November 18
Rumsfeld and the Failure of the Fourth Estate
The New Yorker this last week ran a short interview with Kenneth Adelman, the neo-con who's now best known for predicting that the Iraq war would be a "cakewalk." He has long been part of the national security establishment, reaching the top post in the Arms Control & Disarmament Agency during the Reagan years. There he perfervidly touted "star wars"---the wasteful, fraudulent, and provocative vision that remains, 20 something years later, wasteful, fraudulent, and provocative. Adelman has been a bad actor his whole life, a right-wing sycophant who works the policy journals and op-ed pages.
The topic of the interview was his old master, Don Rumsfeld, and the apparent purpose of this peculiar choice for discussing the SecDef's humiliating fall from power was to humanize Rummie (“How could this happen to someone so good, so competent?”) and position Adelman for another run at being an opinion maven.
It's probably too late for that, one hopes. Adelman has been a minor but persistent player in the right-wing juggernaut favoring aggressive U.S. global reach; he's been a member of Committee for the Present Danger, Project for a New American Century, etc. He aspires to renaissance man status by endlessly quoting Shakespeare, and even coauthored a book, Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Learning and Succeeding on the Business Stage, with Lockheed Martin chairman Norm Augustine. That should be enough to disqualify him from polite company.
But it was his utterly mendacious tenure at ACDA that should earn him a special spot in Hades. As arms expert Michael Krepon recalls, "Adelman acknowledges the cynicism behind the Reagan administration's verification proposals (anywhere/ anytime inspections without a right of refusal) for the draft treaty to abolish chemical weapons. ‘This seemingly nifty approach,' he writes [in his 1989 book, The Great Universal Embrace], ‘had one slight problem—we could not live with it.' When the Soviets unexpectedly called the U.S. bluff, the administration had to ‘search for other grounds for stalling.' Adelman promoted this treaty, which he opposed, because it was ‘the only real way of enticing Congress to fund the chemical weapons program we needed." That kind of prideful moral vacuity has characterized Adelman's career and the circles in which he seeks favor.
Adelman's past his prime to do more harm, one hopes. What was far more striking about the article was that it provides a book end of sorts for Jeffrey Goldberg, the New Yorker staff writer and author of the piece.
In the run-up to the war, when one of the Bush team's fabricated questions was whether Saddam and bin Laden were close allies against the U.S., Goldberg wrote two articles arguing strenuously that the connection was confirmed and dangerous. One of them, just before the war, essentially regurgitated the Rumsfeld line (haltingly endorsed by DCI George Tenet), and lavishly portrayed Rumsfeld as a penetrating intellectual who knew how to ask the right questions. Goldberg left the reader believing---if the reader knew nothing of the situation---that Saddam had to be crushed to save world civilization.
It was in keeping with other Goldberg pronouncements. At a New Yorker roundtable in November 2002, he predicted: "I just wanted to take issue with one thing that's been brought up, which is that the application of American strength, or a successful invasion of Iraq, will unleash these terrible forces of anti-Americanism in the Middle East and elsewhere. It's not that I don't necessarily believe that, but I think there's a counterargument, which is that in the Middle East—here, too, but especially in the Middle East—nothing succeeds like success. Strength is respected." Thus one of the realists' principal arguments against the war---poof! vanished, in a cloud of prejudice.
Or consider this, from the same session: "Iraq after an American invasion could be a bloodbath. But what's true now is that it is a bloodbath. If you go to the Web site of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and look at their reports about what's happening in Iraq, this is a man who has killed massive numbers of his own citizens. And I'm not even talking about the genocide of the Kurds. I'm talking about his Sunni citizens. So it already is a bloodbath. Let's take that into account when we talk about the possibilities." The mortality rate in Iraq at that time was about the same as it was for other countries in the region. (I must make the obligatory statement that this is not an endorsement of Saddam; far from it, and we know who was supporting the old friend before 1991.) The bloodbath did occur, with U.S. complicity in many cases, but by the 1990s it was a bloodbath occasioned in part by the sanctions regime. And by now, of course, the war that Goldberg and Remnick yearned for has killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein managed to do in thirty years.
Even the fiasco of the war has not affected Goldberg's judgment. Just 18 months ago, a loving portrait of Doug Feith, one of Rumsfeld's key lieutenants at the Pentagon, gives the impression that the deaths of American soldiers, at that point numbering 1,500, would be worth it if the war transforms and democratizes the Mideast. (No mention, mind you, of the human costs to Iraqis, never that.) Goldberg sketches a man steeped in history and spending endless hours in his lush library. "History serves another purpose, Feith suggests: it provides solace to leaders who are misunderstood by their peers." He repeats the canard about the Saddam-al Qaeda link, among other Rumsfeldian deceits.
I'm picking on Goldberg for a reason: he is among the most elite of journalists. He took a very strong---and even then controversial---position in favor of this war of choice in The New Yorker, and to my knowledge he has never acknowledged this catastrophic misjudgment (nor has Remnick). The New Yorker has for decades been one of the world's most respected magazines, and is often viewed as part of a thoughtful, liberal establishment. Yet here one can see the bias that permeates even this elite press: the war was not "wrong," only mismanaged, and perhaps only a little; Iraqi suffering and casualties are scarcely worth mentioning; the other costs---financial, reputational---not of significance; the massive threat of Islamic terror a given.
That the New Yorker and the New York Times (though now more-or-less repentent) and the Washington Post's editorial pages have failed to reckon with these repeated failures of reporting and intellectual standards is sobering. These are not the Glenn Becks and Sean Hannitys of the fake news world. These are our leading periodicals. That they cannot, or refuse, to correct the gross misunderstandings and outright falsehoods of the catastrophe that is Operation Iraqi Freedom must go down as one of the most astounding and puzzling failures in the history of the fourth estate.
--John Tirman