security argument with deference during the days leading up to war. Even the antiwar New York Times based its opposition primarily on Bush's go-it-alone mentality, while largely accepting the weapons of mass destruction case and, at least at times, the president's good intentions. "It's not surprising that in the wake of September 11, the president would want to make the world safer, and that one of his top priorities would be eliminating Iraq's ability to create biological, chemical and nuclear weapons," wrote the Times on February 23, 2003. Fear itself reinforced this framing: during the run-up to war the nation fretted through an orange alert and citizens were urged to purchase duct tape for protection against a chemical attack. Hindsight can be 20/20. These editors could hardly have known that Colin Powell would stake his reputation on flimsy evidence, that the U.S. would fail to find biological and chemical weapons in Iraq or any evidence of an active nuclear program, or that the war and its chaotic aftermath would cost more than five hundred U.S. lives (and rising). Still, there may be no higher duty for an editorial page than to set a high bar for war, particularly a preemptive war that most of the world is against. So it's fair to ask what these newspapers might have done differently - and, given what we know now, what they wish they'd written during the days before war early last year. WHAT THEY WROTE IN THE RUN-UP Here's what these six editorial pages did write, during the crucial six-week period between Powell's speech and the beginning of hostilities on March 19, 2003. They ranged from hawkish without a shade of doubt (The Wall Street Journal and, to a lesser extent, the Chicago Tribune), to prowar but conflicted (The Washington Post and USA Today), to antiwar without United Nations approval (The New York Times and Los Angeles Times). None of these six unconditionally opposed war. Neither did any of them throw their weight behind intellectually appealing, but nevertheless unofficial, prowar arguments. These included the so-called "liberal hawk" position, which focused less on Hussein's status as an imminent threat and more on the moral case for overthrowing a murderous tyrant. In other words, of the six papers we studied, for the most part, the ones that supported war also accepted Bush's justifications for it. For the fiercely conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, war was "above all about American self-defense." Though the Bush administration alienated much of the world with its bellicosity, the Journal trained its critical fire almost exclusively on France, Germany, and the United Nations. If the UN couldn't deal with Iraq, wrote the paper, responsibility would fall to the U.S.: "Someone has to prevent the emergence of nuclear- and biological-armed chaos." The Journal called Powell's presentation "persuasive to anyone who is still persuadable"; it also labored mightily to connect Iraq and al Qaeda, calling Hussein and Osama bin Laden "brothers under the skin" and writing, "Mr. Bush has declared a 'war on terror' and Saddam's Iraq is terrorism with an address." In an editorial titled "Saddam and the Next 9/11," the Journal even speculated, wildly, that Hussein may have been behind the October 2001 anthrax attacks. The Chicago Tribune presented a similarly assured prowar case, barely criticizing the Bush administration while unloading on easier targets like the "hysterical French." The Tribune maintained that war should come only as a last resort. Yet the paper argued that by acting as an "axis of appeasement" toward Hussein, instead of backing tough Iraq inspections with serious consequences for failure to disclose weapons, key UN nations had brought an unnecessary war upon themselves. Faced with Hussein's intransigence and the UN's spinelessness, wrote the Tribune on March 2, the U.S. had no choice but to deal militarily with Iraq's "lethal menace." A more introspective prowar stance emerged from The Washington Post. The paper started out hawkishly, echoing many of Bush's arguments and calling war "an operation essential to American security" even before Powell's presentation. The Post then quickly endorsed Powell's WMD and al Qaeda claims (though previously it had been skeptical about al Qaeda connections). Yet as invasion approached, the paper shifted its tone. In two lengthy editorials, it directly answered antiwar arguments and responded to readers who'd accused the paper of "jingoism." Following this public grappling with dissent, the Post unleashed a flurry of editorials smacking the Bush administration for "worryingly vague" postwar planning, for refusing to provide a cost estimate for war, and for giving up too soon on compromise at the UN. The paper never changed its stance on war, however. If the Post was the most self-questioning prowar paper, USA Today often seemed the hardest to pin down. A long supporter of "regime change" in Iraq, the paper enthusiastically welcomed Powell's speech, saying it contained "new and forceful evidence" of Iraq's weapons programs and terrorism links. Soon the paper called disarming Iraq "a critical component to the war on terror." But as war neared, USAT