What I’m saying is that to walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be ready to climb the mountain of conflict.
—Simon Foster, minister for international development, In the Loop (directed by Armando Iannucci)
As he traveled around the United States for nine months in 1831, the twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that Americans loved to argue with one another. “To set foot on American soil is to find oneself in tumultuous surroundings,” he wrote in his great two-volume travelogue, Democracy in America. “A confused clamor proceeds from every quarter. A thousand voices assail the ear simultaneously, each giving expression to some social need.” The variety of social needs that people argued about was endless. Whether to build a school, what to do with a criminal, how best to plan the route for a highway—it seemed that nothing in life could not be made the topic of animated discussion at a town meeting. “Citizens meet for the sole purpose of announcing that they disapprove of the policies of the government,” Tocqueville wrote, “while others hail the men now in office as the fathers of the country.” He saw this fever pitch of civic engagement as a fundamental part of the new country’s identity. “In the lives of Americans,” he wrote, “to take an interest in and talk about the government of society is life’s most important activity and, in a way, its only pleasure.” He found this interest making itself known no matter the setting and no matter the situation. “Americans do not converse,” he wrote; “they argue.”
Tocqueville also found that this love of debate filtered up from streets and towns into the highest levels of government. “The great political fervor that keeps American legislatures in a state of constant agitation,” he wrote, “is merely an episode in something much larger, and in a way an extension of it: something that begins in the lowest ranks of the populace and from there spreads through all classes of citizens one after another.”[1] Civic engagement was infectious, in other words, and its means of contagion was the press. “The press is, par excellence, the democratic instrument of liberty,” Tocqueville wrote.[2]
It carries the currents of political life into every section of this vast country. Ever vigilant, it regularly lays bare the secret springs of politics and obliges public men to appear before the court of public opinion. It is the press that rallies interests around certain doctrines and formulates the creeds of the political parties. It is through the press that the parties speak to one another without meeting face-to-face and understand one another without direct contract.[3]
In Tocqueville’s reading, the press had the power to shape public opinion, but it was also the institution that converted public opinion into a real political force. It was the press that allowed Americans’ passion for debate to exercise influence, often decisively, over how they were governed. Journalists and pundits might use the press to broadcast their individual opinions, of course, but the primary importance of a free press to a democratic society was its function as a loudspeaker for the beliefs of the people.
That might have been an accurate description of how the press worked in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Tocqueville’s qualified but admiring view of the United States remains an important element of the country’s self-image. But his account of the relationship among Americans, the press, and the government does not apply to the United States in the years following September 11. While the American people had strong and varied opinions about the wisdom of invading Iraq—as evidenced by their turning out in the hundreds of thousands for antiwar marches in Washington, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere—it was only the pro-war side of the population whose views got a fair hearing in the country’s major newspapers and on the airwaves of the country’s biggest news stations. During the first two weeks of February 2003, for example, little more than a month before the invasion began, 267 current or former government officials appeared as guests to discuss Iraq on ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS’s Evening News, NBC’s Nightly News, and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Just one of those guests expressed skepticism about the invasion, and even that one guest, the Democratic senator Edward Kennedy, talked as though the war were a foregone conclusion.[4] As the Bush administration marched the country toward war, and as Congress did as little as it could to get in Bush’s way, the news media, for the most part, marched alongside it in lockstep.
Over the following several years, of course, it became clear that invading Iraq had been a mistake. The military failed to locate any stockpiles of nuclear or biological or chemical weapons. The country devolved into civil war instead of rallying around secular democracy and economic liberalism. Saddam Hussein’s ouster and subsequent execution did not inspire a wave of democratic reforms across the region. As the scale of America’s failure in Iraq sank in, it provided Americans with the opportunity to indulge another of their favorite pastimes: blaming the media for things. Americans did not just believe that their political leaders had pushed the country into a foolish war; they believed the media helped with the pushing. The year in which the United States invaded, 2003, is the last year in which a majority of Americans told Gallup that they had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust and confidence in the mass media, and that trust has declined steadily ever since, from a pre-invasion high of about 55 percent to just 34 percent in 2022.[5] Two decades later, resentment of the media remains at a fever pitch across the political spectrum, with Donald Trump making attacks on “fake news” a staple of his rallies and speeches, and left-wing users of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter regularly castigating journalists who supported the invasion. Journalism’s failure to cast more doubt on the wisdom of invading is our era’s paradigmatic example of what happens when television networks and national newspapers get caught prioritizing the concerns of the people they cover above those of their audiences.
Journalists themselves got in on the criticism as well, with most major newspapers eventually running at least a few op-ed pieces detailing the media’s failures. For individual pundits who got the war wrong, the “Iraq apology essay” became a professional rite of passage. In the spring of 2004, the editorial board of The New York Times went a few steps past that, undertaking a kind of internal struggle session and then publishing an anguished package enumerating its failures of editorial judgment and emphasis. After “reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation,” the Times found “a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been.” The editors regretted the paper’s performance during the months leading up to the invasion. “In some cases,” they wrote, “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.” While the editors still believed the paper had produced “an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of” during that period, they thought the Times should have squinted a bit harder at the government’s prewar arguments: “Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged—or failed to emerge.”
While this lengthy recitation of the paper’s mistakes gave the impression of an institution that was determined to hold itself accountable, the editorial board let themselves and their colleagues off the hook in a few important ways. To begin with, they did not specify how the Times would avoid making similar mistakes in the future: Their report included nothing about changing editorial procedures, punishing the reporters whose shoddy work pushed misinformation onto the paper’s front page, firing the editors who failed to oversee the reporters, or instituting any new policies regarding anonymous sourcing. All the Times promised to do was “continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.” In addition, the paper made a point of emphasizing that its reporters and editors had not been alone in making such errors. For example, the Times said it had been misled by “a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq,” people whose self-interest the paper had failed to account for when evaluating the veracity of their claims. To make matters worse, the “best American intelligence sources available at the time” also fed Times reporters information that turned out to be false (or at least unverified), particularly concerning Iraq’s alleged possession of aluminum tubes that were to be used in the manufacture of enriched uranium. These missteps were unfortunate, but the editorial board implicitly painted them as understandable: “Administration officials” and “many” other “news organizations” had also been taken in by the exiles, and the Times certainly wasn’t alone in publishing the bad American intelligence.[6]
To hear the Times tell it, the newspaper participated in an intense national debate and, despite its collective expertise and the best of intentions, arrived at the wrong conclusions. It pursued the truth in good faith and struggled to weigh good information against bad at a time when things were moving fast and much was uncertain. It made a series of honest mistakes along the way, but so did the rest of the news media, as well as the Bush administration itself. But that explanation is self-serving in the extreme. The New York Times and the rest of the national news media did not stage an honest debate and then come down on the wrong side. The media refused to stage a real debate at all. Its errors went far beyond giving too much credence to opportunistic defectors or making educated guesses that turned out to be incorrect. From the beginning, mainstream news organizations treated the invasion of Iraq as a foregone conclusion, going out of their way to avoid seriously considering any evidence or information that would have made the war look like a bad idea. Such evidence and information was not hard to find. As the hundreds of thousands who took to the street in protest saw clearly, the Bush administration’s case for war was laughably weak, ridiculous on its face. The judgment that news organizations made was not that the evidence for invading outweighed the evidence against, but that the evidence against the war didn’t need to be aired at all. In 2013, Thomas Ricks, who reported on the military for The Washington Post in 2002, recalled the bosses spiking his articles criticizing the planned invasion. “There was an attitude among editors,” he said: “ ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?’ ”[7]
In the nineteenth-century America of Tocqueville’s travels, the press forged a connection between the wider population and their representatives in government by transmitting opinion from the former to the latter. In the buildup to Iraq, the press severed that connection. In doing so, it earned the intensifying contempt of Americans for twenty years and counting. When today’s press warns about the spread of “misinformation,” as became fashionable during the election campaign that put Donald Trump in the White House, it is usually talking about foreign influence campaigns and other malign actors on social media. But when many Americans talk about the problem of “misinformation,” they’re talking about the press itself.
