Speaking of Condi Rice, I am reading the superb new biography, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, by Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post. On page 242, in describing Rice’s shifting rationales for engagement in the Middle East, Kessler states the following:
The invasion of Iraq had been promoted in part as a way to bring democracy to the region and help Israel. Now she argued that because the turmoil in Iraq had led to the rise of Iran, the collective fear of the Sunni world would make Arabs more willing to strike a deal with Israel…
This is shocking. If the Iraq war was seen as a way to help Israel, as I believe its neocon architects constructed and sold it in the back rooms of thinktanks, this program was never made public to the American people. If it was "promoted" as such, as Kessler asserts, it was promoted in quiet and oblique ways, or by hints, or in code (for instance when Tom Friedman said it was a good thing to stop the suicide bombers in Tel Aviv pizzerias, or when Tom Lantos likened Saddam to Hitler). If Iraq had been "promoted" to the American people in that fashion, they surely wouldn’t have wanted their sons and daughters risking their lives to prevent suicide bombers in the Jewish state, let alone spending billions on the effort.
Kessler’s statement is most telling about Washington journalism. Journalists all know that what Kessler is saying is the case, but they cannot explore this "promotion" openly. There should be lengthy investigations of this agenda, and massive exposes. But of course no newspaper will go near it, in part because they are themselves implicated in the catastrophe of judgment, and Walt and Mearsheimer are tarred in the Post and the Times and the New Yorker for saying this was how the war went forward. This is in the end a journalistic tragedy. Journalists license politicians; if an idea is in the news, a politician feels safe picking it up. And so the most important debate a democracy can undertake–a presidential campaign–hums along without a mention of the scandal.