amassed serious criticisms of Bush - he's hasty; he's soured things with our allies; he hasn't really made a strong case - while stressing the importance of broad international backing for any military effort and calling war a "last resort." Despite these grave worries, however, when Bush hastened to battle in late March with few allies - unilaterally and hardly as a "last resort" - USAT gave its blessing, calling war "the best of the bad alternatives." By comparison, The New York Times maintained a rigid consistency. Even as the paper called Powell's speech "the most powerful case to date" against Hussein, it also warned that the U.S. "cannot afford to confront Iraq without broad international support." The Times maintained this line throughout, applauding when the administration opted for "coercive diplomacy" - a phrase the paper seemed proud of - but also criticizing Bush's "destructive 'with us or against us' approach." Though willing to support a war sanctioned by the UN, the Times challenged the notion that Hussein posed an "immediate danger" to the U.S. and devoted an entire editorial to debunking the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. "This page has never wavered in the belief that Mr. Hussein must be disarmed," it concluded on March 18. "Our problem is with the wrongheaded way this administration has gone about it." Perhaps even more than The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times doubted that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the U.S., calling claims that he did "hypothetical." The paper therefore argued that the Bush administration should act in concert with the United Nations or not at all. The Times bought Powell's WMD claims, but whacked the administration for stressing unproven Iraq-al Qaeda ties and treating diplomacy like a "demolition derby." The Times exhorted recalcitrant European nations to set an enforceable deadline for Iraqi disarmament, giving Bush some other option than to go it alone. But in opposing Bush's "impatient war" on March 18, it concluded that "a U.S.-led invasion, without sanction from the United Nations, would make this nation and the world at large more dangerous." THE ARC OF THE ARGUMENT Reading through these year-old editorials, it's startling how different the Iraq war appears today. In his ultimatum speech to Saddam Hussein on March 17, 2003, President Bush told Americans there was "no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." By contrast, in his 2004 State of the Union speech Bush could only weakly assert that U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq had uncovered "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" - a kind of Monty Python parody of the case for war advanced less than a year earlier. None of the papers, in fact, held the Bush administration to an adequate standard of proof when it came to launching not just a war, but a preemptive war opposed by most of the world. Given the context of 9/11 and a climate of deference to the president on matters of national security, perhaps such questioning of presidential authority seemed inconceivable. Nevertheless, had the papers shown more skepticism, we might not have as much cause today to second-guess either the Iraq war itself, or the way leading editorial pages wrote about it. THE IRAQ-AL QAEDA CONNECTION To see how those editorial pages fell short of their responsibilities, first consider the misleading Iraq-al Qaeda claims presented by Colin Powell before the United Nations - and warmly endorsed by the four prowar papers. In his United Nations speech, Powell promised, "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." He then went on to claim that a Palestinian terrorist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a poisons specialist, headed a deadly Iraq-based terrorist network. Powell called al-Zarqawi "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants," adding that the radical Islamic group Ansar-al-Islam, linked to al-Zarqawi, had a foothold in northeastern Iraq. In February of this year, The New York Times reported that U.S. officials had just intercepted a message, probably from al-Zarqawi, to senior leaders of al Qaeda, asking for help fighting Americans in Iraq. As the Times reported, the document suggests evidence of contacts between extremists in Iraq and al Qaeda now, "but it does not speak to the debate about whether there was a Qaeda presence in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era, nor is there any mention of a collaboration with Hussein loyalists." "Little evidence," the Times reported, "has emerged to support the allegation of a prewar Qaeda connection in Iraq." Indeed, Powell's claim fits a pattern of allegations that have been repeatedly undercut by more comprehensive assessments. For example, a June 2003 draft report by the UN Monitoring Group on al Qaeda found no link between al Qaeda and Iraq. As the Carnegie Endowment notes, "the most intensive searching over the last two years has produced no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and al Qaeda." Vice President Dick Cheney continues to make noises about Iraq-al Qaeda linkages, and a November 2003 article in The