March to war

Why isn’t the press paying more attention to a possible attack on Iran?

During the course of two weeks in May, America’s top-ranking military officer went from warning that war with Iran could cripple the US military to rattling his saber at Tehran.

That’s one interpretation, anyway. In an interview with Israeli TV that was broadcast on May 5, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, struck a glum note when asked about the possibility of preemptively striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. “I actually am very hopeful that we don’t get into a position where we have to get into a conflict,” Mullen responded, according to Reuters. “It would be a very significant challenge for the United States right now to get into a third conflict in that part of the world.”

But on May 20, testifying before the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Mullen sounded far more combative. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the US designated a terrorist organization in 2007, is “directly jeopardiz[ing]” peace in Iraq, said Mullen, according to the Associated Press (AP). And then: “Restraint in our response does not signal lack of resolve or capability to defend ourselves against threats.”

That seems like a major shift — but what did it mean? Did Mullen really rethink his assessment of whether the military could handle a new conflict? Did he backpedal after concluding that his earlier remarks could undercut diplomatic efforts to limit Iran’s budding nuclear program? Or might one of the Bush administration’s most hawkish members — someone from Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office, perhaps — have pointedly told Mullen that attacking Iran was still very much an option?

Oddly, there didn’t seem to be much interest from the media in finding out — or even in asking the question. The AP report on Mullen’s congressional testimony didn’t note his change in rhetoric. Neither did the New York Times, which made only passing reference to Mullen’s testimony. (The Times story, which focused on the Jerusalem Post’s claim that the US plans to attack Iran this year, was buried on A13.) And the May 21 Washington Post didn’t mention Mullen’s testimony at all.

To be fair, this dearth of coverage didn’t come on a slow news day. The Times’ front page, for example, featured stories about Barack Obama winning a majority of Democratic delegates, Ted Kennedy’s brain-cancer diagnosis, and a fragile peace in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood. The top story in the paper’s “International Report” section, meanwhile, was a follow-up on the Sichuan earthquake.

That said, the muted reception to Mullen’s comments hints at the American media’s broader Iran problem. The good news is this: the press seems to have learned from its failings prior to the invasion of Iraq, when the media’s widespread credulity paved the way for war. The bad news, however, is that Iran poses its own journalistic problems — and these problems could lead, yet again, to the US launching a major attack in the Middle East without the Fourth Estate doing due diligence.

Crying wolf
The argument that we’re headed for a violent showdown with Iran is fairly easy to make. The Bush administration, which made Iran an honorary member of the Axis of Evil way back in 2002, has repeatedly claimed that Iran is undercutting US efforts to stabilize Iraq — by arming insurgents, training them, and giving them safe haven. What’s more, the administration has warned, time and again, that Iran’s nascent nuclear capabilities represent a grave threat — the same warning it made before invading Iraq. As President George W. Bush said in his recent speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, just after comparing Iran to Hitler’s Germany: “Permitting the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Put simply, the rationale for an attack on Iran has already been established and honed.

Then again, it’s also possible to come up with a number of reasons why military action against Iran isn’t imminent. With the exception of Cheney, the hawks who backed the Iraq War (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith) are no longer in positions of power. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are seen as skeptics. Any attack on Iran could destabilize Iraq and Lebanon, and undermine Israel’s new engagement with Syria. The military is already overextended. Oil prices would go through the roof. And no president — not even this one — goes to war a half-year before leaving the White House. Right?

There’s also the awkward fact that an attack on Iran has allegedly been imminent for an awfully long time. In April 2006, for example, the New Yorker published a Seymour Hersh story that asked whether the president would go to war with Iran to prevent that nation from obtaining a nuclear weapon. In September 2006, Time magazine published a cover story on possible Iranian hostilities titled “What Would War Look Like?” And in August 2007, time.com intelligence columnist Robert Baer wrote: “Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the [Republican Guard] maybe within the next six months. And they think that as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Of course, these scenarios never came to pass. Instead, this past fall a US National Intelligence Estimate stated that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 — an assessment that instantly made a US attack seem far less likely. Consequently, developments that hint at the possibility of military action have seemed far less newsworthy than they once did.