As we’ll see, journalism’s failures in 2002 and 2003 also made it easier for Congress to ignore the people it was representing as it considered whether to invade. The cumulative effect, both in the news media and in the halls of government, was a bit surreal. On the streets, in schools and workplaces, and in conversations with friends and family, one could hear and see the “confused clamor” of democratic contention everywhere. But in the news and on Capitol Hill, one saw instead a set of phrases and gestures that had the form and appearance of debate without any of the real content, a debate in the uncanny valley, a disjointed performance of deliberation in which the crucial decisions had already been made. What resulted was the most conformist cultural climate the United States had experienced since the 1950s, under an executive branch acting with a degree of impunity the country had not seen in decades.
The first type of conformity to be established after September 11 was emotional. On September 16, The New Yorker published a series of reflections on the attacks, including a short contribution by Susan Sontag:
The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?…A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counterintelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense….Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.[8]
Sontag was one of the most prominent and well-established public intellectuals in the country, which meant that she could not be driven entirely out of public life for her impertinence and lack of sentiment. But that did not stop a number of people from trying, and Sontag briefly became the most hated writer in the country. Her piece prompted several memorable tantrums. The conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan called her a “pretentious buffoon” who had revealed herself as “contemptible.”[9] In Newsweek, the commentator Jonathan Alter called it ironic that Sontag and other left-wing writers, “the same people always urging us to not blame the victim in rape cases[,] are now saying Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it,” which is a pretty creepy way of characterizing a debate about foreign and military policy.[10] Not to be outdone, a New York Post columnist named Rod Dreher laid out a sadomasochistic fantasy in which he imagined personally humiliating Sontag in front of the heroes she had disparaged: “I wanted to walk barefoot on broken glass across the Brooklyn Bridge, up to that despicable woman’s apartment, grab her by the neck, drag her down to ground zero and force her to say that to the firefighters.”[11] This criticism continued for weeks. Sontag was called a “moral idiot” and a “traitor.”[12] The New Republic, a magazine that had previously run her work, published an article with the opening line “What do Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Susan Sontag have in common?”[13] When she appeared on Nightline to discuss the controversy, the other guest, a man from the conservative Heritage Foundation, said something to the effect that Sontag should no longer be “permitted” to speak in “honorable intellectual circles.”[14]
What exactly were these people mad about? The substance of what Sontag wrote was neither inflammatory nor particularly controversial. That was the first thing that Sontag noticed, anyway. “I mean, I am aware of what a radical point of view is,” she told an interviewer a month after her piece was published. “But I did not think for a moment my essay was radical or even particularly dissenting. It seemed very common sense.”[15] She had not written that the people inside the Twin Towers and the Pentagon deserved to die. She had not praised the hijackers. She had not criticized a single government policy or official action. What she had done was complain about the tone struck by pundits and political leaders after the attacks, a tone of hazy sentimentality and consolation that seemed to leave no space for the kinds of hard thinking that a disaster like September 11 required. She had written the piece after binge-watching cable news for two days after the planes hit. “What I published in the New Yorker was written literally 48 hours after the Sept. 11 attacks,” she said. “I was in Berlin at the time, and I was watching CNN for 48 hours straight. You might say that I had overdosed on CNN. And what I wrote was a howl of dismay at the nonsense that I was hearing.”[16] With the whole Atlantic Ocean between herself and the city she called home, what Sontag wanted from CNN—and what she did not get—was debate: “a lot of thinking,” “the politics of a democracy,” “disagreement,” and “candor,” as she wrote in The New Yorker. To her critics, that desire in itself, totally separate from any judgments she might have made about the best course of action going forward, was unpatriotic at best and possibly treasonous at worst.
Many people contributed reflections on September 11 to the New Yorker issue in which Sontag’s essay appeared. Adam Gopnik, for example, made the strange decision to compare the smell that pervaded lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the attacks to “smoked mozzarella,” a scent he described as “not entirely horrible from a reasonable distance.” That is at least as offensive as anything Sontag wrote, but readers could forgive his haute bourgeois aestheticization of September 11’s brutal violence because the tone was right, his feelings appropriate. The article was pensive, mournful in a gentle way, totally apolitical. Gopnik lost himself in the library of his own mind, quoting Edgar Allan Poe, Auden, and E. B. White. He appreciated the birds in Central Park and noticed a now-ironically cheerful advertisement on the street for a “Wayne Thiebaud show at the Whitney.” He walked down Seventh Avenue and felt “a surprising rush of devotion to the actual New York, Our Lady of the Subways, New York as it is.”[17] His piece was a perfect example of “confidence-building and grief management,” the very thing Sontag had criticized. A couple of writers made fun of him for the line about cheese, but on the whole, the media gave him a pass.
The imperative to focus on grief management extended into the “entertainment” sectors of the media as well. In March 2003, on the eve of invasion, the all-female country music trio the Dixie Chicks performed a concert in London. Public opinion in England, as in the rest of the world outside the United States, was overwhelmingly against the war. Before playing a song about an American soldier who dies in Vietnam, singer Natalie Maines talked to the audience. “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all,” she said. “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”[18] The crowd cheered and the concert continued, but when The Guardian reported on Maines’s remarks, Americans went ballistic. People referred to the group as “Saddam’s Angels” and “the Dixie Sluts.” The band’s song “Travelin’ Soldier” dropped from the No. 1 position on the country music chart down to No. 63. Radio stations stopped playing the group’s music and suspended DJs who didn’t comply. They lost an endorsement deal with a tea company, and their bus driver quit in protest. Maines had to move from Austin to Los Angeles because of death threats, at least one of which the FBI decided was credible.[19]
Musicians didn’t even have to say anything about the war to see their careers harmed. In the week following the attacks, program directors for the radio broadcasting conglomerate Clear Channel, which owned stations across the country, received a suggested list of more than 160 songs to not play. The origins of the list were unclear, and Clear Channel denied that it ever issued an outright ban on the songs that were included, but many DJs stopped playing them anyway. Whatever the truth of its origins, and whatever the level of enforcement, the list’s message came across: It was no longer appropriate to give musical expression to certain ideas and feelings in public. Every song by the left-wing rock band Rage Against the Machine was included; there was no longer any room for criticism of America’s politics. John Mellencamp’s “Crumblin’ Down,” the Dave Matthews Band hit “Crash into Me,” and Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” were all banned, presumably because their titles and lyrics might inadvertently cause listeners to dwell on the events of September 11. John Lennon’s pacifist anthem “Imagine” was on the list, too: The only thing Americans were going to imagine for the time being was the satisfaction they would take in retribution. But emotional management didn’t just mean discouraging people from thinking about negatives like death, destruction, and war. The list wanted to guard against people feeling too positively, too, and that meant that Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” were out as well. The controversy surrounding the list was a silly episode and a public relations headache for Clear Channel, but it illustrated the extent to which media companies saw their audiences as people who couldn’t be trusted to manage their feelings about September 11 on their own.[20]
Today, when many people get their news and entertainment primarily from individually curated social media feeds and streaming services rather than national newspapers and a monolithic complex of corporate television and radio networks, one runs the risk of underestimating the effect that episodes like the Sontag controversy and Clear Channel’s do-not-play list had on the cultural climate. The internet is now so central to how information gets disseminated and discussed that it can be hard to remember just how embryonic the digital world was two decades ago. A critic for The New York Times, for example, recently wrote that “Sept. 11 was the first world event experienced communally online,”[21] but that’s not even close to correct. It might have been for a tiny, dedicated cadre of early adopters, but television, not the internet, is where most people experienced September 11. None of today’s major social media platforms existed on September 11 or even when the Iraq War began. In early 2003, 89 percent of Americans were still using television as their primary news source, as were 87 percent of America’s internet users. The internet lagged behind not just television but print newspapers and radio as well.[22] This meant that when something published in the country’s most prestigious magazine prompted comparisons between the writer and Osama bin Laden, people heard about it. And when the nation’s largest radio conglomerate banned “Imagine,” many people simply weren’t going to be listening to “Imagine” for the foreseeable future.
