Television, newspapers wrong on war in Iraq

By James G. Lakely ~ The Washington Times

Television screens, newspapers and magazines across the globe last week featured images of a joyously liberated Baghdad.

It was a scenario wholly contrary to a future many of those very same media outlets predicted just days before.

The Washington Post published a front-page story on April 4 with the unsourced assertion that "the U.S. invasion force, built around one tank-heavy Army division and one lighter Marine division, is not large or powerful enough to take Baghdad by force, especially with tens of thousands of heavily armed fighters believed loyal to Hussein still inside the sprawling city."

A front-page story in The Washington Post on April 1, titled "Rumsfeld's Design for War Criticized on the Battlefield," stated that "raw nerves were obvious" as officers compared the war planning of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with that of maligned Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara.

The story's sole quoted source of active battlefield complainers was an anonymous colonel who said Mr. Rumsfeld "wanted to fight this war on the cheap" and "he got what he wanted."

A story the next day told of unidentified "senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq as well as retired officers at home" who "have questioned some of the Pentagon's assumptions behind the war plans."

Among the most prominent were retired Army Gens. Barry R. McCaffrey and Wesley K. Clark, who regularly took to the cable-news channels to predict a longer and more difficult battle for control of Baghdad than actually unfolded.

Retired Air Force Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, however, was virtually alone in predicting a quick defeat of Saddam's regime. In an op-ed piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in early October, Gen. McInerney predicted a "campaign that will be over within 30 days and have less casualties than we had in Desert Storm with a smaller attacking force."

At the time, he was accused of being overly optimistic, but U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad on the 21st day of fighting.

Getting it wrong

Many others were not as prescient. In a front-page analysis piece for the March 30 editions of the New York Times bearing the headline "Bush Peril; Shifting Sand and Fickle Opinion," R.W. Apple Jr. wondered if President Bush's "luck" was "about to turn in the winds and sands of Iraq?"

Failure to obtain permission from Turkey to stage American troops on the northern front was a "debacle" and "with every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made two gross military misjudgments in concluding that coalition forces could safely bypass Basra and Nasiriyah."

Mr. Apple warned on March 27 in a piece titled "Iraqis Learn the Lessons of How U.S. Fights Wars," that "Saddam Hussein had learned a lot since his forces were routed in the Persian Gulf war in 1991." He predicted that Saddam would bog down the coalition forces' march to Baghdad through guerrilla warfare.

Brent Baker, vice president for research and publications for the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group, said such analysis was rampant because reporters began to believe their own negative reporting -- giving virtually no weight to explanations that a single day of battlefield difficulties did not constitute a failed plan.

"I think the news media love to see failure," said Mr. Baker. "In the months leading up to the war, liberal opponents said it would be awful, and that the Iraqis wouldn't love us, and there would be blood in the streets.

"So when the actual war started, they actually believed their own fear-mongering," he said. "When anything went even a little bit wrong, they said, 'Aha. We were right.' But that kind of negative reporting couldn't last long because reality outran it."

The morning after coalition troops secured Baghdad on Wednesday, Mr. Apple's analysis was markedly sunnier. He called recent developments "the high-water mark for a new American determination to use the nation's military might to project its power around the world" and lauded U.S. troops who have continued a 20-year trend of "usually but not invariably achieving their immediate goals in short order."

Mr. Baker said such reversals of analysis are justified by the notion that what was previously said "was right at the time." Thus, "nobody has acknowledged how they were wrong," he said.

CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, disclosed on Friday that his network withheld details of Saddam's brutality from its coverage to protect CNN employees.

Alarming facts about secret police, abductions, beatings, dismemberment and assassinations under the Iraqi dictator were not reported to the public, Mr. Jordan wrote, "because doing so would have jeopardized Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

"I felt awful having those stories bottled up inside me," Mr. Jordan wrote in an editorial titled "The News We Kept to Ourselves" published Friday in the New York Times. "At last these stories can be told freely."