“In my view, there is a significant ‘crying wolf’ aspect to this situation,” Atlantic national correspondent James Fallows says via e-mail. “Repeatedly over the last three years we’ve had reports that a strike was ‘imminent’ — that it would happen before the ’06 midterm elections, that it would happen to deflect controversy from the ‘surge,’ and now that it will happen during the waning days of Bush/Cheney’s hold on office.”

“Because the idea is so obviously self-defeating, the most reckless step in modern American history, I have not thought that at any point it was likely to happen,” adds Fallows — who’s argued against an Iran attack in the Atlantic’s pages — in his e-mail. “It is possible, of course, because arguably Bush and Cheney could muscle their way to ordering it. (It’s also conceivable that the resistance from the military would be significant enough to move it out of the straight executive-order-in-secret category.) But all of my reporting has made me doubt that it will (as opposed to could) occur.”

A related but distinct point is raised by Jonathan Landay, national security and intelligence correspondent for the McClatchy Company (formerly for Knight Ridder Inc.) and, like Fallows, one of a few reporters distinguished by his pre–Iraq War skepticism. It’s possible, Landay notes, that the war drums the Bush administration periodically sound are primarily intended to intimidate Iran and give the US diplomatic leverage. If so, the press risks becoming complicit in those efforts if it seizes on new displays of chest-thumping as evidence that an attack might be imminent. “If they want to turn up the volume, you end up helping them,” says Landay. “You have to be really careful. This is exactly what happened with the invasion of Iraq.”

These two concerns — that past prognostication hasn’t panned out, and that hyping the possibility of war could again make the press de facto stooges for the Bush administration — help explain why something like Admiral Mullen’s seeming change of heart about war with Iran might not be considered front-page news, or even news at all. But they’re less enlightening when it comes to other aspects of Iran coverage.

Consider, for example, the recent election of Ali Larijani as Speaker of the Iranian Parliament — which was almost certainly green lighted by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Larijani is a tricky dude to figure out. He’s a conservative and a staunch supporter of Iran’s nuclear program. But he’s also a rival of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and might challenge Ahmadinejad in next year’s presidential elections. In addition, though Larijani used his inaugural speech to lash out at a recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran’s lack of disclosure regarding its burgeoning nuclear activities — he termed it “deplorable” — he’s also viewed as less confrontational than Ahmadinejad, and is interested in ratcheting down Iran’s ongoing confrontation with the West.

For all those reasons, you’d think that Larijani’s ascent would be considered a major news story. But it wasn’t treated that way. The Times ran its story on A6. The Wall Street Journal ran a brief on A10. The Washington Post didn’t cover Larijani’s election in the next day’s paper. And, as of this writing, none of the network evening newscasts have mentioned it. [Please see correction, below.]

A few days before Larijani’s election, Suzanne DiMaggio, director of the Asian Social Issues Program at the Asia Society in New York, cited thin coverage of Iran’s internal politics as one abiding failing of the US press as a whole. “The Iranian regime is presented as this monolithic entity, which isn’t true,” DiMaggio told the Phoenix. “Yes, it is a theocracy. But there are many different levels in the decision-making system. There’s a parliament; there’s a national security council; there’s an office of the president; and most important, there’s Khamenei, the supreme leader. It’s much more complex than the way it’s portrayed.” Perhaps Larijani’s rise will prompt a flurry of coverage that renders obsolete this harsh assessment of the US media’s performance. But the early signs aren’t encouraging.

Out of context
Back in early May, the New York Times ran a story by Michael Gordon, its chief military correspondent, on new Bush administration claims that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese fundamentalist group, was training Iraqi militiamen at a camp near Iran. Like much of the reporting dissected in the Times’ mea culpa after the invasion of Iraq, Gordon’s story relied on anonymous sources and provided little counterpoint to the administration’s claims — a parallel that was promptly noted, in withering terms, by Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald. “Gordon’s reporting is as predictable as it is uncritical and unreliable,” wrote Greenwald. “Any time the administration ratchets up its war-threatening rhetoric with Iran, Gordon . . . pops up with a prominent article that does nothing other than repeat government claims as fact.”

