The trillion dollar war.., p.22
The Trillion Dollar War Machine, page 22
Despite the pushback, even in their own network, Landay and Strobel’s editor, John Walcott, was 100 percent supportive of their work, and he gave the following rationale, as recounted by Landay: “We are Knight Ridder—we don’t report for the people who send other people’s daughters and sons to war; we report for the families whose daughters and sons get sent to war.”28
Landay cited another reason that the Knight Ridder team got it right. They went beyond the official government PR flacks and the high-ranking officials who had already decided to go to war to talk to mid-level government and military people who were far more skeptical. And they demanded at least two sources for every claim, a rule Judith Miller should have followed before parroting false and misleading claims by the likes of Ahmed Chalabi and his network, many of whom hadn’t been inside Iraq for years and had few contacts there.
When asked why cooler heads failed to prevail even in the context of at least some information that directly contradicted Bush administration lies about issues like the state of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program and the bogus attempt to link him to Al Qaeda, Landay suggested that the reason went well beyond the conduct of newsrooms and news executives to include the broader public mood in the wake of the 9/11 attacks: “The amount of flag waving, knee jerk nationalism was extraordinary.” In addition, he thought that many outlets didn’t want to “lose revenue by going against the grain or go[ing] up against the administration.”29
Then there was the problem of “access journalism,” a plague that continues to this day. It refers to the desire to avoid criticizing the official narrative too harshly for fear of losing access to high-level sources, sources who dominated the public discussion about the reasons for invading Iraq.
Landay’s take was supplemented by fellow panelist Peter Beinart, who as the editor of the influential liberal journal The New Republic came out in favor of the effort to topple Hussein. Later, however, he acknowledged that he had made a grave mistake in doing so. Such an admission is admirable yet has not been replicated by the vast majority of pundits who had beaten the drums for war, including figures like the infamous John Bolton, who is still heavily turned to for foreign-policy “wisdom” by many mainstream media operations. Beinart gave his take on why current policymakers, think-tank experts, newspapers, broadcast outlets, and web-based news sources largely avoid critiquing the war in Iraq and treat the people who got it disastrously wrong as if they are credible experts:
A lot of the people who end up serving in American foreign policy have worked in institutions that are funded by defense contractors or other people who are basically in what Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial-complex. And they’re likely to go back to those jobs afterward, whether it’s certain think tanks or consulting firms… and the media does not even do a good job of making that clear. You can be a former official, and you can maybe have an academic affiliation and that’s the only thing you’re known by… no one will actually know if you write an op-ed or go on TV where most of your money is actually coming from. I’m not even saying don’t give this person a platform, but allow people to think about the fact that their views… we’re all shaped by our experiences, none of us are pure, we’re all shaped to some degree by our bottom lines; and you don’t have to be a vulgar Marxist to believe that. It’s just the way human beings are and yet that’s not exposed.30
Beinart also identified the lack of diverse experiences and voices in both policymaking and journalism as a major part of the problem:
The people who make American foreign policy tend in general to be far less representative of the American public than even the people who make domestic policy. American foreign policy elites are much whiter, more male, than the American public. I think it matters because it fuels American exceptionalism, which is part of the ideology that drives American intervention, and which tends to see America’s enemies, adversaries in the harshest possible light. The idea that America’s rivals are essentially evil and we are essentially good is something that people whose families have suffered in the United States, with family connections to the global south, where America has done a lot of terrible imperial things, tend to be more skeptical of.… Those people tend to be very under-represented in these positions. And I think that’s part of the reason you have kind of a self-perpetuation of these kinds of people in foreign policy positions both in the media and in government.31
Kelley Vlahos, a conservative opponent of intervention in Iraq who has worked at Fox News, The American Conservative, and Responsible Statecraft, the online magazine of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—where both authors of this book hang their professional hats—addressed the failure of current media outlets to learn the lessons of Iraq, citing “the 20 years of the lies we’ve been fed.” She also noted the widespread ignoring of even the best of war-related journalism: “We’re talking about Afghanistan here—The Washington Post did this incredible story, a sort of autopsy, on Afghanistan and found out that our generals, our top State Department official[s,] did not believe that we were winning that war like ten years ago, and it only came out afterwards.” On a more positive note, “People see this and they’re digesting it, and that can’t help but have positive repercussions because we’re not going to take things hook, line and sinker… they’re not going to be drinking the kool aid like they were.”32
One possible solution to all of the above is to expand the reach of independent media outlets that are free of corporate and governmental influence, including widely syndicated TV/radio networks like Democracy Now that routinely elevate both US-based experts who are critical of current US foreign policy and, crucially, journalists, experts, and average citizens of the countries most affected by US foreign and military policies. Krystal Ball, the editor of the popular independent news outlet Breaking Points and moderator of the Quincy panel, offered a sign of hope:
I am of the opinion that legacy media is not reformable but that doesn’t cause me to despair because I think we’re in a different moment in American culture anyway—we don’t have a monoculture anymore the way that we used to… everything has splintered and fractured [and] that has potential benefits if you cultivate a new ecosystem that is better, healthier, allows dissent, allows diversity of viewpoints so there’s a real opportunity there to have a whole blossoming of a new ecosystem that is not necessarily going to replace legacy media but be a more important complement to it. Because the idea of everyone sitting down to watch the same news every night is long, long, gone. You see trust in the media declining and I think deservedly so, [but] there’s an opportunity in this new world; there’s an opportunity for something better.
