War Made Easy: Journalists and the American Empire

President Bush made his final trip to Iraq over the weekend and at a news conference was confronted by an Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at the president, calling it a farewell kiss. He then said, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!" The 28 year old Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, was a correspondent for Al Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi television station. It is useful to contrast his act of protest with the U.S. media, which acquiesced in the Bush administration’s march to war refusing to raise questions about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. What have we learned since then? 

After his ill fated press conference Bush traveled by helicopter to Camp Victory where he told hundreds of soldiers that the surge was, "one of the greatest successes in the history of the United States military." During the presidential election that same line was repeated over and over by pundits and experts on morning talk shows and the evening news. But the reality is quite different. The war in Iraq is far from over. Neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed. And the country is far from secure.  

More important, have the media learned from what happened in Iraq? Norman Solomon says that there has been near silence on the question of increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. And the media are repeating the same kind of mistake made in Vietnam in 1964-65 when an escalation of troops went unchallenged by a pliant press corps. 

Richard Rowley of Big Noise Films, Christian Parenti a correspondent for The Nation and the author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq, and Norman Solomon the author of War Made Easy, discuss the role of journalism under George W. Bush and whether the fourth estate can recover.