This page did not support the war in Iraq, but it never quarreled with one of its basic premises. Like President Bush, we believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding potentially large quantities of chemical and biological weapons and aggressively pursuing nuclear arms. Like the president, we thought those weapons posed a grave danger to the United States and the rest of the world. Now it appears that premise was wrong. We cannot in hindsight blame the administration for its original conclusions. They were based on the best intelligence available, which had led the Clinton administration before it and the governments of allied nations to reach the same conclusion.
Baloney.
The information was out there, for anybody who wanted to look for it, to support the assertion that Saddam was nothing but a paper tiger. link:www.salon.com/people/feature/2002/03/19/ritter/index.html|Scott Ritter] stated that almost all of Saddam's biochemical aresenal had been destroyed. The transcript of
General Kamel's interview with UN weapons inspectors, in which the General told of ordering the destruction of Saddam's chemical program shortly after the end of the 1991 war, was available on the web. There was no argument put forward by the American junta or by Mr. Blair's government that was not disputed by reputable sources or simply refuted.
Of course, anyone who got his information from the
New York Times and other outlets of the US multinational corporate media would not have known this. One needed to look at foreign sources like the
Guardian of London, anti-establishment sources like Pacifica radio or sources on the fringe of the establishment like
The Nation to learn what was going on in Iraq and elsewhere.
Many of us who marched against the war did so not as dreamy pacifists but as realistic, informed citizens. We were informed, and no thanks to the
New York Times.The runup to war in Iraq represents a colossal failure by mainstream US journalists, including those on the staff of the
New York Times such as Thomas Friedman and Judith Miller, to inform the citizens of a democracy of the true facts. Instead of informing Americans, these outlets simply helped the Bush junta beat the drums of a war predicated on lies. The mainstream media allowed junta spokesmen to lie unchallenged. The
New York Times was as much a part of the problem as Fox News.
The US media, including the
Times, has much for which to answer.