How’d We Do?

The press corps failed badly in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq. Was coverage of the Iran war any better?

Stepping up to the podium to make the case for war, the president of the United States claimed there was “a direct threat to this country.” He spoke of the enemy’s “long history of reckless aggression and terrible crimes.” He said he would “not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction.” And he promised that once the enemy autocrat was removed, the US would “help that nation to build a just government after decades of brutal dictatorship.”

That was George W. Bush, speaking a couple of weeks before the US invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. In the haze of compulsory patriotism that followed the 9/11 attacks, the American press is widely regarded as having failed to hold the Bush administration accountable as it raced toward regime change in the Middle East. “Overall and in the main, there’s no question that we didn’t do a good job,” Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, told Bill Moyers in a 2007 PBS documentary, Buying the War.