The attempted cancellation of Susan Sontag served as a model for conservatives and center-left liberals who wanted to police any deviations, no matter how minor, from the scripted morality play of mourning, national innocence, and vengeance. The television host Bill Maher, for example, who was otherwise happy to join the New Atheists in singling out Islam for demonization, made the mistake of furrowing his brow at the reflexive description of the hijackers as “cowards.” President Bush had used the term in the very first public sentence he uttered about the attacks—“Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward”—and the rest of the media had quickly followed suit. Maher didn’t get it. “We have been the cowards,” he said on Politically Incorrect just under a week after the attacks. “Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away—that’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, not cowardly.” He apologized multiple times during the ensuing uproar, but his show was canceled within a year.
Local newspaper columnists in Texas and Oregon were fired for criticizing President Bush’s peripatetic behavior on the day of the attacks. A New York performance of music by the loopy German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen—who once told a newspaper he was educated at the Sirius star system—was also canceled after he described the attack on the World Trade Center as “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” The reaction to all of these comments was excessive; a couple of grumpy newspaper columnists weren’t going to prevent the invasion of Afghanistan from going forward, and the idea that a European composer of atonal art music could undermine feelings of national unity in a country as indifferent to high culture as the United States was laughable. But the firings and boycotts and cancellations enforced the kind of emotional conformity that now made up the texture of the country’s public life, affirming that it was ridiculous to suggest that America’s response to September 11 required debating anything at all. President Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, spelled this out when he drew the following lesson from Bill Maher’s comments at a White House press conference: “People have to watch what they say and watch what they do.”[23]
By the spring of 2002, the shock of September 11 had slightly worn off and American soldiers had taken Kabul. The Bush administration now had the time to shift its focus from enforcing emotional conformity to cultivating the political conformity that would be required to realize its dream of war with Iraq. This effort required one of the most forceful propaganda campaigns in the country’s history. Nationally, the debate revolved around three questions:
Did Saddam Hussein’s government have any direct connections, or had it ever provided material assistance, to al-Qaeda or any other extremist group?
Did Iraq possess, or was it on the verge of possessing, weapons of mass destruction, whether chemical, biological, or nuclear?
Would overthrowing Hussein’s government and attempting to replace it with liberal democracy serve America’s strategic interests?
As the Bush administration made its case for war, it answered all three of these questions in the affirmative, but the second was the most important. If Saddam possessed WMDs and was hiding them from United Nations inspection teams, then he was an “imminent threat,” and America would be justified in taking him out. As everyone knows now, and as many people understood at the time, Hussein didn’t have anything that needed to be hidden from the U.N.—the case for war was built entirely on lies. But in addition to the stalwart support of Fox News and other conservative news organizations, the Bush administration got crucial assistance from The New York Times, which, despite its status as a favored punching bag of the right wing, might have done more to aid the push for invasion than any other newspaper in the country.
The Times was instrumental in legitimizing the false claim that Iraq either possessed or was pursuing WMDs. Relying on the allegations of Iraqi defectors looking to advance their own political interests at Hussein’s expense, the Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon wrote a notorious front-page story in September 2002 alleging that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes specifically designed for use in uranium enrichment. Miller talked to White House officials she described as administration “hard-liners,” writing that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”[24] Vice President Dick Cheney cited the story on Meet the Press, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice did the same on other television programs. Miller also interviewed a defector who said he had “personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons…as recently as a year ago.”[25] In response to intelligence analysts who voiced doubts about the evidence for Hussein’s pursuit of WMDs—doubts that weren’t even mentioned until the story’s ninth paragraph—Miller cited anonymous administration officials who “insisted” that “this was a minority view.”[26]
Miller’s father was a nightlife impresario who was famous for persuading Elvis to play hundreds of shows in Las Vegas starting in 1969,[27] and just like her dad, Miller built a career on her ability to book A-list talent—in her case, as sources. Like most reporters at major newspapers and networks, Miller needed to maintain access to powerful people in order to perform the basic functions of her job, which meant that criticizing those officials or casting doubt on their honesty in public always came with a high potential cost. Miller was an extremely well-sourced reporter, and unlike Elvis, the talent she booked preferred to keep their names off the marquee, allowing the Times’s reputation to lend their claims a credibility they would have lacked had readers known the identities of the people making them. Ahmed Chalabi, exiled leader of the dissident Iraqi National Congress, was a key source for Miller’s reporting on Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program, and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, supplied her with the name of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame, whose subsequent public outing became a prolonged scandal (it was widely believed at the time that someone associated with the Bush administration had leaked the agent’s identity in retaliation for an op-ed written by her husband, who thought the evidence for Hussein’s pursuit of WMDs was flimsy). The eventual controversy surrounding Miller’s reporting put a stop to her professional ladder climbing, but she managed to make a home for herself as a commentator on Fox News. “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself,” she later said. “My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”[28] This was a very convenient bit of self-exonerating sophistry. By devoting just two paragraphs out of sixty-one in her first article on Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear program to those who expressed doubts that Iraq was much of a threat, Miller made it perfectly obvious that she had “assessed” the government’s claims to be credible. And by describing her work as something close to stenography, she revealed herself as a megaphone for the Bush administration rather than any kind of independent observer or analyst.
The news media was similarly lax in scrutinizing the case Secretary of State Colin Powell made for the invasion at the United Nations. The presentation that Secretary Powell gave on February 5, 2003, as well as the extent to which other Bush administration officials had to bully him into giving it, is now notorious, and I won’t recount the details of that story in too much detail. Taking place just over a month before the invasion, Powell’s speech was the administration’s single most effective bit of salesmanship in its campaign for war. Powell was one of the most admired men in the country, a moderate Black conservative with a distinguished record of military service and a sober, statesmanlike bearing. Commentators often wondered when he would mount a campaign for the presidency, an idea rendered even more appealing by Powell’s obvious reluctance to pursue the office. His presence among the ideologues populating the rest of the Bush administration was reassuring to the press. “George W. Bush’s intention to name Colin Powell as secretary of state…instantly enhances his coming administration,” the Times editorial board wrote in December 2000.[29] That perception was the single best reason for Bush to send him to the U.N. “You’ve got high poll ratings,” Powell later remembered Dick Cheney telling him before the speech. “You can afford to lose a few points.”[30] As far as the media was concerned, the performance Powell delivered to the Security Council was in keeping with his stature. “Colin Powell convinced me,” wrote the future Obama appointee Steven Rattner. The Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter didn’t buy Powell’s arguments about the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but he found the secretary of state “persuasive on Iraq’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.”[31] The Times editorial board found in Powell everything that was lacking in Bush, describing the presentation as “powerful,” “convincing,” and “all the more convincing.” It thought Bush’s decision to send Powell to the U.N. was “wise.”[32] The speech was a public relations coup. By the time journalists and other world leaders came around to the realization that almost all of it was based on false or at least faulty intelligence, Hussein was gone and it was too late.