But she went on to say that “there’s also a risk that everybody just ends up in their little silo just hearing what they ultimately want to hear.”33
Another problem that has led to inadequate coverage of war-and-peace issues in the media is economic, not political. The consolidation of the major media in a few corporate hands has further undermined the ability of major outlets to provide full, nuanced coverage of life-and-death issues. In the sphere of Pentagon reporters, for example, most detailed coverage in recent years has fallen to specialty publications like Defense One, Politico, Defense News, Inside Defense, and Breaking Defense. Most if not all of these publications are funded directly or indirectly by weapons contractors. But it is not entirely their fault, given the paucity of funding from foundations or the broader public for detailed defense and foreign-policy analysis. The specialty publications are also important because larger outlets, which cover developments like the Pentagon’s bloated budget or US military overreach only episodically, often look to the specialty publications for more detailed information on the arms sector than they have time to gather on their own.
In fairness, despite contractor funding, the specialty publications do solid articles at times; unfortunately, they do not reach a wide audience. When larger outlets do publish big investigative studies, they often fail to create a “ripple effect” throughout the larger media ecosystem. This was true of The Washington Post’s exposé on government lying and obfuscation on the state of the war in Afghanistan, as well as with its excellent articles documenting the postretirement work of former Pentagon and military officials on the payrolls of repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.34 It was also true of a New York Times story that documented the steady flow of ex-Pentagon and military officials to work as board members or advisers of military-tech start-ups and the venture-capital funding that is driving them.35
Press coverage of Ukraine is an interesting point of contrast with past coverage of military issues. Jonathan Landay, the stalwart of alternative, accurate coverage of the Iraq war, has said he believes that press coverage of the war in Ukraine was by and large well done and that the Biden administration was far more transparent about everything from official intelligence estimates predicting the Russian invasion to detailed lists of nearly every weapon supplied to Kyiv.
This behavior is rare with respect to other current conflicts. For example, the slaughter of civilians with US-supplied weapons in Gaza and the repression of student activists and other advocates of a ceasefire by universities, government, and potential employers has often been treated as less important than complaints by some Jewish students that protests and critical statements spurred by Israel’s war crimes in Gaza make them feel uncomfortable. This false equation, with its overemphasis on complaints about hurt feelings compared to efforts to stop the killing in Gaza, was a damning flaw in mainstream coverage of the Gaza conflict.
However, this imbalance has not been quite as severe on major op-ed pages, where voices of Palestinians and US critics of the Gaza invasion have received more space, albeit still far from enough. And the mainstream failings have been offset to a degree by coverage by outlets like Democracy Now, which frequently gives a platform to US-based protesters and journalists and everyday people who are under assault and risk losing their lives in Gaza itself. In addition, photos and film clips of the carnage in Gaza circulated by Al Jazeera and on social media have created a counterweight to inadequate coverage in the mainstream press, which in some weeks spent more time giving legitimacy to false charges of anti-Semitism among students organizing to end the killing in Gaza than on the awful news from Gaza itself, including the discovery of mass graves near a hospital.
Meanwhile, the history of consorting with white supremacists by right-wing politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson has gone largely unremarked upon. Johnson, who visited the Columbia University campus in April of 2024 during an encampment of pro-ceasefire students there, said that he was deeply concerned about claims of anti-Semitism on the part of organizers trying to stop the university and the US government from continuing to enable Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Yet no major outlet questioned either Johnson’s sincerity or his right to proclaim on the issue of anti-Semitism, given that he had long promoted the racist, anti-Semitic “great replacement theory,” which holds that welcoming nonwhite immigrants to the United States is part of a plot to undermine the culture and power of white Americans. The theory has been cited by numerous perpetrators of racial and anti-Semitic violence, including the attacker who murdered eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.36
There is no record of Johnson taking major issue with white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups that espouse the replacement theory and worse. In fact, when he ascended to the speakership, an analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center summed up Johnson’s ties to racist and anti-Semitic organizations as follows: “Hate Groups Rejoice Over Newly Elected Speaker Mike Johnson.”37 It is stunning that a man with Johnson’s values and history could be taken at face value while he was spouting false charges against a movement that has among its leaders large numbers of Jewish university students and progressive organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace.
