Sometimes journalists make history
Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst's yellow journalism spurred the United States to launch the Spanish-American War. The work of Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's stories on Watergate forced a president to resign.
Freelance journalist Seymour Hersh may soon join that list thanks to his report in this week's edition of The New Yorker that the Bush administration plans to launch airstrikes against Iran during its second term. Hersh's information came from several "inside" sources who, he said, went public because they desperately want to stop the Pentagon from going to war with yet another country before Afghanistan and Iraq have been stabilized.
The neoconservative self-delusion revealed in Hersh's story is truly stunning. He reports that Pentagon officials ignore warnings that the U.S. military is already overstretched and that Iranians, whose religious leaders have preached for decades that America is "the Great Satan," would likely unite in opposition to any American attack. Instead, Hersh said, they prefer to believe that Iranians will greet U.S. troops as liberators. (Heard that one before?) "[I]f you don't drink the Kool-Aid, you can't go to meetings," Hersh said. "That isn't a message anybody wants to hear."
The White House responded to Hersh's story with much sound and fury, claiming it was "riddled with inaccuracies" and that "some of the conclusions he's drawing [aren't] based on fact." What you'll notice, though, is that White House spokesmen aren't pointing to anything in particular that they allege to be incorrect. They're just issuing a blanket denial and lashing out at the reporter's credibility, which is what subjects of investigative journalism often do when they're embarrassed about having been exposed.
Hersh seems convinced that it's only a matter of time until Bush and the Pentagon neocons attack Iran. If they don't, however, historians may some day point to Hersh as the anti-Hearst: the man who almost single-handedly kept America from going to war.
Freelance journalist Seymour Hersh may soon join that list thanks to his report in this week's edition of The New Yorker that the Bush administration plans to launch airstrikes against Iran during its second term. Hersh's information came from several "inside" sources who, he said, went public because they desperately want to stop the Pentagon from going to war with yet another country before Afghanistan and Iraq have been stabilized.
The neoconservative self-delusion revealed in Hersh's story is truly stunning. He reports that Pentagon officials ignore warnings that the U.S. military is already overstretched and that Iranians, whose religious leaders have preached for decades that America is "the Great Satan," would likely unite in opposition to any American attack. Instead, Hersh said, they prefer to believe that Iranians will greet U.S. troops as liberators. (Heard that one before?) "[I]f you don't drink the Kool-Aid, you can't go to meetings," Hersh said. "That isn't a message anybody wants to hear."
The White House responded to Hersh's story with much sound and fury, claiming it was "riddled with inaccuracies" and that "some of the conclusions he's drawing [aren't] based on fact." What you'll notice, though, is that White House spokesmen aren't pointing to anything in particular that they allege to be incorrect. They're just issuing a blanket denial and lashing out at the reporter's credibility, which is what subjects of investigative journalism often do when they're embarrassed about having been exposed.
Hersh seems convinced that it's only a matter of time until Bush and the Pentagon neocons attack Iran. If they don't, however, historians may some day point to Hersh as the anti-Hearst: the man who almost single-handedly kept America from going to war.
posted by Alabamian at 3:20 PM
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