Self-serving, revisionist rationalizing is the only way to describe today's Washington Post editorial marking the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war. They begin:
Tomorrow marks the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, as appropriate a moment as any to take stock. What matters most is finding the best policy now -- doing whatever can be done to help Iraq and safeguard U.S. interests in a vital region. But looking back also is essential, particularly for those of us who supported the war.
Wrong. An appropriate moment for a nationally read newspaper to take stock would have been before deciding to support a preemptive war, both through editorial cheerleading and a willingness to abandon journalistic integrity and act as stenographers for the White House in the run-up to the war.
The editorial then falls back on the "who knows" what would have happened if we hadn't gone to war. But instead, why don't we look at what we do know? We know that there would be 3,216 U.S. servicemen and women who weren't killed in Iraq. We know that there would be tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen and women who weren't wounded in Iraq. We know that there would be hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who weren't killed. We know that we wouldn't be spending $2 billion a week on this war. We know that our military would not be at the breaking point. And we know that the United States wouldn't have lost its moral standing with the rest of the world. But the Washington Post decides leave it to history's judgement and move on to the question of, "What have we learned?"
The decision was right? Do they mean the decision to go to war because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist? And does the "everyone" who thought it was an enormous gamble include those that predicted we would be greeted as liberators? That the case against Hussein was a "slam dunk"? That the war would be a "cakewalk"? But let's forget all that and stop blaming the architects of this war who waged it with "breathtaking and infuriating arrogance, ignorance and insouciance." After all, it could have happened to anybody.The easy way out is to blame President Bush, Vice President Cheney or former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: The decision was right, the execution wrong. There's no question that the execution was disastrous. Having rolled the dice on what everyone understood to be an enormous gamble, Mr. Bush and his team followed up with breathtaking and infuriating arrogance, ignorance and insouciance.
The Washington Post then, finally, addresses their own culpability.
Clearly we were insufficiently skeptical of intelligence reports. It would almost be comforting if Mr. Bush had "lied the nation into war," as is frequently charged. The best postwar journalism instead suggests that the president and his administration exaggerated, cherry-picked and simplified but fundamentally believed -- as did the CIA -- the catastrophically wrong case that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented to the United Nations.
They exaggerated, cherry-picked and simplified, but they didn't lie? Perhaps the Washington Post's editorial board should assign a team of crack reporters to google a few terms like aluminum tubes, yellow-cake, Prague and UAV, and perhaps then they will rethink their extraordinary claim that the administration didn't lie to the American people.
And after their weak defense for parroting the administration's case for war, the Washington Post takes a page out of the White House playbook and says:
Unquestionably, for example, the experience has shown the risks of preemptive 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.
It's hard to believe that after four years this still needs to be said: Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. Raising the specter of terrorist attacks to somehow justify this preemptive war is completely dishonest. Or if the Washington Post prefers, it is exaggerating, cherry-picking and simplifying.
The editorial finishes with these deep thoughts:
Unfortunately, none of this provides bright guidelines to make the next decisions easier -- not even those facing the nation right now in Iraq. It's tempting to say that if it was wrong to go in, it must be wrong to stay in. But how Iraq evolves will fundamentally shape the region and deeply affect U.S. security. Walking away is likely to make a bad situation worse. A patient, sustained U.S. commitment, with gradually diminishing military forces, could still help Iraq to move in the right direction.
One wonders if the Washington Post was ever tempted to say, after four years of "breathtaking and infuriating arrogance, ignorance and insouciance," after four years of following the same course with only the slogans changing, after four years of unending violence and death, the time for patience is long past.
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