Thought Control

Thirteen years after George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, unquestionably supported by Tony Blair, invaded Iraq by lying to the world, the American people and the Congress with a sardonic smile on their face, it is Blair who is facing the music. And nobody thinks the former British Prime Minster is in a mood to dance. 

The British conscience seems to be trying to make an effort to mend the past. The Chilcot report's 2.6 million words - four times the length of War and Peace - have forced Blair to defend why he chose to throw his full support behind Bush and Co. despite so much evidence and advice against joining in the incursion into a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.  

But it is the United States, far more than Britain that needs to look within. When will there be a similar, official inquiry in Washington to understand how national policy can be hijacked by deceit? It didn't happen overnight. The run-up to the war took place in slow motion for nine months or more. 

And the big media played the role as a cheerleader. Fundamental assumptions about the "Global War on Terror" and the promulgation of the so-called Bush Doctrine of Preventive War were rarely debated or even discussed. Vital historical context was almost never provided. "Patriotism" and "national unity" trumped truth. The line between propaganda and journalism was forgotten. Fox was the worst, but the rest of the mainstream media wasn't much effective either.  There seemed to be a perceived need to be "Americans first and journalists second." The result was a perfect storm. 

Anyone who had the courage to challenge the "centres of power" was silenced, one by one. Susan Sontag, writer and activist, was vilified for saying that President Bush's tough-talking response was "robotic," and that America needed to rethink its Middle East policies. Bill Maher lost his TV show "Politically Incorrect" after refusing "the conventional wisdom." Noam Chomsky was virtually declared a traitor for calling the US a terrorist state and warning that a violent response to 9/11 would backfire. Isn't it an irony of history that President Obama, in an interview with Vice News last year said, "ISIL is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion, which is an example of unintended consequences"? 

Not all was lost, though. Thousands marched in cities across the US and Europe to protest. Washington Post's Walter Pincus questioned the administration's claims about WMD. His pre-war report on the subject, after almost being killed, was relegated to page 17. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh and Mark Danner distinguished themselves with outstanding coverage of Abu Gharib following the thread that led directly from the blood-spattered rooms outside Baghdad to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Pentagon. But such journalists were few and far between. And network television was almost never interested in hearing their voice.

The mainstream media kept 'buying' the lies - before they were sold.  There are several reasons for that. One is economic. The decline of newspapers, the rise of infotainment, and Media Company owners' insistence on delivering high returns to their shareholders have diminished resources and led to a bottom-line idée fixe not conducive to objective journalism. 

Has the media learned its lesson? In many ways, it has. After the non-existent WMD was not to be found and the war turned south, most news organisations began to get tough with the Bush administration. The problem, of course, is that the press only really turned on Bush when his ratings began to fall - another sign that the Fourth Estate has become more of a windsock than a truth teller. How many opinion pieces or editorials have been written in US newspapers demanding a Chilcot Report-like enquiry? 

The structural problems of the media have not gone away. If the media has learned that a bugle blast can be sounded by a fool, that God is not on America's side every time it launches a war, that there is nothing in the preamble to the US Constitution which defines the purpose of the United States of America as remaking the world in its image and that self-righteousness is not reason, maybe something can be redeemed from this black chapter of history after all. 

History, if not journalism, will record that the greatest tragedy of our time is not the loud clamour of a few, but the appalling silence of the many. 

The writer is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star.