Weekly Standard published excerpts from a list of fifty supposed Iraq-al Qaeda contacts compiled by Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith (the Defense Department strongly challenged the Standard's interpretation). Yet the Carnegie report disputes the very idea that Hussein would have considered passing off weapons to a terrorist group whose radical Islamist principles he despised. Not only do we have grounds today to question Powell's assertion, but considerable grounds existed at the time. British papers like the Independent and Guardian scoffed at the claim. The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times weren't convinced, either. The latter noted that Powell had failed to prove that al-Zarqawi had strong al Qaeda ties, and pointed out that Ansar-al-Islam operated out of a Kurdish-controlled area of Iraq beyond the control of Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, all four prowar papers accepted Powell's claim. Furthermore, during the period studied for this article, none of these papers seriously questioned the Bush administration's regular assertion of other operational links that Powell didn't mention (such as the claim that the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague) or the administration's wanton efforts to link Saddam Hussein and 9/11 rhetorically. Therefore, these papers' ringing endorsement of Powell's claim can, at the very least, be read as a passive acceptance of the administration's larger strategic campaign to link Iraq with al Qaeda. The Wall Street Journal - whose editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, declined to be interviewed for this article - pushed questionable al Qaeda theories the hardest. The Journal not only called Powell's evidence about al-Zarqawi "worrisome," but, acting as a kind of low-level intelligence analyst, also attempted to read the tea leaves of the Iraqi state-controlled media, citing articles that expressed approval of al Qaeda's anti-American activities as evidence of a sinister, deeper collaboration. "Saddam Hussein is probably too clever to get caught openly canoodling with Osama bin Laden," wrote the paper, "but the evidence . . . shows that they share the same evil purposes." The Chicago Tribune also endorsed Powell's al Qaeda evidence; the secretary of state, wrote the paper, "fleshed out evidence that Iraq harbors an active terrorist network linked to Al Qaeda." In an interview, the Tribune's editorial page editor, Bruce Dold, defended that description, calling the al Qaeda issue an "open question." Absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pointed out with respect to Iraq and al Qaeda collaboration. But at some point, the burden of proof should shift onto those continuing to assert an Iraq-al Qaeda link without compelling evidence. Although before Powell's speech USA Today had questioned the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, the paper wrote that Powell had made "the most convincing case to date" that it did indeed exist. Today, editorial page editor Carol Stevens comments, "We found the idea of a cell operating in Iraq credible after listening to Powell, but I don't think we ever found it credible that there was an operational connection" between Iraq and al Qaeda. The paper did not make that distinction in its editorials at the time, however. The Washington Post has also proven willing to reassess the subject of Iraq-al Qaeda connections. Like USA Today, before Powell's speech the Post had seemed unconvinced that such ties existed. But the paper concluded that Powell offered "a powerful new case" that Hussein was in cahoots with a branch of al Qaeda. In a lengthy October 2003 editorial entitled iraq in review, however, the Post seemed to swing back again, accusing administration officials like Dick Cheney of pushing "exaggerated" ties between the two groups, adding, "For our part, we never saw a connection between Iraq and 9/11 or major collaboration between Saddam and al Qaeda." By e-mail, the Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, clarified that Powell's al-Zarqawi evidence would not have constituted a "major" collaboration by the standard set forth in the paper's October iraq in review editorial. Yet though the Post now says it wasn't convinced that Iraq was working with bin Laden, during the period between Powell's speech and war, it did not challenge Bush administration insinuations to this effect. THE INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Even as the four prowar papers endorsed Colin Powell's sketchy al Qaeda claims, they showed little predisposition to take seriously much stronger evidence, presented by the UN inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei, questioning the U.S. case for war. Indeed, some showed an almost knee-jerk tendency to distrust international perspectives, verging on xenophobic in the case of The Wall Street Journal. When Saddam declared that he had no weapons of mass destruction - which now appears to have been the truth - the Journal nastily retorted, "If you believe that, you are probably a Swedish weapons inspector." Consider what was arguably the most important rebuttal to U.S. intelligence