Getting back to Ukraine, until about two years into the war, voices in favor of supporting Kyiv’s ability to defend itself while suggesting a parallel diplomatic effort to avoid a long, grinding war or dangerous escalation have not fared well in mainstream outlets. Until the war had dragged on for over two years and objective observers were deeply skeptical that Ukraine could drive Russian forces out of “every inch” of Ukrainian territory, groups promoting a diplomatic end to the conflict were too often ignored or, even worse, described as “pro-Putin.”
Much more could be said about inadequate media coverage of immigration, the antidemocratic insurrection of January 6, outright racism and misogyny, and the role of moneyed interests in shaping life-and-death policies at home and abroad. There have been a decent number of nuanced and informative stories on some of these issues, but they are far outweighed by the basic frame within which these issues are discussed in conventional news outlets.
Another point not to be overlooked is who the broadcast media choose to serve as experts on current conflicts. On war-and-peace issues, the overwhelming majority of chosen pundits are former military officers, including some who have direct affiliations with the MIC, as indicated in the comment by Peter Beinart cited earlier in this chapter. By contrast, advocates of diplomacy are outnumbered by a large margin, and actual peace activists have been featured on major national outlets so rarely that it’s hard to even cite or remember a recent example.
Even allegedly liberal outlets like MSNBC fall short, as when it went a year or more without running a single story on the US role in backing Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, a conflict that left hundreds of thousands of people dead because of indiscriminate bombing, destruction of essential civilian infrastructure like hospitals and water-treatment facilities, and a blockade that vastly reduced imports of vital humanitarian aid.38 Instead, the network dedicated inordinate amounts of time to hyperventilating about admittedly outrageous statements by Donald Trump and his not-so-merry band of MAGA Republicans. Covering people who are organizing to make the world a safer and more peaceful place was an afterthought at best. Too often, MSNBC functions more as a form of liberal entertainment, affirmation, and morale boosting than it does a hard-hitting independent news source.
On a more basic level, Janine Jackson, of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), argues that an overriding problem in the US media as a whole is its habit of covering and sympathizing with the powerful at the expense of everyone else. The victims of government and corporate malfeasance and the advocates working to expose corporate crimes are too often denied a voice in mainstream treatments of important developments.39
Gone are the days when the Pentagon papers, or even the 1980s revelations of companies charging the Pentagon $600 for a toilet seat or $7,200 for a coffee maker, were followed by wire services, radio, television news, political cartoons, and sometimes even late-night comedy shows.40 So getting a full picture of the machinations of the MIC requires a self-guided tour of a wide range of online sources, including podcasts and web-only interview shows. And even that is too often not enough to get an accurate, well-rounded picture of US foreign and military policy at work, with all of its good intentions and deep flaws.
Whether the answer is to press mainstream media to do a better job or to cultivate and grow the audiences for independent outlets, change is essential to any effort to rein in the MIC or solve America’s other pressing problems, foreign or domestic. Lives depend on it, as do future prospects for our democracy.
The needed changes go well beyond reducing the influence of the MIC. An underlying problem is the public’s misguided addiction to the concept of American exceptionalism—the notion that America’s intentions are always benevolent, that the nation is almost always right, and that America has a special mission to promote peace and democracy worldwide. This fantasy view of America’s global role needs to be counterbalanced by intensive public education about the manifold benefits of pursuing a balanced foreign policy that favors diplomacy and economic and cultural exchange over war and preparations for war.
Better media coverage will be just one ingredient of a successful effort to build a less militarized society, but it is an essential one. Until there is a fuller understanding of the costs and consequences of maintaining a massive war machine and a military-first foreign policy, it will not be possible to gather the necessary democratic counterforce to rein in the war machine.
11
THE BATTLE FOR HEARTS AND MINDS
HOLLYWOOD AND THE WHITEWASHING OF WAR
If you’ve been to just about any sporting event, you’ve likely had a front seat to one of the oldest forms of military entertainment: the flyover.
Above the 2024 Super Bowl, six F-16s screamed out of the sky in a crisp formation, rattling windows and causing gasps and shouts from the audience. Their flyovers are exciting, but public performances of the US Air Force Thunderbirds at air shows are absolutely jaw-dropping. Throughout the show, four fighters in the core “Thunderbirds Diamond” formation fly in perfect synchronicity just feet away from one another—a proximity that immediately sets off alarm bells for anyone who’s ever stepped foot on a commercial aircraft. But even this simple, elegant precision is the backdrop for the real show: the “solo” planes. As the Thunderbirds Diamond flies effortlessly together, these four daredevil planes do every aerobatic trick imaginable, from barrel rolls to seemingly playing chicken in the air in a rollicking simulation of a dogfight. To most fans, such a demonstration is nothing short of incredible and inevitably leads to thoughts of how amazing both these pilots and planes must be.