In an interview in an article in yesterday's editions of The Washington Times, Mr. Jordan stood by his decision, saying he felt "relieved" and was "absolutely sure I did the right thing holding these stories."

Beating drums of doom

Television anchors also beat the drums of doom prior to the liberation of Baghdad.

Ted Koppel, reporting from the front lines for ABC's "Nightline" on March 25, told viewers to "forget the easy victories of the last 20 years. This war is more like the ones we knew before."

A graphic beneath a report by CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Feb. 25 asked: "If War Happens, Another Quagmire?"

On "Good Morning America" on March 26, ABC's Diane Sawyer wondered: "What happened to the flowers expected to be tossed the way of the Americans? Was it a terrible miscalculation?"

CBS' Leslie Stahl told Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on the March 26 edition of "48 Hours" that the supply lines to quickly advancing U.S. forces were overstretched, its "rear was exposed" and these problems were endangering the needed humanitarian aid in southern Iraq.

"It's nonsense," replied Mr. Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first Bush administration. "It's the usual chatter. Every general who ever worked for me is now on some network commenting on the daily battle and, frankly, battles come and wars come and they have ups and downs, they have a rhythm to it."

John McWethy, a correspondent for ABC's "World News Tonight," told viewers on April 4 that his "intelligence sources are saying that some of Saddam Hussein's toughest security forces are now apparently digging in, apparently willing to defend their city block by block."

"This could be, Peter, a long war," Mr. McWethy told "World News Tonight" anchor Peter Jennings.

"As many people had anticipated," replied Mr. Jennings.

On the Jan. 24 edition of CBS' "60 Minutes II," Dan Rather warned that "to win this time" the Iraqis say that coalition troops "will have to wage a perilous battle in the streets of Baghdad." And if it comes to that "the civilians we spoke with said they will fight, too," he said. Mr. Rather also warned that Baghdad's narrow streets and dark alleys are "a perfect place for Saddam to ambush the invaders."

Failing to note, as other news outlets had, that Saddam's regime was based on fear and severe brutality -- where even mild criticism of the Iraqi dictator was grounds for rape, torture and death -- Mr. Rather stated that from what he could tell, Iraqi women "are all Saddam supporters."

Pushing different agendas

Newsweek magazine's "Conventional Wisdom" column in the April 7 edition (which hit newsstands on March 31) gave out three "down arrows" -- one each to Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Cheney's "down arrow" was for stating on NBC's "Meet The Press" that U.S. troops would be greeted in Iraq as liberators. Newsweek called it an "arrogant blunder for the ages."

Mr. Bush received a down arrow for "his war" that "cluelessly flings open the gates of hell, making any sort of victory Pyrrhic." And Mr. Rumsfeld was criticized for "taking fire from TV retired generals for a flawed war plan. And how did you miss the Fedayeen?" -- referring to the Fedayeen Saddam, suicide guerrillas loyal to the Iraqi dictator.

One of the three praiseworthy "up arrows" went to Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace for being "honest enough to admit the U.S. misjudged the enemy. But bosses not honest enough to admit he's right."

That referred to a quote by the commander of the 5th Corps in a New York Times story in which Gen. Wallace said: "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we war-gamed against." The New York Times ran a correction a few days later in which it informed readers it left out the words "a bit" before the word "different."

The cover story of the April 7 edition of Newsweek, written by Evan Thomas and John Barry, carried the headline, "A Plan Under Attack." It asked the question, "Did we start the war with enough force?" and stated that "as the blame game begins, the fight in Iraq is about to get a lot bloodier."

They also cited "some air-power advocates grumbling that the initial phases of the shock-and-awe campaign went too easy on the Iraqi capital."

Gen. McInerney says the faith that he and war planners in the Bush administration had that air power combined with a nimble ground force would quickly topple Saddam's regime was vindicated. He says the real grumblers were those experts who were pushing another agenda.

"Wesley Clark is going to run for president, so he had to go against President Bush. McCaffrey is an army general, so he was trying to build a larger army. The New York Times was going after the administration, so they all had different agendas," Gen. McInerney said.