What’s most striking about the presentation today, though, is how unconvincing it is if you don’t start from the assumption that the man delivering it deserves an enormous benefit of the doubt. Supplementing his speech with audio clips from intercepted phone calls as well as a forty-five-card slideshow, Powell put the translated text of allegedly suspicious Iraqi phone calls on a screen and then exaggerated the content of the translations while reading aloud, turning remarks that seemed innocuous or ambiguous on their face into damning evidence of malign schemes. One of the intercepted messages Powell read was translated as follows: “And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.” Then Powell put a more exciting gloss on the recording, restating it as “And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas—make sure there is nothing there” (emphasis added). He also showed satellite surveillance photos documenting the fact that trucks and other kinds of equipment had been moved from place to place. Those photos were rendered suspicious by Powell’s reference to an Iraqi defector who claimed the Hussein government had “mobile biological resource laboratories” that could be hidden in shipping containers and transported anywhere by truck. Of course, the satellites couldn’t see inside the trucks or the shipping containers they towed, and Powell admitted that none had yet been found, but then of course they wouldn’t have been found; because the labs were mobile, they would be easy to hide. “The mobile production facilities are very few, perhaps 18 trucks that we know of—there may be more—but perhaps 18 that we know of,” he said. “Just imagine trying to find 18 trucks among the thousands and thousands of trucks that travel the roads of Iraq every single day.”[33] Powell did not explore the possibility that people moving trucks and equipment around was a normal occurrence everywhere in the world.
Powell’s presentation was built solely on speculation, an insistence on making the worst possible assumption about any piece of circumstantial evidence, and his stellar reputation among the press corps and diplomatic community. It included no direct evidence of a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons program. It was very effective. Despite what should have been the obvious shortcomings of his presentation, Powell still managed to place the onus on Iraq’s government to prove the negative proposition that it wasn’t pursuing a weapons program (these were the exact terms in which the U.N. drafted its resolutions demanding Iraqi disarmament).[34] To read the positive reviews of Powell’s performance in newspapers the next day, or to watch them delivered on television news that evening, was to feel that the entire debate had entered a zone of unreality.
Opinion writers could have helped to mitigate some of the damage being done by their reporter colleagues over at the news desk, but as journalists like Judith Miller decided to prioritize access and close relationships with their powerful government sources over documenting the truth, many liberal and centrist pundits seemed to decide that criticizing the Bush administration’s war effort wasn’t worth the professional risks. The editorial board of The New York Times, for example, is made up of about fifteen people, give or take a few. The names of the head and deputy editors of the editorial page are listed on the paper’s masthead, but the names of the board’s other members are harder to track down. They have two jobs. The first is to produce unsigned articles that express the newspaper’s official, institutional opinion on the events of the day. The second is to commission and edit signed opinion pieces authored by guest contributors and columnists. They work in strict isolation. Members of the board are not allowed to discuss their work or views with colleagues in the newsroom, nor are they permitted to know what those colleagues will be reporting on over the coming days and weeks. The separation between news and opinion is supposed to be total, like church and state. During the first years of the twenty-first century, legacy publications were still enjoying the final years of their unquestioned dominance, and The New York Times was the most important and widely read newspaper in the country. That lofty status made the members of its editorial board something like the high priests of American public opinion. They were among the most influential semi-anonymous writers in the English-speaking world.
In 2002 and early 2003, the Times devoted many hundreds of column inches in its opinion pages to the question of whether the United States should or should not invade Iraq, depose Saddam Hussein, and install a democratic government in his place. It was odd, though: Very few of those column inches were actually devoted to evaluating the case for war on the merits. Hardly a week went by without the Times addressing Iraq in one way or another, but the board seemed to fixate in a rather manic way on President Bush’s sales tactics while paying little attention to the thing that was up for sale. On July 25, 2002, one op-ed noted the likely costs associated with a full-scale invasion. “There is a case to be made that these costs are worth sustaining,” the two guest contributors wrote. “But if so, we need Mr. Bush to make it. He has not yet done so.”[35] The board would keep up this anxious drumbeat throughout the following seven months. August 3: “There may be a compelling case to be made for war with Iraq. The administration has not yet made it.”[36] August 11: “It is not too late for Mr. Bush and the nation to consider basic questions about Iraq.”[37] August 16: “Mr. Bush and his aides may yet be able to make a solid case for military action in one of the most volatile parts of the world.”[38] August 24 saw a special guest appearance from Bill Keller, who would become the paper’s executive editor in July 2003. “When the time comes, the president…needs to lay out his evidence,” he wrote.[39] September 5: “Mr. Bush seems to realize that he has a lot of work to do if he hopes to present a more coherent policy.”[40] September 20: “At this stage Congress and the American people deserve some time to ponder the matter.”[41] October 3: “The debate should be a moment for the American public to take stock.”[42] October 8: “Mr. Bush still has work to do if he hopes to persuade Americans of the need to use military force to disarm Iraq.”[43] January 10, 2003: “There can be no wavering from the goal of disarming Iraq, but all chances of doing so peacefully should be explored before the world is asked to decide on war.”[44] January 28: “The world must be reassured that every possibility of a peaceful solution has been fully explored.”[45] February 2: “The administration owes the American people and the rest of the world a more careful and consistent approach.”[46] March 7: “Diplomacy should be given a chance to rescue the Security Council from damaging paralysis, and to present Baghdad with one last opportunity to change course.”[47] March 17: “This page remains persuaded of the vital need to disarm Iraq. But it is a process that should go through the United Nations.”[48] The war began three days later.
It’s not as if the Times didn’t make up its mind about the war; by the spring of 2003, its editors clearly believed that Hussein was hiding a WMD program, and they thought that invading was worthwhile in the event that he refused to cooperate with United Nations inspectors. But the board never spelled out how it came to that belief. It didn’t address the skeptics who thought the evidence for Iraq’s WMDs was actually pretty thin, and it didn’t reflect on the Bush administration’s failure to substantiate Hussein’s alleged links to al-Qaeda and what that failure said about the larger issue of the administration’s credibility. Instead, the Times appeared to drift into a pro-war position, like an unmanned boat tugged down one river fork rather than another by an invisible current, even as the editors fetishized proceduralism and chided the president over his lack of enthusiasm for international consensus. The more it wrote about the invasion, the less interested it seemed in what that invasion would entail, or what its consequences might be. That’s not the kind of writing one would like to expect from the opinion leaders of the English-speaking world.
