Long predicted, Goldberg’s eclipse finally begins

Everyone’s talking about this post by Glenn Greenwald on Jeffrey Goldberg’s journalistically-disastrous performance in the buildup to the Iraq war. Greenwald puts more fuel on a fire that can only be built now, when that tragic decision is in the past, about why we made the mistake. He know that this has to do with "Israel-obsessive devotees" like Goldberg. Showing that the left understands, we can’t get past the Iraq war without talking about the occupation. 

unlike [Judith] Miller, who was forced to leave the New York Times over what she did, and the NYT itself, which at least acknowledged some of the shoddy pro-war propaganda it churned out, Goldberg has never acknowledged his journalistic errors, expressed remorse for them, or paid any price at all.  To the contrary, as is true for most Iraq war propagandists, he thrived despite as a result of his sorry record in service of the war.  In 2007, David Bradley — the owner of The Atlantic and (in his own words) formerly "a neocon guy" who was "dead certain about the rightness" of invading Iraq  — lavished Goldberg with money and gifts, including ponies for Goldberg’s children, in order to lure him away from The New Yorker, where he had churned out most of his pre-war trash.  

One of his most obscenely false and damaging articles — this 2002 museum of deceitful, hideous journalism, "reporting" on Saddam’s "possible ties to Al Qaeda" — actually won an Oversea’s Press Award for — get this — "best international reporting in a print medium dealing with human rights."  Goldberg, whose devotion to Israel is so extreme that he served in the IDF as a prison guard over Palestinians and was described last year as "Netanyahu’s faithful stenographer" by The New York Times’ Roger Cohen, wrote an even more falsehood-filled 2002 New Yorker article, warning that Hezbollah was planning a master, Legion-of-Doom alliance with Saddam Hussein for a "larger war," and that "[b]oth Israel and the United States believe that, at the outset of an American campaign against Saddam, Iraq will fire missiles at Israel — perhaps with chemical or biological payloads — in order to provoke an Israeli conventional, or even nuclear, response," though — Goldberg sternly warned — "Hezbollah, which is better situated than Iraq to do damage to Israel, might do Saddam’s work itself" and "its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, maintain extensive biological- and chemical-weapons programs."  That fantastical, war-fueling screed — aimed at scaring Americans into targeting the full panoply of Israel’s enemies — actually won a National Magazine Award in 2003.  Given how completely discredited those articles are, those are awards which any person with an iota of shame would renounce and apologize for, but Goldberg continues to proudly tout them on his bio page at The Atlantic.

Despite all of those war-cheerleading deceits — or, again, because of them — Goldberg continues to be held out by America’s most establishment outlets as a preeminent expert in the region.