How the news media stopped worrying and
learned to love Rumsfeld
By Norman Solomon
Aug. 20— The nation’s top dog of war is frisky again.
Donald Rumsfeld has returned to high visibility — after a couple
of months in the media doghouse following revelations about torture
at the Abu Ghraib prison — now openly romancing the journalistic
pack with his inimitable style of tough love as he growls and romps
across TV screens.
For three years, the élan of Rumsfeld’s media stardom has
been welded to fear and killing. The civilian boss at the Pentagon made
little impression on the nation until 9/11 — but soon afterwards,
CNN was hailing him as “a virtual rock star.” While he briefed
reporters about the bombing of Afghanistan in autumn 2001, there was
a rush among reporters and pundits who conflated his ability to oversee
air-war carnage with new status as some kind of hunk.
Three decades after President Richard Nixon pursued a “madman”
strategy in an attempt to intimidate North Vietnam’s leaders, more
than a few liberal pundits joined in the acclaim for Rumsfeld as someone
capable of pinning the violence meter. During a CNBC appearance (Oct.
13, 2001), Thomas Friedman said: “I was a critic of Rumsfeld before,
but there’s one thing ... that I do like about Rumsfeld. He’s
just a little bit crazy, OK? He’s just a little bit crazy, and
in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us,
and I’m glad we got some guy on our bench that our quarterback
— who’s just a little bit crazy, not totally, but you never
know what that guy’s going to do, and I say that’s my guy.”
And Ahmad Chalabi was Rumsfeld’s guy. Relentlessly promoted by
the Pentagon chief and top aides, the slick Iraqi exile was widely understood
to be an accomplished liar. But that didn’t impede New York Times
reporter Judith Miller and a team of colleagues as they put out front-page
pre-war stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, with Chalabi
serving as the key unnamed source.
The Times wasn’t alone. Many reporters on mainstream payrolls took
the nod from Rumsfeld, eagerly succumbing to the Chalabi scam. And some
avowedly independent journalists did likewise. Christopher Hitchens,
for instance, ended up dedicating his book about the Iraq invasion to
Chalabi and a few others — calling them “comrades in a just
struggle and friends for life.”
When Rumsfeld comes in for harsh media criticism, he takes a licking
and keeps on ticking ... like a time bomb. Since early 2001, New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd has referred to him as “Rummy”
with escalating frequency (in more than 40 columns last year), and some
other pundits have also been scathing at times. Yet the prevailing media
narrative has been compatible with the Rumsfeld “new American century”
agenda: Boys will be boys, Rumsfeld will be rummy, war will be bloody,
and the Pentagon media machine will keep spinning while the defense
secretary leads the way.
Rumsfeld was back in media action for a long interview Aug. 17 on the
PBS “NewsHour” with host Jim Lehrer. Mostly, Rumsfeld spun
the fine fabric of public relations. Along the way, he talked about
how to get “the best intelligence” and “good all-source
analysis” without “having it all single-perspective.”
Minutes later, Lehrer got around to asking whether Pentagon analysts
doing “lessons-learned studies” on Iraq had determined “why
the intelligence turned out to be so wrong about weapons of mass destruction.”
Rumsfeld: “Ooh, no, that wasn’t what we did, no. The Central
Intelligence Agency did that.”
Lehrer: “Right. So you didn’t — that was not part of
your lessons learned?”
Rumsfeld: “No. We’re not in that business.”
The evasive reply came from the Pentagon honcho who’d flatly declared
before the Iraq invasion that the US government knew where Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction were located.
But — without a word of follow-up — Lehrer changed the subject,
moving on to a matter of tactical foresight. “What about the intensity
of the insurgency after major combat,” he asked, “was that
an intelligence failure within the Pentagon — or not?”
Rumsfeld’s response was predictable and easy (“things are
always different than one anticipates ... a war plan doesn’t ever
outlive the first contact with the enemy...”). In an interview
that involved several thousand words and focused largely on intelligence,
Lehrer permanently dropped the WMD question as soon as Rumsfeld blew
it off.
Major US news outlets are hardly inclined to be up in arms about Rumsfeld’s
record of pre-war deception when they remain so dainty about critiquing
their own. What passes for soul-searching at the New York Times and
the Washington Post is much more like autoeroticism than self-flagellation.
No wonder Rumsfeld the media star is back.
Source: CommonDreams.org