The quality of argumentation was even worse at conservative outlets such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. Those organizations played their expected roles, praising Bush’s every move, laying out the evils of the Hussein government in exhaustive and exhausting detail, and keeping a neurotically vigilant watch for anyone with a bad word to say about the proposed war. But even if individual writers at centrist and liberal publications didn’t want to join in on the orgy of bloodthirsty jingoism that characterized conservative media, they still displayed a striking reluctance to oppose an administration that many of them had been happy to criticize for the first eight months of its existence. In places like The New York Times and The New Yorker, the Iraq debate was dominated by a group of ostentatiously reluctant hawks. When one surveys the editorials, symposia, panel discussions, and narrative journalism this group produced in 2002 and 2003, the consistency of tone is remarkable. Almost without exception (the exception is Christopher Hitchens), liberal support for the invasion was solemn, even melancholy, accented with flourishes of moral seriousness and high-minded anger directed toward the antiwar left. In March 2003, Hendrik Hertzberg published a comment in The New Yorker. Caught between two groups of loud partisans, each “equally convinced of their moral rectitude,” Hertzberg counted himself among the “great many who hold their views in fear and trembling, haunted by the suspicion that the other side might be right after all.”[49] The magazine’s editor, David Remnick, was one of these many, and so was the writer Paul Berman, who was frustrated that Bush refused to describe the war as a defense of democratic civilization in general. “We’re going into a very complex and long war disarmed,” Berman told the Times, “in which our most important assets have been stripped away from us, which are our ideals and our ideas.”[50] One month before the invasion, Thomas Friedman wrote, “I feel lately as if there are no adults in this room (except Tony Blair)….I side with those who believe we need to confront Saddam—but we have to do it right, with allies and staying power.”[51] Leon Wieseltier broke with his fellow editors at The New Republic, the house organ of the Washington consensus, in displaying no eagerness for war, but he still thought there would need to be a war. “We will certainly win,” he said, “but it is a war in which we are truly playing with fire.”[52]
The liberal hawks were clearly at pains to distance themselves from the drum-beating patriots over at places like the National Review. In The New Yorker, Hertzberg disdainfully referred to “the sort of evangelical-Christian conservatives who contemplate Armageddon with something like rapture.” But they were equally concerned that people not associate them with the antiwar left, or, as Hertzberg described them, “traditional pacifists and the sort of angry leftists for whom any exercise of American military power, because it is American, is wrong.”[53] These were distinctions based on style, but when it came to substance—that is, the question of whether the United States should take out Saddam—there was little to separate the liberal hawks from the war’s most enthusiastic proponents. They did not challenge the Bush administration’s central contention that Saddam Hussein either already possessed or was actively working to acquire weapons of mass destruction. They did not point out the fantastical lunacy of the government’s plan for shipping democracy to Iraq like so much flat-packed Ikea furniture. They failed to note that without a real, workable plan for rebuilding Iraq after Saddam’s fall, the war was doomed to failure. They also refused to grapple with the Bush administration’s obvious bad faith. It wasn’t just that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest were lying. It was how little they seemed to care that everyone could tell they were lying. For all the energy the Bush administration put into its propaganda effort, it hardly seemed concerned with whether the propaganda was any good. The Republicans believed they could get what they wanted without having to trouble themselves with a sophisticated strategy or a narrative that the average informed person would be likely to accept as accurate; they thought their goals were achievable through sheer shamelessness and force of will. In light of the liberal hawks’ performance during 2002 and 2003, the Republicans were right.
There was one little corner of the media landscape where the public could find something like a real debate on the war. In the early years of the twenty-first century, a number of journalists and commentators—prominent, obscure, and upstart alike—began to publish their writing on independent blogs. For established journalists, blogging allowed them to communicate with readers more quickly and in a more colloquial tone than would have been allowed in the pages of a magazine or newspaper. For the up-and-comers, blogging allowed them to build up loyal audiences and get their byline into circulation by posting several times a day, commenting on events in real time, and lacing their posts with jokes, links to funny videos, wry expressions of disgust, and howls of outrage. Within the space of a few years, bloggers like Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and dozens of others built their own coherent world, one with its own rhythms, tics, preoccupations, and insider terms of art. A map of this world could be found in the blogrolls, the list of other sites that each blog would post on the side of the page to indicate whom they were in conversation with. Because many of them didn’t do any original reporting of their own, the relationship between establishment publications and bloggers resembled that between sharks and the remoras that cling to them—without the mainstream media, the bloggers would not have had anything to comment on. But they were separate from it, too, like a group of quick-witted, intellectually unformed, and sometimes arrogant boys who sit in the back of the hall and keep up an insistent running commentary throughout the professor’s lecture. For people who spent a lot of time reading these blogs during the Bush presidency, a roll call of their names is likely to inspire mixed feelings of nostalgia, amusement, and exhaustion: Eschaton, Alicublog, Firedoglake, Instapundit, Allahpundit, Tapped, Pandagon, Little Green Footballs, Hullabaloo, Daily Kos.
This medium for commentary was a recent development, very much in its infancy in 2002. Comments sections weren’t introduced until 1998, and news organizations were slow to adopt them. Permalinks, which gave individual blog posts unique URLs that could be bookmarked and shared, were only invented in 2000.[54] The bloggers weren’t exclusively focused on the war. They wrote about whatever was happening in the news that day, from international trade deals and minor congressional scandals to musings on the return of professional baseball to Washington, D.C. For the first several years of their existence, however, Iraq and the war on terror were the biggest stories in the world, so that’s what they focused on. One could argue that Iraq was the event around which the internet learned to talk to itself, and audiences, for their part, found that the internet was very useful for keeping up with news on the war. Even if people weren’t yet ready to give up their newspaper and cable subscriptions, more than three-quarters of Americans used the internet in some capacity to find or share information about the war, and their ranks grew as time passed. At the beginning of 2001, less than half of Americans used the internet at all. By 2007, when President Bush initiated the “surge” in response to America’s failure to pacify Iraq following Saddam’s ouster, 75 percent did.[55]
There was plenty of pro-war sentiment in Blogworld. Andrew Sullivan, for example, a gay British American conservative who idolized Margaret Thatcher and had edited The New Republic in the 1990s, was Susan Sontag’s most dedicated critic. He started his blog, The Daily Dish, in 2000, and spent the next decade as one of the most influential commentators in the country. Though he turned against the war after the invasion, his defense of the Bush administration before the spring of 2003 was so strident as to merit the adjective “hysterical.” He was quick to hand out his “Sontag Award” to any commentator who deviated from what he viewed as the only acceptable response to the attacks: unqualified sympathy for the Americans, unlimited hatred for the hijackers, and boundless love for America’s ideals. When The Guardian published an opinion piece in which the writer Charlotte Raven described her ambivalent feelings toward the United States—“It is perfectly possible to condemn the terrorist action and dislike the US just as much as you did before the WTC went down”—Sullivan went into a rage.[56] “A new low in hatred for America,” he wrote. “It is beneath response. But we might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself—a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead.”[57] The pro-war camp also included people like Matthew Yglesias (now a Twitter/X lightning rod as well as a star independent blogger), who started blogging as an undergraduate and swiftly climbed the ranks of the media power hierarchy. Yglesias spent a lot of his time writing irritatingly fine-grained disquisitions on arguments among pundits—“I’d meant to do a post a little while back about how I’d read a post from Oxblog’s Afghan correspondent which answered about 75 percent of what had puzzled me about Peter Bergen’s ‘things are better than you think in Afghanistan’ op-ed,” is how he began one post in September 2004[58]—but occasionally he would drop the hairsplitting and just say what he thought. In January 2002, after President Bush characterized Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as making up an “axis of evil” in his State of the Union address, Yglesias wrote that “we should take them all out” (emphasis added).[59]
The difference between Blogworld and the traditional media, though, was that Blogworld had a place for antiwar voices, too, people whose contempt for the Bush administration was matched only by their loathing of the more established pundits who were falling over themselves to lend the neocons’ geopolitical strategy a veneer of seriousness that it did not deserve. Duncan Black, who wrote under the pseudonym Atrios, used his talent for neologism to annoy his mainstream media superiors on his website, Eschaton. In 2006, Atrios coined the term “Friedman Unit,” meaning six months, in reference to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s funny habit of repeatedly claiming that “the next six months” would be crucial in determining the outcome of the Iraq War, which he’d done at least twelve times over the previous two and a half years.[60] “The dominant view among the crowd in Washington is that the next 6 months is a critical time in Iraq,” Atrios wrote. “As it has always been. They’re all Tom Friedman now.”[61] David Rees produced a web comic titled Get Your War On, in which he attached profane speech bubbles to public domain clip art drawings of office workers talking to each other. A strip from October 2001 read as follows:
Man 1: If you could say one thing to God right now, what would it be?
