Media Bona Fides

The foreign policy debate in this country is perverted by the mainstream media.  Despite the dismal failure of the official government agencies, the policy wonk class, and the punditocracy leading up to the invasion of Iraq, we continue to have these very same people trumpeted as experts.

And when folks question if these so-called experts should still be continued to be viewed as experts — despite how wrong they have been in the past or their partisan connections to the administration (as in the retired generals who were carrying the DoD’s water on TV) — we often get answers like that of Lois Romano in today’s Washington Post online chat.

Concord, N.H.: I’m skeptical of the article stating that Gen. Petraeus sees enough progress for there to be a troop withdrawal in the fall. Are things really going that well, or is he laying the groundwork to make Iraq less of an issue for John McCain in the fall? It’s a little sad that I’m even asking this question.

Lois Romano: Gen. Petraeus is considered an honorable man so its hard to believe that he would introduce politics into his assessment.

 Petreaus seems to be honorable, but he’s certainly not above politics.  As Glenn Greenwald pointed out last summer, the General has a history of questionable, misleading, and outright bogus statements on the war, all of which further the line of the administration.

Remember those mobile bio-weapons labs found in the early days of the invasion that proved in fact to be used for weather balloons?  That was Petraeus’s 101st Airborne.

In December 2003, he said that insurgent attacks were already on the way down.

Here’s Petraeus in March 2004:

We saw this in terms of Iraqis giving information about bad guys in their neighborhoods, about where weapons caches were, where improvised explosive ambushes were found and so forth. And we saw that increasingly during our time there. 

Sometimes I think I found after I came back that people think that Iraqis did not appreciate what our soldiers did. To the contrary, and in fact in Mosul, the Moslauis, the people, are actually going to name a street the “101st Airborne Division Boulevard.” It’s Frakamia Waha in Arabic, and so I think that was just indicative of that kind of support.

On the other hand, although they would say quickly thank you very much for what you did, we appreciate your liberating us, or sometimes even we appreciate the good deed you just did, they would then have many more good deeds that they wanted us to do. And we jokingly used to say that the reward for a good deed was a request for 10 more good deeds. . . .

But what I would say is that there has been enormous progress just in the seven or eight months that we’ve actually been recruiting, training, equipping and employing Iraqi security forces. Huge progress. The ones that I recounted about the border police, civil defense corps, police and facility protection security forces, not to mention the new Iraq army, which I think just had its fourth battalion graduate from training the other day.

Increasingly, they’re coming online.

Six weeks before the 2004 election, Petraeus wrote a glowing op-ed in the Washington Post.  It included such insights as:

Now, however, 18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up.

The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously in the face of an enemy that has shown a willingness to do anything to disrupt the establishment of the new Iraq.

And that’s just in Bush’s first term!

A similar response to criticism came from NBC’s Brian Williams regarding the retired military generals’ propoaganda program. 

At no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers. I think they are better men than that, and I believe our news division is better than that.

Again, no looking at the facts involved.  Just assertions about character.  We can trust them because Brian Williams says so.  Nearly a month since that post, and Williams has yet to seriously address the allegations in the story.  It’s sad, but typical.

It’s preposterous and absurd for the media to trot out character as excuses for their cozy behavior with propagandists.  They should approach things with a skeptical eye, and not let their personal beliefs about the character of the individuals involved guide them.

It is not sufficient for the media to give these folks their bona fides.  They have not proven worthy of the trust.