Press Watchdogs Need to Start Barking in Iraq

Press Watchdogs Need to Start Barking in Iraq
Editors and Publishers (July 01, 2004)
By Tom Wicker, who covered politics and national affairs for The New York Times for more than 30 years.

How can the U.S. most honorably, and with the least damage to its interests and those of the Iraqi people, remove itself from this morass? And who will ask these questions if the press doesn't?

Press reports now indicate that senior Ameri- can military officials in Iraq were informed in November 2003, and by their own subordinates, of the abuse of some Iraqi detainees. That was about the same time that Red Cross authorities alerted U.S. commanders to incidents of mistreatment at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Yet by its own statements, it was not until January 2004 that the military announced that prisoner abuses and alleged violations of the Geneva Convention were being investigated. Even then, only a single press release was issued, and no particular attention was called to it.

In fact, were it not for a showing months later, on television's "60 Minutes II," of shocking photos of prisoner mistreatment, the abuses might not be widely known today. Repeated publication in newspapers of those and other sickening pictures, and scandalous headlines in every nation, have followed ?- an example of the "watchdog" function of the press eventually overcoming official and bureaucratic inertia.

Yet Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, managed to suggest in Senate hearings that this public exposure by the press was somehow illicit or unpatriotic ?- as if it were better that a routine matter should have been covered up and left alone.

Rumsfeld and Myers even pushed the ludicrous claim that a single press release, issued by the Army in January merely to announce an unheralded investigation, amounted to full and adequate disclosure of this shameful episode.

As yet undetermined, moreover, is whether anyone other than "sergeants and privates" is to be prosecuted. How thoroughly, after its faltering start, will the investigation be pushed? How high will guilt be properly assigned? That's a question the press should keep asking, particularly after President Bush went to the Pentagon, only a few days after the Senate hearings, to congratulate Rumsfeld on the "superb" job he was doing.

Thus, even as his Administration continues to sink into its Middle Eastern quagmire, Bush seems as little aware as Richard Nixon was in 1973 that there may be a "cancer" growing on his presidency.

Iraq may not, as Watergate did, metastasize into the dire fate that overtook Richard Nixon in 1974. But this incautious U.S. venture into the Middle East, too often aided by an overly acquiescent press that failed sufficiently to question premises and examine evidence, will remain a threat to U.S. eminence in the world until American forces are safely and honorably brought out of an Iraq that can shape its own future. That doesn't appear to be happening any time soon.

Because the danger remains, it's more necessary than ever for the press not merely to report the carnage in Iraq but to question its origins, for it may provide crucial lessons for the future. Did the Bush foreign policy of "go-it-alone" and "preventive" wars lead to the shambles into which the Iraq invasion has deteriorated? If so, can that policy be followed any further? If not, what's to replace it?

The federal commission probing 9/11 has found there was no link between Saddam and al Qaeda, although the American press had echoed Bush's insistence that such a connection validated the Iraq invasion. The U.S. press did not question ?- in some cases, it more nearly celebrated ?- the decision to invade Iraq without the support of most allies or the United Nations. It's only now becoming clear to many Americans that the Pentagon designated too few U.S. troops for the task in Iraq, is not eager to supplement forces there now, and may lack the manpower to deal with challenges arising elsewhere.

Neither Bush nor Rumsfeld seems to have envisioned or planned for the post-war difficulties. If these difficulties were overlooked by the administration, they still provide a case history of what an alert press should have been doing, and failed to do: warning its readers and viewers that things were not so simple as they seemed to appear in Washington.

Even today, when U.S. authorities have shown that they have only the vaguest ideas as to how post-Saddam Iraq is to be governed, and with U.S. occupation troops dying in greater numbers than during the invasion, few in the press have raised the vital question whether the vastly more important war on terrorism has been advanced or retarded. Was Iraq a necessity, or a diversion?

Either way, Iraq could explode into civil war when and if U.S. forces somehow extricate themselves. Even if not, who can or will control an anarchic territory or an uneasily federated state? How can the United States most honorably, and with the least damage to its interests and those of the Iraqi people, remove itself from the morass into which the president and the Pentagon have stumbled? And who will ask these vital questions, if the press doesn't?