Washington Post Editorial Board Attempts To Erase Its Pre-War Rush To Invasion
Washington Post Editorial Board Attempts To Erase Its Pre-War Rush To Invasion
Today marks the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. To commemorate the occasion, the Washington Post has trotted out its editorial from May 4, 2003. The reprinted editorial contains a preface, emphasizing that the WP disagreed with the infamous banner:
Five years ago, President Bush declared the mission in Iraq accomplished. The Post editorial board disagreed. Here’s what the board wrote on May 4, 2003. […]
Still, it’s also impossible to agree with the banner that was draped near Mr. Bush on the carrier deck, proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” Aides say the slogan was chosen in part to mark a presidential turn toward domestic affairs as his campaign for reelection approaches. … There is much to be done; the greatest tests and risks still lie in the future.
It’s wonderful that the WP didn’t buy into Bush’s PR stunt on May 1, 2003. But this self-congratulatory reprinting of its May 4 op-ed is disingenuous. Among the the nation’s major newspapers, the WP editorial board was one of the loudest cheerleaders for war in Iraq. As Chris Mooney wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review:
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. … 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. … The paper never changed its stance on war, however.
As much as it would like to pat itself on the back for getting one right, the WP editorial board had many more that were wrong. A few lowlights:
“After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.” [2/6/03]
“The Perils of Passivity” [2/13/03]
“But the United States cannot again join the Security Council in backing down from a confrontation with the Iraqi dictator, as it did repeatedly during the 1990s, also under pressure from France and Russia.” [2/16/03]
“In the case of Iraq, the functioning of American democracy has been pretty straightforward. President Bush has been respectful of opponents, at least at home, as he should be on such a momentous issue.” [2/23/03]
Evidently, getting just one editorial right is a “mission accomplished” for the Washington Post.
Their real gripe with Mr. Bush is that he looked great; the president pulled off his "Top Gun" act as much as Michael Dukakis flubbed his spin in a tank.No wonder the WP chose not to highlight this piece as well.
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The worthless, lying traitorous war-mongering Washington Post, what a fall from back in the Watergate Era in the 1970s when it lead the investigative reporting about the Nixon criminal regime. Now in the 21st century, the corporate Washington Post has become a cheerleader for a corrupt and evil Bush Republican Administration… Heck of a job, Posties…
May 1st, 2008 at 6:12 pmLike we forgot about Charles “Empire” Krauthammer?
May 1st, 2008 at 6:14 pmThere’s going to be a NEW BOSS on January 20, 2009 in the form of a DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT. With that on the horizon, what will you have to say when your market share goes to crap for good, Washington ComPost?
The conduct of the these news outlets has been beyond belief the
May 1st, 2008 at 6:21 pmlast 7 years. DESPICABLE!
Charles SourKrautdumber
May 1st, 2008 at 6:23 pmThere is NO “free press” anymore. Only the “owned press.” Owned by the same corporate interests the profit mightily from the wars that they promote.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:35 pmIf we have evidence of historical facts (cheerleading the war) why would the press think we won’t review their behavior when they give contradictory positions? It is quite easy to read who said what, and when. Do they think we won’t remember what actually happened?
May 1st, 2008 at 6:38 pmUmmm, WP? Putting those big ass pom poms behind your back isn’t gonna fool anybody… Just thought ya’d like to know.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:40 pmIn 50 years the 2007 Miami Dolphins will be looked at as one of the best, if not The Best, professional football team of all times. Wait and see.
And until then, my opinion of them and yours carry the same weight.
So there.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:40 pmYou can only shoot yourself in the foot so many (Washington) times.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:55 pmMcWars Says:
There’s going to be a NEW BOSS on January 20, 2009 in the form of a DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT. With that on the horizon, what will you have to say when your market share goes to crap for good, Washington ComPost?
The conduct of the these news outlets has been beyond belief the
last 7 years. DESPICABLE!
Hillary is a Democrat like Joseph Lieberman was a Democrat. Don’t kid yourself, there’s a very good chance that the powers that be will remain unchanged.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:07 pmSince this is a time for perspectives, while looking at Wapo articles from that time period, I came across this gem:
Leaving the left I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives — people who once championed solidarity
Keith Thompson Sunday, May 22, 2005
Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I’m separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos. I’m leaving the left — more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together. I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives — people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere — reciting all the ways Iraq’s democratic experiment might yet implode.
[…]
I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations. Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics…
sanenation@yahoo.com
May 1st, 2008 at 7:12 pmSorry, here’s the link to the article:
http://www.sfgate.com/ cgi-bin/ article.cgi?f=/ c/ a/ 2005/ 05/ 22/ INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL
May 1st, 2008 at 7:15 pmWASHPO: “The victory celebration held aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday was well-deserved, both for President Bush and for the servicemen who cheered him. Thanks to those who gathered on the carrier’s deck and their comrades in arms, Saddam Hussein’s homicidal hold on Iraq was broken in three weeks, with relatively small, if painful, losses of Iraqi and American lives.”
As it was US military policy not to record the loss of specific Iraqi lives, how would the WSJ editors be able to judge the relative loss on the Iraqi side—especially as the shock and awe bombardments were particularly directed at a city larger and more densely populated than Chicago?