claims, a report to the UN by El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and chief UN nuclear inspector. The Bush administration had repeatedly asserted that in addition to possessing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam was on the verge of going nuclear. "We cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," Bush observed in an October 2002 speech. Yet on March 7, 2003, confirming his preliminary findings of January, El Baradei told the United Nations he had found no evidence of any active Iraqi nuclear program. In dismantling this central tenet of the U.S. case for war, El Baradei challenged the assertion - made, among other places, by Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech - that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from Niger, alleging that it was based on forged documents (as we now know to have been the case). The Egyptian inspector also debunked repeated U.S. claims that Iraq had sought aluminum tubes for the purpose of uranium enrichment. Reviewing the evidence today, El Baradei appears to have been vindicated on all counts. As the former chief U.S. weapons inspector, David Kay, told Congress last October, "We have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material." In the weeks before war, however, the four prowar papers largely shrugged off El Baradei's critique (which thoroughly anticipated Kay's eventual conclusion, announced this January, that Iraq lacked a "reconstituted, full-blown nuclear program"). The Chicago Tribune didn't even mention it. The Post took perhaps an even more dismissive approach to El Baradei, calling his March 7 presentation a "diversion" and noting that the debunked Niger uranium claim "did not even form part of Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent presentation to the Security Council." The Post didn't ask why such a dubious piece of evidence made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address, however. Nor did it explore what it says about the uses and abuses of U.S. intelligence that the president presented information to the American public that Colin Powell considered unfit for the United Nations. (Asked about the Post's treatment of El Baradei, Hiatt said the paper had based its case for war more on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons stockpiles than on concern about nuclear weapons.) The Journal was equally dismissive. "Mr. El Baradei made a public fuss last week about one British-U.S. claim that turns out to have been false, but which was in any case peripheral to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," it editorialized. But again, El Baradei had challenged the entire notion that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons, not "one British-U.S. claim." The inspector knocked out an entire leg of the Bush case for war - and moreover, the one that had seemed to present the strongest need for urgent action against Iraq (to prevent the country from achieving nuclear status). ElBaradei's report may help explain why so many UN members were reluctant to endorse an immediate invasion along the timetables urged by the U.S. and Britain. USA Today covered El Baradei's report in three sentences - in some ways a better job than the other three papers. Yet, while it rebuked the U.S. and Britain for relying on apparently poor intelligence with respect to the Niger claim and aluminum tubes, USAT didn't seem to grasp that El Baradei was challenging the entire nuclear weapons argument, rather than a few details. Moreover, the paper mentioned El Baradei's speech in the context of a "pox on both your houses" editorial that rebuked both sides for using sketchy evidence in the Iraq debate. Asked about her coverage of El Baradei's speech, editorial page editor Stevens commented, "I think that we assessed it fairly, given what was going on at the time." In examining the generally dismissive reactions to the UN's chief nuclear inspector, one comes face to face with the strongly nationalistic character of many U.S. editorial pages' writings in the run-up to war with Iraq. As the Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, a dissenter from his paper's editorial stance on Iraq, put it during the weeks preceding war, "Here in America, there is general agreement that we are right and everybody else on Earth is wrong." This sardonic assessment certainly dovetails with these four papers' approach to El Baradei's presentation. The editorial pages' nationalistic impulse was only strengthened by the 9/11 context, suggests the University of Washington's Domke. Against the backdrop of terrorist threats and a strong emphasis on national security, major newspaper editorial boards tended to play it safe, deferring to the president and his advisers when it came to protecting Americans. Thus Powell's claims were instantly ratified, El Baradei's ignored or dismissed. "Because the papers started from that position" of giving the administration the benefit of the doubt, says Domke, "they let down their guard." MISSING THE BIG PICTURE Generally, the antiwar papers did not dismiss international evidence in a knee-jerk fashion. If these papers had a major