McClellan Highlights
American Media's 'War Within a War'
"It's easy to lose sight of
the kind of 'collective psychological moment' so easily detectable in the
United States in the months that followed the attacks of September 11. … one
can also say that today some of the main organs of the American press mirror
rather than mold behavior."
It's one thing to accuse the occupants
of the White House of mounting a deliberate campaign of disinformation on the
path to declaring war in Iraq in 2003. It's quite another to read the same
accusation written by someone who was the spokesperson for the White House
until 2006. The book, What Happened,
which comes out this week in the United States, is a harsh attack on the
President and some of his closest advisers and is written by Scott McClellan,
who has worked with Bush since the days when he was governor of Texas.
The most convincing sentence
in McClellan’s political memoir is this: “the lack of intellectual honesty
helped take our country to war with Iraq.” This isn't exactly a novelty - and I
say this not so much because it's an argument that has been repeated so often.
The use of faulty information provided by the secret services is as old as the
existence of such services. But for the occupants of the White House under
Bush, according to McClellan, the attitude that led to error - and to the use
of deception - was the “self delusion” that he believes is one of Bush's
strongest characteristics.
The ex-spokesman is also very
critical of the American press, or at least the sectors that cover the
day-to-day world of government in Washington (all capitals that live only on
politics, such as Washington, Brasília or, some time ago, Bonn, create peculiar
ties between journalists and power). The media, states McClellan, made the
“propaganda” work easier to the point of complicity - for a White House which
had always been prone to "conceal and become secretive rather than
(showing) honesty and transparency,” he writes.
In fact in terms of the role
of some sectors of the American press, there was a war within a war in the
moments that preceded the disastrous invasion of Iraq. In light of what has
happened since 2003, it's easy to say today that some examples of the always
admired American press (The New York Times, CNN, Newsweek, and others)
could have been more critical or could have more vehemently expressed criticism
about how the Iraqi campaign was conducted.
But in this debate, it's just
as easy to lose sight of the kind of “collective psychological moment” so
easily detectable in the United States in the months that followed the attacks
of September 11. In this very complex field of the relationship between means
of communication and the public - in which only those without their thinking
caps on would claim is a one-way street - one can also say that today, some of
the main organs of the American press mirror rather than mold behavior.
PARODY: RUPURT MURDOCH ON SCOTT
MCCLELLAN
This “secondary theatre of
operations,” shall we say, doesn't expunge the Bush government of primary
responsibility or its original sin - which is to impose ideological visions
guided by short-term political gain on a set of far-reaching decisions with
profound long-term consequences. An impressive number of authors, aided by over
a dozen former White House officials, have contributed to compose a bleak
picture of Bush’s lack of analytical rigor, his aversion to facing facts that
don't fit into his vision of the world, and his difficulty in providing
accurate cost/benefit analyses of his major decisions.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
The positive thing in all of
this is the speed with which it has created a mass of critical voices in the
United States. They have helped sketch out to the smallest detail the story of
a phenomenal disaster, and I'm not just speaking of Iraq. The original sin, to
take advantage of McClellan’s expression, is about intellectual dishonesty.
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