Man 2: I think I would say, “Thank you, God, for your healing gift of religion.” What about you?
Man 1: I’d say, “God, I regret to inform you that U.S. policy now dictates we bomb the fuck out of You up in Heaven.”[62]
One of the most important nodes in Blogworld technically wasn’t a blog at all. It was more like a collection of several dozen blogs, all housed together under the same name. The website Slate was founded in 1996 by Michael Kinsley, who had co-hosted the cable news talk show Crossfire in the early 1990s. Slate ran lengthy exchanges among its editors and contributors that covered much of the spectrum of opinion on Iraq. Liberal hawks gave voice to their ambivalence, the conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan qualified her support for invasion with the line “Ultimately it’s all a big gut call,” and the progressive historian and media critic Eric Alterman wrote that the war was “unnecessary and potentially ruinous.”[63] David Plotz admitted that he supported the war in spite of finding arguments against it to be very compelling. “I haven’t been able to explain to myself (much less anyone else) why I support it,” he wrote.[64] Jonathan Alter said the United States should invade to preserve its credibility, and the pro-war journalist Jeffrey Goldberg telegraphed seriousness by breaking up his prose into as many clauses as possible and using a semicolon when a comma (or even no punctuation at all) would have worked just fine: “I will try, instead, to return to the essential issues: the moral challenge posed by the deeds of the Iraqi regime; and the particular dangers the regime poses to America and its allies. Everything else, to my mind, is commentary.”[65] A few other writers said that the Bush administration’s disdain for international law had cemented their opposition to the war. Midsize magazines such as The New York Review of Books also criticized the Bush administration’s pro-war publicity campaign and detailed the recklessness and incoherence of the president’s foreign policy, focusing in particular on his determination to undermine the same set of international rules that had benefited the United States more than any other country on earth over the previous half century.
Like traditional media, Blogworld was predominantly white and male, but its diversity of style and tone was crucial to its appeal, along with its speed and disregard for the conventions of legacy journalism. This disregard wasn’t contrarianism for its own sake; traditional journalism really did seem ill-equipped to chronicle what was unfolding during President Bush’s first term. In less than two years, Bush had lost the popular vote, been installed in the White House by the Supreme Court, and then been confronted with the worst disaster in the country’s history. Given his lack of a popular mandate and the modesty of his campaign promises, one might have expected a president in Bush’s position to respond to September 11 with caution. Instead, his administration revealed itself as the most radical in living memory, proposing to upend the country’s foreign policy as well as the balance of power between the presidency and the other branches of the federal government. In light of the Bush administration’s radicalism and the country’s panicked mood, did it really make sense, as The New York Times maintained, to prohibit the inclusion of swear words in a news article? Blogs did a better job keeping up with the news as it unfolded, and their more rambunctious and emotional style was better suited to the disorienting and frightening times. The emotionally neutral stance on which newspapers prided themselves might have worked most of the time, but after September 11 that detachment sounded more like the dissociated monotone of someone who is unable to come to grips with events. The bloggers’ emotionalism told readers that they, too, were struggling to make sense of it all.
For all their democratic, argumentative energy, however, the bloggers had a limited impact on the wider national debate. They simply didn’t have the funds or the infrastructure to match the audience numbers of organizations like the Times and CNN. Their influence would grow as legacy publications began to imitate the independent blogs, whether by launching blogs of their own or hiring some of Blogworld’s star performers to write under their mastheads. But the bloggers selected for promotion to the legacy media big time were not the firebrands, not the ones who had said from the beginning that invading Iraq was a mistake. They were people like Ezra Klein, the wunderkind who supported the invasion as a college student and then dutifully apologized for supporting it a decade later. “Ezra is an incredible operator,” one editor said of him in 2013. “He is always looking upward at things. You only have to watch him work a party. He moves right to the most important people there.”[66] Or consider Matthew Yglesias, who was glad to explain in 2021 that careerism fueled his undergraduate support of the war. “I was a senior in college when the war started, but I was an early adopting blogger,” he said.
I was looking to graduation, I was looking to my job, I was looking to my aspiration to become, you know, a Frank Foer kind of person. And I was aware that in sophisticated political commentary circles, these things that my friends around the dorm thought were considered incredibly naive and dumb ways of looking at it. I thought that I had developed this much more sophisticated view from reading all these wise professionals.[67]
While Blogworld’s most valuable contributions in 2002 and 2003 came from people who were willing to say that the mainstream media had abdicated its role as social and political watchdog, the individual bloggers who enjoyed the most success within mainstream media later were those who knew from the beginning that in some cases, with respect to certain debates, the best course of action was to imitate and flatter one’s professional superiors. This is one reason why, for all the promise of the bloggers’ “disruptive” energy in the early years of the twenty-first century, the foreign policy views of traditional media have changed very little since 2003.
Let’s pretend for a moment that journalists hadn’t made any of the mistakes described above. Let’s say conservative opinion writers had merely disagreed with their opponents rather than accusing them of treason and fantasizing about making them walk across broken glass. Let’s say Judith Miller’s editors had refused to publish her pieces because of her overreliance on Iraq’s self-interested exiles as sources, or that they had told her to spend more time interviewing those who were skeptical of Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Let’s say The New Yorker’s reluctant hawks had suddenly realized their reluctance was well founded, and let’s say the editorial board of the Times devoted more attention to the merits of the case for war as opposed to impotently complaining about the Bush administration’s failure to make the case for war. Would it have made a difference? Would it have made people less willing to watch the war drag on for year after year if serious doubts about the need to wage it had been raised at the beginning? Would it have weakened the Bush administration enough to deny him a second term? Would it have stopped the war from happening at all?
