Page 104 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

94 Chapter 4

to get tough. Sebastian Mallaby remarked that the central problem lied in "the
hesitation in rooting out insurgent bases in the Sunni heartland.""3 Aside from
the problem of not committing enough troops to adequately "pacify" Iraq, the
Washington Post used the standard criticism about the danger of the Bush ad-
ministration's distrust of multilateralism, as "the administration developed its
policies about preemption and Iraq without readjusting its ideas about allies or
coming up with a new strategy for dealing with them."'14 The problem was not
that the U.S. went to war, but that it should have done so more effectively by
securing support from its allies. This "textbook lesson" of Iraq was referred to in
the New York Times as proof of "the dangers of going it alone in the world" of
global conflict and dispute re~olution."~ At the margins of the mainstream me-
dia, alternative news sources like Salon postulated that, "if the Bush administra-
tion had been prepared to wait for U.N. support before launching its invasion,
things could have turned out very differently in 1raq."Il6
Some mainstream editorials and news reports did not target the Bush ad-
ministration specifically for regime change, but reinforced a general media cli-
mate where readers could blame the Bush administration for the lack of progress
in Iraq. The New York Times gave "reason to wonder whether that vision" of
Time Magazine reasoned
democratizing Iraq "was unrealistically ~~timistic.""~
that, "the longer the U.S. waits, the more time it gives the insurgency to
spread.""8 ABCNews Military Analyst Anthony Cordesman stated that the Coa-
lition Provisional Authority "got the first year of the coalition occupation in Iraq
fundamentally wrong.. .The effort to rush money into the Iraqi military and se-
curity forces recognizes the United States failed to make a serious effort to train
Iraqi military and security forces to fight insurgents in any strength during the
year following the fall of Saddam ~ussein.""~
The lesson of this chapter is that American mainstream media has been pro-
foundly dogmatic and narrow in its "criticisms" of the President during wartime.
An outlook incorporating a wider spectrum of criticisms would need to incorpo-
rate more than just comments concerning the lack of sufficient troops in Iraq, the
slow pace of "pacification," speculation over Iraq's ability to commit to democ-
racy (rather than the U.S.'s), and the problems of unilateralism as contrasted
with multilateralism. To present a more balanced view of the situation in Iraq,
the media would surely need to encompass more progressively oriented denun-
ciations of America as an imperial power, in order to allow Americans to decide
for themselves whether the U.S. is engaged in democracy promotion in Iraq, or
in repression. Typical "critical" views in the mainstream press that assess the
cost of the occupation and the war in terms of American lives and perhaps most
important, the likelihood of successfully destroying nationalist guerilla resis-
tance, need to be acknowledged as "solutions" that necessarily marginalize insti-
tutional critiques of American aggression and empire, as well as support for
withdrawal based upon such critiques.