But does the aforementioned Gordon story — or, for that matter, other reports that might be used to bolster the case for war or limited military action — mean that the press hasn’t absorbed the lessons of Iraq? Not so, argues Michael Massing, a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review and the author of Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq. “I think that the press learned something from the Iraq failure,” he says. “There have been many more stories about the dangers of attacking Iran than there were about the dangers of attacking Iraq. And on the nuclear issue, they’ve also done better than they did on the WMD question with Iraq.” (Case in point: the Times’ April 26 analysis titled “Questions Linger over Scope of Iran’s Role in Iraq Fighting.”)

Massing does have one major gripe, however. “The area where I find the most similarity to what occurred in the run-up to Iraq,” he says, “is in coverage of the overall relationship between the US and Iran, and particularly the Bush administration’s policies toward Iran. The Bush administration has very successfully framed our relations with Iran, beginning with the ‘Axis of Evil’ speech in 2002, in terms of its black-and-white, us-versus-them perspective. And the press, with a few exceptions, has gone along with this.

“Any talk about Iran needs to be caveated,” Massing continues. “It’s a noxious regime in a lot of ways, and Ahmadinejad in particular has made outrageous statements about Israel and the Holocaust. But it’s a state with strategic interests that both conflict and overlap to some degree with the interests of the US. The Iranians have actually shown themselves willing to cooperate with the US; early in the Bush administration, Iran helped us get rid of the Taliban.” Even so, he concludes, “The way Bush’s hard-line views have perhaps run counter to our own interests there has been largely ignored.”

How, then, should the press proceed? This might seem like a bad time for the press to revisit Bush’s Iran policy, or parse Iran’s internal politics, implications of political flux inside Iran, or explore Iran’s internal politics, or parse hints of US bellicosity with renewed vigor. After all, there’s a presidential election to cover. And the proximity of that election makes it difficult to imagine that any attack against Iran could occur before 2009.

In reality, though, this might be the best possible moment for an uptick in Iran-focused press coverage. Crafting a coherent, tough Iran policy will be one of the great foreign-policy challenges that the next president faces. And Democratic nominee-in-waiting Barack Obama and his Republican counterpart, John McCain, have offered drastically different takes on how best to engage the Iranian regime. Given the stakes, voters should be capable of weighing this difference when they head to the ballot box in November — but if their knowledge of Iran isn’t augmented, and soon, how smart a choice are they going to be able to make?

What’s more, events of the past few days suggest that a Bush administration attack on Iran might not be as improbable as it currently seems. The aforementioned report by the IAEA, which voiced serious concern about Iran’s non-cooperation with international monitors, is a helpful addendum to the administration’s oft-stated case for military action. And as the just-published memoir by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan reminds us, once this president decided to invade Iraq, he wasn’t going to let anything stop him. If Bush has already made a similar decision about attacking Iran — and if, due to media complacency, this happens with a minimum of public debate — the press will have only itself to blame.

– By Adam Reilly, Mr. Reilly’s Media Log: http://www.thephoenix.com/medialog

Popularity: 2% [?]

Israel & US attack in Iran is suicide cause Iran secretly developed 300 plus tactical nuclear warhead and bought 200 plus tactical nuclear warhead and 70 plus ICBM with strategic nuclear warhead from Russia, China, India and North Korea. Iran wil response in one minute they will nuke Israel Nuclear Power Plan, all US military Base in the middle east, Tel-Aviv, New York City, London, Vatican, Washington D.C., Paris, Brussel and etc. But Israel have 1,000 plus tactical nuke weapons and 100 plus strategic nuclear weapons developed and bought to US, UK and France. Israel and US attack Iran is openning of the gates of hell.

Boot licker’s are busy licking the mad president’s boots and the NYT has it all ginned up. “Remember the Maine” is the war cry and BKR is getting ready to turn tout the Iranan women for the US troops. We will steal our free oil from somewhere else after we wrecked Iraq.
The war machine owns most media and certainly most journalists. ?Reporting has in the best of times been a hacks profession for the wet brained yes men of the air.
As Warren Zevon once said “Time for another little war.”

Knopfler….you’re an ASS and totally clueless! Go and live in that shithole Israel if you love them so much!! I hope Israel gets blown off of the map!!