WASHPPO: “None of the disasters feared before the war has come to pass: neither burning oil fields nor bloody street-to-street battles; neither Arab revolutions nor armed interventions by Iraq’s neighbors would the US military”
Except for the street-to-street and house-to-house battles that have raged over the last five years.
And ignore the fact that the Bush Administration predicted that the Iraqi oil fields would pay for the ENTIRE invasion and OCCUPATION—which is in part why protecting the oil infrastructure was a priority.
Not even the critics predicted ‘burning Iraqi oil fields’, nor Arab revolutions.
In fact the Bush administration DID predict Arab revolutions—Democratic revolutions, which have not come to pass (and of which the critics were highly skeptical).
As for “armed intervention” by “Iraq’s neighbors”, the Turks have hit the PKK and Bush is busy claiming that neighbor Iran is engaging in armed intervention (though at best it is covert and very small scale).
WASHPO “Mr. Bush acknowledged before the war that these risks were real, but argued that they were outweighed by the risks of not acting:”
No he didn’t! He said that Saddam had WMD, supported Al –Qaeda and was a threat to world peace and the US. And that was it!
WASHPO: “When the horrors of the Baathist regime — now being confirmed in terrible but necessary detail — are set against even the destruction and deaths of the war, it’s impossible not to conclude that the United States and its allies have performed a great service for Iraq’s 23 million people.”
In that the US and its allies sold Hussein the chemical weapons he used against the Iranians and the Kurds for which the US and its allies later used as an excuse for invasion, and that there are now over 2 million external refugees and 2 million internal refugees and that life expectancy, infant mortality and a whole host of other measures of social welfare have plummeted since the invasion, and that 500,000 to 1 million have likely died—directly or indirectly—from the invasion and occupation and predictable an predicted violence that has ensued from an inadequate occupation force and incompetent post-invasion management.
Indeed the Iraqi’s are so grateful that THEY have been declaring “Mission Accomplished” for the past THREE YEARS. The Iraqis still want the US out, but Bush refuses to give the order.
The Washington Post is not only re-writing its past, but the past of the Bush administration and in addition, it is re-qrting the present too, by simply ognoring it.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:16 pmNamtillaku Says:
Hillary is a Democrat like Joseph Lieberman was a Democrat. Don’t kid yourself, there’s a very good chance that the powers that be will remain unchanged.
Speaking of Washington CompPost, I read a Hillary story about reaction to losing the support of an Indiana super, and she stated somewhere that if the Republican nominating rules were followed she’d have already clinched the nomination by now. Yes, in the same story she claimed this prolonged fight was good for the democratic party, she complemented a Republican way of doing business.
And you are right, it’s becoming easier to compare Hillary to Lieberman. I support Barack Obama bigtime and believe he will clinch that nomination, and hopefully, the election.
(By the way, neat handle!)
May 1st, 2008 at 7:32 pmUnfortunately the MSM is holding itself to the same standard of accountability as Bushco.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:04 pmThe Washington Post is full of s*** and cannot be trusted.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:18 pmThe corporate media has reduced American media to the state of something out of the old Soviet Union.
They are un-American traitors.
Do not support them or their sponsors.
.
Bush doesn’t talk much about being a cheerleader either, but one can not change facts…
… one may try to “FIX” facts, but change them…?
.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:10 pmWhen Katherine Graham died, so did the Post’s greatness!
May 1st, 2008 at 10:25 pmIs there anyone left who doesn’t know that The Washington Post is a Zionist rag-sheet?
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:15 amThe worst error was in allowing the war party the legitimacy of this pernicious and irrelevant argument. Whether or not Iraq had WMD, it was not a threat, had never threatened us, and would have been squashed like a bug if it had even tried to threaten the only nations it could have - its neighbors.
By accepting this argument we bury, once and for all, the position that we can only go to war when attacked or in immiment danger of being attacked. At least in Vietnam we had the decency to maintain the fig leaf of respectability, using the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” as justification.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:49 amPerhaps the WP needs to read Time regarding post war planning. http://www.time.com/ time/ nation/ article/ 0,8599,1736831,00.html
Gen. Sanchez absolutely blasts Rumsfeld and Franks for their little dance step around and finger pointing when things predictably went sour in Iraq. (The widespread looting happened right under Gen. Franks’ nose).
In February 2003 the WP said after the Powell testimony that nobody could now doubt Iraq had WMD. Two major problems with that statement. A lot of people didn’t believe what Powell said. Hans Blix was already in Iraq and his preliminary report said that no WMD had been found there. Futhermore, Blix was complaining about being sent on wild goose chases by the Bush administration. There was plenty of doubt about the existance of WMD in Iraq. Plenty.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:37 pmWhat mystifies me is why they think they can get away with this sort of hand-waving. Before the Web, you could say “We opposed the war!” and it would take a trip to the library and hours of work prove them wrong–but now anybody can do it while munching cheetos.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:01 pmI remember Rumsfeld saying “I never said Iraq was an imminent threat” and then had Tom Friedman, of all people, confront him with an exact quote to the contrary.
You can’t get away with this crap any more–so why do theypersist, and keep getting caught? Is it just force of habit? Do they think Americans reaally are sheep? Are they ding a dance to delude themselves?
Evil I can understand. Stupidity, even, I can understand. But this is kind of like a psychotic break.