Page 74 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

64 Chapter 3

viewed such charges as unfounded, fanciful, or too controversial to be worthy of
discussion.
Scott Ritter was less interested in distinguishing between whether the case
for war was an "intelligence failure" or a conscious deception on the part of the
Bush administration. Ritter argued in his 2003 book Frontier Justice: Weapons
of Mass Destruction & the Bushwhacln'ng of America, "the intelligence cited by
the President has tumed out to be either egregiously erroneous or simply pulled
from thin air. The details so precisely set forth have tumed out to be void of any
substance. Did the President lie, or was the intelligence fundamentally flawed?
Either case is disturbing. Either case is
Ritter was long known as a proponent of Iraqi disarmament, as his time
with the UN disarmament regime in Iraq demonstrated. Although his criticisms
of the administration's war claims did gamer some attention in the mainstream
media before the 2003 invasion (he appeared nineteen times on ABC, NBC, and
CBS in the year before the war), he only made one appearance in the post-
invasion period on these networks, at a time when his claims about Iraq's lack of
WMD had been ~indicated.~' This did not mean, however, that Ritter's
arguments were immune from attack during the pre-war period. Ritter was been
labeled a "flip flopper" by the Chicago Tribune, whlch portrayed him as
inconsistent due to his earlier assessments that Iraq was in possession of
In
wMD.~~ an interview on CNN, Paula Zahn informed Ritter that, "People out
there are accusing you of drinking Saddam's Kool id."^^ In the pre-war period,
most reporters and editors discarded Ritter's suggestion that the Bush
administration lied about Iraqi WMD, as the content analysis below suggests.
As has been acknowledged since the 2003 invasion, the Bush administration
did not conduct a "pre-emptive strike" to stop an imminent Iraqi attack on the
U.S. On the contrary, it utilized the practice of "preventive war," meaning that
American leaders invaded Iraq under the assumption that Iraq, at some unknown
point in the future, could constitute a threat to the U.S. While projections of an
Iraqi threat to the U.S. were considered enough reason for the Bush
administration to go to war, they did not meet the UN Charter requirements,
which outlaws force with two exceptions: UN Security Council authorization, or
self-defense against imminent attack. Iraq did not meet either of these standards,
in light of evidence available before and after the invasion that Iraq was not in
material breach of U.N. disarmament. Media reporting typically repeated
inaccurate claims that the U.S. was making a "pre-emptive" strike on Iraq, rather
than a preventive one. The difference was crucial, as pre-emptive strikes are
conducted in order to deter imminent threats, and preventive strikes are made
against countries not deemed an immediate security threat.