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MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS
MONTHLY - FREE PRESS
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September, 2004
How the News Media Stopped Worrying
and Learned to Love Rumsfeld
By Norman Solomon
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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 elan 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
prewar 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 prewar 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.
Norman Solomon is co-author, with Reese Erlich, of "Target Iraq: What the
News Media Didn't Tell You." His columns and other writings can be found
at <www.normansolomon.com