One way to answer these questions, which isn’t quite as cheap and dismissive as it seems, is to reject their premise and note that the imaginary alternative was just that—imaginary. Not only did the media go along with the Bush administration’s war planning, but it has continued to support presidential militarism ever since. Despite the public self-flagellation over its errors in reporting on Iraq, for example, the New York Times editorial board responded to Obama’s 2009 plan to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan with the same fussy proceduralism they directed at Bush in 2002 and 2003. Dismissing out of hand the idea that the United States should give up and withdraw entirely (which would have been the correct decision), the editors would insist only that “Mr. Obama needs to explain the stakes for this country, the extent of the military commitment, the likely cost in lives and treasure and his definition of success.”[68] And when Obama made the more egregious mistake of taking military action in Libya, disguising as a simple effort to protect civilians a military action that was in reality always designed to end Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, the editors praised the decision, writing that “the United Nations Security Council resolution [authorizing] member nations to take ‘all necessary measures’ to protect civilians…was perhaps the only hope of stopping him from slaughtering thousands more.”[69] Other outlets failed to live up to their post-Iraq commitments to subject the military actions of future presidents to more rigorous scrutiny even when the president in question was Donald Trump. When Trump ordered the launch of several dozen Tomahawk missiles into Syria in April 2017, the U.S. military’s first unilateral involvement in the Syrian civil war, the CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria described it as the moment Trump really “became President of the United States,” as though it were impossible to embody the full majesty of the office without killing people over something of negligible strategic importance.[70]
The very idea that the American news media, in its current form, can just decide to cultivate a consistently adversarial relationship with the government it covers is a fantasy. Objectivity and editorial independence are valuable ideals that news organizations could never afford to abandon, and many young journalists still dream of one day taking down a corrupt presidential administration in the manner of Woodward and Bernstein. But the economic and social realities of producing daily journalism on a national scale often militate against putting those ideals into practice. President Bush’s approval ratings never dropped below 57 percent between September 11, 2001, and March 2003,[71] and a majority of Americans supported invading Iraq from June 2002 right until the invasion began.[72] Why exactly would one expect the country’s journalists and editors to have been less susceptible than the general public to the country’s mythology of redemptive violence after September 11? Why would one expect pundits to have radically different views on the uses of American military power than their countrymen? The whole point of the word “mainstream” in the phrase “mainstream media” is that the people who voice their opinions on those platforms mostly have the same opinions as everyone else. Exceptional journalists and publications exist, of course, but to expect journalists as a group to be more perceptive and more measured in their judgment than the average citizen doesn’t make a lot of sense.
In addition, national news organizations are corporate entities with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The competitive pressures are intense, and this makes it costly to espouse unpopular views for any sustained period of time. Journalism in the United States is battered on all sides by public opinion it cannot afford to ignore for long, the need to get a story published before the competitors do, and the laws of profitability. Compared with an as yet unrealized ideal of journalistic foresight and editorial independence, the media failed spectacularly in the months preceding the invasion. But with respect to the news media infrastructure that actually exists in the United States, journalism functioned about as well as you would expect it to.
For another way of answering the what-if questions about the media and Iraq, consider the institution that, unlike the media, literally had the authority to prevent the country from going to war after September 11: Congress. Anyone claiming that a more adversarial media response to the Bush administration’s pro-war propaganda campaign in 2002 would have ultimately made a difference also presupposes a Congress that is responsive to public opinion and ready to debate issues on their merits. Congressional representatives are the only people in the federal government who are elected by direct popular vote, which means that the House and Senate are the parts of the federal government that should, in theory, be most responsive to “the will of the people.” If an adversarial news media had turned people against war in 2002, it would still have been up to Congress to make their constituents heard at the federal level. Fortunately, Congress had more than sufficient authority to prevent the Bush administration from sending the military into Iraq, because in 1973, in an effort to reset the federal government’s balance of power following decades of presidents waging undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam, Congress had passed the War Powers Resolution Act over Nixon’s veto. Designed to prevent future presidents from sending troops into combat on their sole authority, the law states that any troop deployment by the president must be preceded by a congressional declaration of war, except in cases of a national emergency or some other formal “statutory authorization” on the part of the legislature.
Three days after September 11, however, Congress decided to voluntarily abdicate its authority when it took up a bill called the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The text of the bill was brief. It began, “Whereas, on September 11, 2001, acts of treacherous violence were committed against the United States and its citizens,” and it ended with an assurance that “nothing in this resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.” In spite of that assurance, the rest of the AUMF rendered the War Powers Resolution all but irrelevant to America’s foreign and military policy for the next twenty years and counting. “The President,” it declared,
is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.[73]
The implications of passing the AUMF were staggering. At a stroke, the executive branch would acquire nearly absolute authority to decide when, where, and how the U.S. military would fight. The choice of targets would be left entirely to the president’s discretion, so long as he could claim with a straight face (he didn’t even have to prove it, just claim it) that a newly designated enemy had at least “aided” or “harbored” anyone who had anything to do with any organization involved in September 11. And so long as Congress periodically agreed to reauthorize the authorization they had already given—not a big lift, politically—the executive’s new war-making authority would be bound by neither time nor space. The war on terror has sometimes been called “the forever war.” It was the AUMF that made the “forever” part possible.
The California congresswoman Barbara Lee was the only member of the House or the Senate to vote against the AUMF. “I am convinced,” she said in a September 14 speech on the House floor, “that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.” She sounded nervous as she spoke. Her voice shook, her shoulders rose and fell as she took deep breaths between sentences, and she repeatedly clasped and unclasped her hands. She concluded by quoting a member of the clergy who had spoken at a memorial service earlier that day: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” She knew the AUMF’s passage was a foregone conclusion, which meant that her vote was an act of genuine political courage. Her reward for that courage was to become the most vilified politician in the country. She became the Susan Sontag of Capitol Hill, and for the same reason. “Let’s step back for a moment,” she said in her floor speech. “Let’s just pause, just for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.” Instead of a rush to war, she wanted deliberation and debate, and in response her office was flooded with so many death threats that the Capitol Police appointed bodyguards to look after her for twenty-four hours a day. The press turned her into a symbol of the American left’s feckless pacifism. “Who Is Barbara Lee?” asked the headline of a September 17 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, written by the conservative pundit John Fund. The answer, in short, was that Congresswoman Lee was “someone who always blames America first,” a representative whose district was “perhaps the most radical in the country,” and a longtime antiwar activist whose supposed pacificism was really just “a cloak for her belief that when it comes to the use of American power, her country can never do right.” At best, Lee and her ilk were “hopeless dupes.” At worst—and Fund seemed to believe the worst—they were up to “something more sinister.”[74]
During the Bush and Obama administrations, the AUMF was invoked thirty-seven times to launch military operations overseas. These included combat action in Afghanistan (2001); opening the notorious detention center at Guantánamo, as well as foreign military training in the Philippines, Georgia, and Yemen (2002); deployment to Djibouti and “maritime interception operations on the high seas” (2003); military operations in Iraq (2004); deployment (it’s not specified where) to enhance the counterterrorism capabilities of “friends and allies” (2006); strikes targeting Somalia from both the air and the sea (2007); “working with counterterrorism partners to disrupt and degrade al-Qaeda and affiliates” (2010); the detention of some one thousand “al-Qaeda, Taliban, and associated fighters,” plus the implementation of a “clear-hold-build strategy” in Afghanistan (2011); “direct military action…against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” including in Yemen (2012); the capture of a single member of al-Qaeda in Libya (2013); and a campaign of air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the use of U.S. troops to support Iraqi security forces, a series of strikes against the Khorasan group of al-Qaeda in Syria, and one air strike in Somalia (2014). The year 2015 saw U.S. support for anti-al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan, U.S. support of a Kurdish Peshmerga rescue operation in Iraq, the deployment of U.S. forces to northern Syria, and the deployment of combat aircraft and personnel to Turkey.[75] Without the AUMF, Congress would have been obligated to debate and vote on these operations, making decisions for which they would have to answer to their constituents every two years. But Congress didn’t want to have those debates and cast those votes. Perhaps they remembered what happened to Barbara Lee.