shortcoming, it was, instead, something they shared with the prowar pages to a much greater extent: a passive willingness to write about the Iraq debate on the president's own terms. By closely following the back and forth at the United Nations, they often missed the forest for the trees. There were no angels at the UN (except possibly the Canadians, who advanced a very workable compromise plan for stepped-up Iraq inspections that could have resolved the impasse). The Bush team may have been committed from the outset to war and was diplomatically obtuse, but the French and their allies took a hypocritical stance in first supporting Iraqi disarmament Resolution 1441 and then blocking serious measures to enforce it. When prowar papers ventured into these waters, they tended to selectively slam the French. When the antiwar Times covered UN happenings, meanwhile, they inevitably wound up even-handedly criticizing both the administration and the French alike. This framing aided the Bush administration by centering the debate around whether UN Resolution 1441 should have been enforced, or whether the United States should still go to war without the UN, instead of around more central issues. Just because the UN was behaving hypocritically didn't make it incumbent upon the U.S. to wage war on that body's behalf just for the sake of consistency, after all. To determine whether the United States should go to war alone, it was far more important to weigh such matters as the Bush administration's preemptive war doctrine, whether Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States, and whether this country could be expected to effectively handle the postwar period and leave Iraq better off than it was before. But though in some cases the newspapers discussed these topics earlier, they paid relatively scant attention to them during this crucial period. Take the question of "preemptive war." Officially outlined in a National Security Strategy document released in September 2002, the Bush administration's preemption doctrine drew some debate at the time of its inception, including in many of the papers discussed here. During the critical time period examined for this article, however, none of the six newspapers devoted an editorial to examining the doctrine. The most thorough discussion came in a single paragraph from the Los Angeles Times: An Iraq invasion without U.N. sanction would be a preemptive attack by the world's only superpower. It would probably be successful in the initial military phase - but at what cost? A preemptive strike can be justified if the threat is imminent and unavoidable. With neither of those conditions proven, a preemptive attack yields the moral high ground. The U.S. would be cast as the global bully, seeking to arrogate the installation of governments in other lands. That's certainly helpful, though brief. Editorial editor Janet Clayton also points out that her paper discussed the Bush doctrine of preemption still more thoroughly in editorials falling outside the time period covered in this article. USA Today's Carol Stevens made a similar point during her January 29 interview with CJR, and added, "we are writing tomorrow on how [the latest] faulty intelligence undermines the preemptive war doctrine, so we do see the two issues as linked." So clearly, USA Today now sees the broader picture. Yet as war neared, the country could have profited from a much more searching examination of the so-called preemption doctrine. The papers might have noted, as the Carnegie Endowment report does, that preemption has always been a legitimate strategy to head off an imminent military attack, so long as the anticipation of such an attack is based on sound intelligence. But what the Bush administration contemplated wasn't really "preemption" at all - instead, writes the Endowment, it was "a loose standard for preventive war under the cloak of legitimate preemption," even in the absence of an imminent threat. Now that we have invaded Iraq and found that it apparently had no weapons with which to threaten the U.S. - and certainly did not pose an imminent threat - the holes in such a doctrine are plain for all to see. But the matter of the need for high-quality intelligence to justify a preemptive invasion should have been laid out in the days immediately preceding war. Similarly, consider the question of how the U.S. would manage postwar Iraq. The Wall Street Journal was, as usual, extreme compared with the rest of the papers on the question. Following a late February speech to the American Enterprise Institute in which Bush laid out his glowing vision for a postwar democracy in Iraq, the Journal announced that the address "made instantly irrelevant a forest of columns demanding to know, 'What about after the war?'" No other paper gave Bush a completely blank check based upon one lofty but vague speech. But many papers raised questions about the postwar situation as, at best, a compulsory aside, rather than as a central ground upon which to weigh the Bush administration's plans. The Chicago Tribune, for example, included the following sentence in its major prowar editorial of March 2: "The gauzy vision that proponents of war offer