I'm proud to say that one of the most famous and respected war reporters of the past 40 years, Joseph L. Galloway -- co-author of We Were Soldiers Once...and Young -- wrote the foreword for my new book on Iraq and the media. As tough as the come, Joe was also virtually the first leading reporter/pundit to call for a U.S. pullout from Iraq several years ago.
Here is an excerpt from the foreword for DailyKos readers. SusanG reviewed the book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq, here last Sunday.
"In war truth is too often the first casualty," Galloway writes, "and it is not just a president or a secretary of defense or assorted official spokesmen who do the killing. Our brothers and sisters in the media also participate in the execution."
Here is more (I control the rights to this and can reprint at will):
Looking back to that fall of 2002 when war drums were beating loudly and the president and his closest advisers spoke with certainty – and deceit -- about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and the danger he ostensibly posed to our country and our friends and allies, most in the media either swallowed it whole or timidly refused to do their jobs and question the official rationale for war....
Did the national outburst of patriotism and an epidemic of American flag decals and flag lapel pins on the expensive suits of television anchors frighten those who had long believed that their newspapers set the nation’s agenda? How could those agenda-setters and so many others in the media abandon their first duty to challenge and question the assertions of the politicians holding high office?
During the early years of the war, I made two reporting trips to Iraq, in the fall of 2003 and again in 2005-2006. The soldiers and Marines I lived with and went on operations and convoys with were the same type of fine young Americans I wrote about in earlier wars. In fact, many of their commanders, from colonels to four-star generals, were officers I had marched or ridden with when they were captains and majors in an earlier war. All were doing their best with a bad hand dealt them by their civilian overlords—too few troops to do the job assigned, struggling against faulty decisions by people like Ambassador L. Paul Bremer of the Coaliton Provisional Authority that only fueled the insurgency, and laboring under the micro-management of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld whose ears were closed against any advice contrary to his thinking.
I was an early and harsh critic of the administration’s conduct of the war. In the interest of full disclosure, because I had worked in 2001-2002 as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell, then secretary of state, I had sources very close to the debates and in-fighting over the conduct of the war at the highest levels. It was clear that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld were riding roughshod over anyone who urged caution and careful thought. By 2005 I was writing columns suggesting that Rumsfeld, and his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, be fired for their mistakes, along with the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force Gen. Richard Meyer. None of this endeared me to either the White House or the Pentagon bosses. Not until the 2007 perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s hatchet man, would the overly cozy relationship too many Washington pundits and reporters maintained with the likes of Libby and George W. Bush’s spinmeister Karl Rove be exposed to the open air.
Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War, and to carry visible and invisible scars from our work there, felt uneasy about Iraq and the stated reasons for pre-emptively invading that country. Those feelings only grew stronger in the months after March and April of 2003 when the President and his men were doing premature victory laps around the press rooms at the White House and the Pentagon.
Mitchell lays it all out in this book. Read it and weep. If you are a consumer of the news, I urge that you reserve judgment when reading reports quoting the calculated rhetoric of government officials. And, if you are a reporter, take a solemn vow to not believe everything you hear, and barely half of what you see.