The passage of the AUMF was one of the worst self-inflicted wounds in congressional history, and given the importance of the House of Representatives in particular to the democratic character of the country’s government, it was also a blow to American democracy writ large. Even before September 11, Bush’s presence in the White House constituted a democratic crisis, regardless of one’s political orientation. Receiving half a million fewer votes than Al Gore in 2000, Bush was the first president in 112 years to win an election while losing the popular vote, and his victory was only assured when five unelected members of the Supreme Court stepped in to make sure that not all of the votes were counted. The decision was a political one, and nakedly so, with five conservative justices overruling a lower court and handing the presidency to the Republican candidate (subsequent analysis revealed that a full statewide recount would have swung the election to Gore). Given the manner in which Bush took office, one might have expected Congress to be particularly aggressive in terms of oversight, because it was the only branch of the federal government that could claim substantive democratic legitimacy at the time. Instead, Congress responded to September 11 by rushing to give up its authority over military policy, as though it were only too grateful not to be responsible for making the big decisions. The result was that a president whose administration stood on the shakiest democratic foundations in more than a century also became the most powerful chief executive in modern times.
As Bush sought to expand the war on terror to Iraq in 2002 and 2003, the empowered executive branch pressed its advantage, asking Congress to pass a second AUMF that would apply to Iraq. Again, Congress failed to push back, never seriously considering the alternative passage of a full declaration of war instead. A declaration of war would have made it clear that Congress—and by extension, citizens—still had the final word on when and where America’s armies went to fight. It would also have classified Iraq’s soldiers, as well as the extremists Bush believed to be allied with Saddam, as “enemy combatants” under international law, with all of the protections that designation entailed. In addition, all of Congress’s prior declarations of war, the last of which had been issued after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had at least formally adhered to the principle of nonaggression, declaring not that the United States was about to start an offensive war but that, because of the actions of another party, a state of war already existed. The illegality of aggressive wars is one of the basic pillars of international law. All of the above considerations made a declaration of war unacceptable to the Bush administration. They could not argue with a straight face that Iraq had brought a state of war into being, and Bush was determined that America’s enemies not be granted the full protection of the Geneva Conventions. A second AUMF constituted the limit of what the Bush administration was willing to tolerate in terms of congressional participation, and his officials made it clear that the request for a second AUMF was an indulgence that Congress did not really deserve. As far as those officials were concerned, the first AUMF had provided them with all the authorization they needed. The second AUMF was just to let Congress save a little face.
For all the media’s errors, it was Congress that really failed to debate the invasion of Iraq. The negotiations that took place over the Iraq AUMF never touched on the central question of whether the United States would go to war. It was a foregone conclusion that the United States would go to war. Even before Congress brought the AUMF to the floor of either chamber, the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein said it was obvious that Bush “has the votes” to approve the invasion.[76] The way she saw it, her job was not to try to stop the Bush administration from launching a war but to pad the AUMF with language that would make it less embarrassing for skeptical Democrats like herself to get on board. Doing so would help to limit the amount of time the Senate had to spend debating the war in front of C-SPAN’s cameras. This was not a very ambitious goal for a legislature that refers to itself as “the greatest deliberative body in the world,” but it made sense in light of the midterm elections that were approaching in less than two months. The Democratic Party’s strategy seems to have been to hedge their opposition and ensure that if the war went well, they would share at least some of the credit with their Republican counterparts. “I’m one that has been very concerned about a pre-emptive unilateral attack,” Feinstein said, “in terms of America’s perceived ‘imperialist’ culture that this administration has developed.” Once the AUMF had been modified to include a few anodyne caveats, she voted for the preemptive unilateral attack, as did nearly 40 percent of her Democratic colleagues in the House and a majority of Democrats in the Senate.
Even the compromise AUMF, however, came with so many executive branch strings attached that its final form could hardly be said to represent a real exercise of congressional deliberation and oversight. Although the alleged link between Hussein and al-Qaeda was by far the weakest component of the Bush administration’s argument for war, it was not one the neocons were willing to abandon. Less than a week before Congress began voting on the Iraq AUMF, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told reporters that America’s evidence of the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda was “bulletproof,” though he refused to share any details.[77] Holding to the Iraq–al-Qaeda hypothesis allowed the administration to argue that invading Iraq required no additional legislative approval whatsoever. So long as the official rationale for invading retained the claim that Saddam had aided al-Qaeda in some way, or that he had attempted to, or even that someone in his government had been in contact with them and then failed to help the free world bring the terrorists to justice, Bush could argue that the first AUMF had already granted his administration the authority to send troops to Baghdad. Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Office of Legal Counsel published a memorandum opinion arguing that “to the extent that the President were to determine that military action against Iraq would protect our national interests, he could take such action based on his independent constitutional authority; no action by Congress would be necessary.”[78] And as a former lawyer with the State Department recently pointed out in Lawfare, the thinly veiled threats to bypass Congress entirely and rely solely on the 2001 AUMF “provided leverage in negotiations, limiting the extent to which some in Congress felt they could push back on the White House’s demands.”[79] Skeptics in Congress did succeed in adding language to the authorization stipulating that President Bush could only order the use of military force against Iraq once all diplomatic efforts had been exhausted, but they rendered their own stipulation toothless by also granting Bush the sole authority to determine when diplomacy was no longer useful. The AUMF also required President Bush to check in with Congress and submit reports on how things were going every sixty days. Other than that, he could do as he liked.[80]
A legislature doesn’t just represent the views of its constituents. It also models the kind of government under which its constituents live. In 2002 and 2003, Congress modeled a kind of governance more akin to sleepwalking than democracy, a dissociated going through the motions of debating an issue that everyone seemed to agree had been decided well in advance. The Times’s editorial board didn’t seem to have a problem with this. On the day it published an op-ed asserting that “no further debate is needed to establish that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator whose continued effort to build unconventional weapons in defiance of clear United Nations prohibitions threatens the Middle East and beyond,” congressional debate on the AUMF had not even begun.[81] Convinced that their job security was more important than the lives of the Iraqis and Americans who were going to die once the bombs started falling, congressional Democrats consistently pulled their punches, refusing to attack President Bush’s case for invasion at the point where it was most vulnerable—its falsehood. Senator Hillary Clinton, for example, was widely believed to be unwilling to voice her own doubts about invading Iraq because she wanted to preserve her viability as a presidential candidate in 2008, a reticence that Washington insiders regarded as “shrewd and pragmatic,” in the words of the columnist Maureen Dowd.[82] One exception was Representative Jim McDermott of Washington, who said during a visit to Baghdad that he thought President Bush was willing to “mislead the American people.” A newspaper columnist described McDermott’s interview as “the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime,”[83] and Andrew Sullivan wrote that McDermott was “perilously close to treason” in a post that also described the antiwar movement as “obscene.”[84] It didn’t take McDermott long to walk back the remark, which set yet another useful example.
Foreign policy is often the sphere of government action that is the least accessible to democratic input, but even by those standards, what happened between 2000 and 2003 was extreme. The Iraq War might have been launched with the official approval of Congress, the United Nations, and public opinion, but this approval was semantic rather than substantive. The war was planned by an administration that was installed in the White House rather than elected. It was rubber-stamped by a legislature whose first act after September 11 was to abdicate its responsibility to steer the country’s military policy. And it was applauded by a citizenry whose approval had been elicited with lies and who were stuck relying on a news media that didn’t really want to bother with what Thomas Ricks’s editor called the “contrary stuff.” Whatever President Trump did to harm democracy between 2016 and January 6, 2021, what the Bush administration and the rest of the federal government did to get the war on terror off the ground was worse.