for a post-Hussein Iraq is, to be frank, unconvincing." But then the paper quickly followed up, "But at least that will be post-Hussein Iraq, with his destructive capability gone." That's hardly a serious consideration of the difficulties the U.S. would be getting into as it attempted to run a (likely hostile) Middle Eastern country and set it on the path to democracy. USA Today worried somewhat more about postwar Iraq, noting after Colin Powell's speech that the Bush administration should "give allies and the American public an equally persuasive explanation of its Iraq game plan and exit strategy." Yet even though the administration did not do this by USAT's own admission - Bush "provided little new substance about the war costs, goals and sacrifices that may lie ahead," the paper wrote in response to Bush's Iraq ultimatum speech - it nevertheless supported war. The Washington Post was still more eloquent about postwar uncertainties. But again, such worries didn't seem to prevent the paper from supporting war. Given the insurgency that is still occurring, and the current threat that Iraq may succumb to Iran-style theocracy, it seems clear that all six papers should have spent far more energy examining the Bush administration's blithe plans for democracy-building. A LACK OF SKEPTICISM But the biggest flaw, for all of the papers, goes back to the way they responded to Colin Powell's speech. At best, the presentation should have been taken to represent one side in a continuing UN debate about Iraq's weapons capacities - exactly how international papers like the Guardian reacted to it. After all, that paper noted, UN inspectors Blix and ElBaradei had their own analyses, which often conflicted with Powell's. Yet without appearing to weigh such contrary evidence, the U.S. papers all essentially pronounced Powell right, though they couldn't possibly know for sure that he was. In short, they trusted him. And in so doing, they failed to bring even an elementary skepticism to the Bush case for war. Why did the papers trust and defer? For most of them, notes Todd Gitlin, a Columbia journalism professor, "the default position seems to have been that the administration was well meaning - and that there was a tight logical connection between admirable purpose and clear fact." Gitlin thinks the papers should have known otherwise at least from the time, in mid-2002, when it became clear that central players in the administration like Vice President Dick Cheney were devoted to war no matter what - and advocated proceeding without even bothering to win United Nations approval. As a group, the papers failed to exercise skepticism at this exacting a level. It's not that they should have magically intuited that Iraq didn't have any weapons at all. They simply should have demanded more proof that they could verify with their own eyes. A LOOK BACK Given that the case for war against Iraq appears far weaker today, and that the White House's intelligence claims have lost their authority, what does that say about these six editorial pages that took Colin Powell's claims almost entirely at face value? "All these papers are on notice," says Thomas Powers, a highly respected writer on intelligence issues for The New York Review of Books and author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda. "They've seen what happened. They were hustled." In Powers's recent NYRB article "The Vanishing Case for War," he reached this jaw-dropping conclusion: In the six months since the President declared an end to major combat in Iraq not a single one of the factual claims about Iraqi weapons and links to al-Qaeda has been robustly confirmed, and in most cases there has been no confirmation of any kind whatsoever. Attempts to prompt self-reflection from the six editorial page editors about this astonishing failure met with only moderate success. Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal declined to be interviewed, while Gail Collins of The New York Times e-mailed to say, "We don't discuss the process that goes into writing the editorials. After they're written, we feel they should speak for themselves. I try never to elaborate on them." But Collins added: "I will go off my normal rule to say I wish we'd known there were no weapons of mass destruction." Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post, Bruce Dold of the Chicago Tribune, and Carol Stevens of USA Today consented to telephone interviews, while the Los Angeles Times's Janet Clayton responded by e-mail to a lengthy list of questions. Of these respondents, Stevens and Dold - who said there was "sharp disagreement" on the Tribune editorial board about the war, and that he took ultimate responsibility for the paper's prowar stance - seemed most unwilling to consider what their papers could have done differently. "I'm not going to second-guess what we wrote in the course of the build-up to this," Dold commented. He argued that the Tribune would have supported war even had it known that Iraq lacked WMD, simply because of Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with UN resolutions. "If indeed he did not have weapons - and I think it's all still an open question - the fact was