Consider for just a moment these events of the last few days:
The number of American servicemen and women killed in the Iraq war reached 2,000. An additional 14,000 have been badly wounded, many maimed for life.
The Iraqi people’s approval of their country’s new, democratic constitution was certified as complete.
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby — Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff — resigned after being indicted, on charges of obstructing justice, perjury and making false statements, by a federal grand jury investigating allegations that senior officials in the Bush administration illegally revealed covert intelligence agent Valerie Plame’s identity to journalists.
The officials’ ostensible purpose was to plant stories in the media that would discredit the agent’s husband, former US ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had charged that the White House distorted intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein’s purported possession of nuclear weapons to justify invading Iraq. Karl Rove, the president’s deputy chief of staff and top political adviser, remains under investigation in connection with the affair. Connect the dots and what do you get?
Clearly, it’s a picture of an administration in disarray — particularly when you shade the scene with the fact that more than half of all Americans now say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake; the implosion of presidential crony Harriet E. Miers’ Supreme Court nomination; the indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the investigation into possible insider trading by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.
That’s the foreground.
In the background is a more ambiguous image, and bringing it into clearer focus is the most urgent challenge now confronting the American news media. Plainly put, the issue is this: George W. Bush and the key members of his administration — particularly Cheney, Libby’s former boss — persuaded the American people, still traumatized by the Sept. 11 atrocities, to support war against Saddam by telling them that he had both nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction. It was only a matter of time, they said, before the vengeful Iraqi dictator, a mass murderer of his own people, made those weapons available to terrorists who would use them against the United States. As we now know, there were no such weapons. The leading American newspapers bear a special responsibility in this matter because they all swallowed the administration’s argument hook, line and sinker.
Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack” remains the best basic introduction on the administration’s march to war. It outlines an extreme preoccupation with Iraq initially shared only by Cheney and a circle of ideologically neoconservatives on his staff and around then-Deputy Secretary of State Paul D. Wolfowitz. Then, there was a murky progress in the intelligence used to intensify that preoccupation into a national security imperative.
The American people need to know how that progression occurred because that knowledge is key to the responsible exercise of citizenship in the upcoming midterm elections and beyond. In an address to the Online News Association on Friday, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the New York Times’ publisher, said that his paper had been far too slow to correct its prewar news reports that Saddam, in fact, had weapons of mass destruction. “It was an institutional failure. We didn’t own up to it quickly enough,” he said. The New York Times clearly wasn’t the only journalistic institution that failed, and the duty to set the public record straight about how this mistake was made is a shared one. There will be shame enough for all if the media as a whole fail to accept this obligation.