that he didn't comply, and the UN had looked the other way while hundreds of thousands of people had died in Iraq," said Dold. Open-mindedness is certainly a virtue. But at this point Dold's insistence on keeping an open mind about the administration's WMD case could be likened to bending over backwards. And Dold's argument can be challenged on another front. In its editorials the Tribune tended to cast the United States as an anointed enforcer of the United Nations resolutions, as well as a kind of UN hypocrisy monitor - as if Hussein's failure to comply with the UN, on its own, justified a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq. Yet even given a lack of Iraqi compliance, there would remain the question of why we should risk American lives and spend countless billions to deal with Hussein. Unlike the Chicago Tribune, USA Today reached a "broad consensus" on all of its editorial statements on Iraq. In fact, says Carol Stevens, editor of the page, the paper doesn't write anything without such agreement. "In hindsight," Stevens added, "some of our worst fears came true" about the war - such as the disastrous consequences of desultory postwar planning. One might think the realization of such fears would lead to a fundamental questioning of the prowar case. But Stevens diverted the question of what she wished the paper had done differently. "I don't know if it's a question of what we know now," she said, "but I guess I'd like to ask Powell what he knows now that he wishes he'd known then." Janet Clayton of the Los Angeles Times wishes her paper had known "that the intelligence that the administration was using was flawed, and was often skewed to favor the administration's preconceived ideas." In hindsight, she adds by e-mail, "I do wish we'd been more skeptical of Powell's WMD claims before the UN. His personal credibility was on the line, and we didn't think he'd take that lightly." After the war, as it became increasingly clear that Iraq lacked the arsenal the Bush administration claimed it had, the Times sharply whacked the administration for its exaggerations on the subject of Iraq's WMD. THE POST RECONSIDERS Of all the prowar editorial page editors, Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post was by far the most willing in an interview with cjr to reconsider his paper's stance in light of recent evidence. "I feel like we're always asking people to talk to us," Hiatt explained. "It's hard to tell journalists that we're not going to talk to them." Hiatt has also discussed these questions with his readers. In the paper's lengthy October 12 iraq in review editorial - an impressive work of introspection - the Post conceded the absence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, as well as an absence of evidence of al Qaeda ties. Remarking upon the violent postwar situation, the paper also harshly criticized the Bush administration's prewar lack of sound long-term planning. Without renouncing its prior prowar stance, the paper concluded that the case for war currently stands on the edge of a knife: Success or failure in the effort to stabilize Iraq under a reasonably representative government that poses no threat to the world will provide the ultimate answer to the question of whether the war should have been undertaken. Hiatt says he wishes the Post had not accepted the WMD claims during the days before war: "If you look at the editorials we write running up, we state as flat fact that he has stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." But Hiatt adds that he doesn't feel hung out to dry by the administration - at least not yet. "If it turned out that Powell had deliberately lied to me, I would feel suckered," he says. Hiatt's candor is admirable. Still, he has tough questions to answer. It is true that the Post couldn't have known the administration's WMD claims would evaporate. And in the days before war the paper's editorial page raised sharp questions about the Bush administration's alienation of allies, its failure to adequately plan for postwar Iraq, and its refusal to level with the American public about how much war would cost and what our long-term commitment would be. So why did the Post continue to support war given very good reasons for doubting that the Bush administration knew what it was getting into? "As an editorial writer, you don't get to choose your ideal administration," answers Hiatt. "You deal with what's there, and if you think there's a threat to American security, is the administration you have more capable of dealing with it than not?" In a subsequent e-mail exchange, Hiatt added, "It is easy to write an editorial, as some papers did, saying, 'Saddam Hussein is dangerous, and we support the war, if the French go along,' or 'if Bush were more sincere about wanting democracy,' or whatever. It is harder to write an editorial accepting the real-world choices (the French are not going to go along) and offering your best judgment under those circumstances." To the Post's credit, the newspaper has shown a refreshing willingness to reconsider that best judgment. For other pro-war papers, as for the Bush administration, that day of reckoning has not yet arrived. |