When Dishing Out Blame, Don't Stop With Bush (media/others allowed Bush)

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-naim2jun02.story

When Dishing Out Blame, Don't Stop With Bush
Many in government and the media went blind as a war-hungry administration shed time-tested principles.

By Moisés Naím, Moisés Naím is the editor of Foreign Policy magazine. This essay appears here by special arrangement with the Financial Times.


Don't put the blame for Iraq on President Bush alone. Nothing, it would seem, could have stopped the Bush administration from pursuing its long-standing plans against Saddam Hussein. But placing responsibility for the Iraq debacle solely on Bush's shoulders is too simple and even potentially dangerous. It blurs the responsibilities of others who contributed to an environment in which new, bad ideas were embraced while proven, good ones were shed.

It is important to learn that whatever the threat — terrorism included — no government should be afforded the latitude enjoyed by the Bush administration. The media — both reporters and commentators — are among the prime culprits here. The promise that democracy would spread from a liberated Iraq, for example, was as poorly scrutinized as the notion advanced by the administration that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the war against terror.

Today few doubt that the administration's performance in postwar Iraq has been inept. This consensus, however, risks eclipsing the reality that many potentially influential players seem to have been stunned into submission or ineffectual opposition to the whims of the White House.

It is not just that intelligence agencies were too willing to confirm the "facts" that their political bosses wanted to hear. Many Democrats were too frightened of appearing "soft on terror" and thus signed political and military blank checks to an administration prone to overdrafts. Blinded by partisanship, congressional Republicans were subservient to the White House's wishes even when these wishes contradicted age-old Republican values such as fiscal conservatism. Fearing irrelevance, U.S. diplomats were too quick to accept the notion that negotiated approaches on Iraq had run their course. Some journalists were so deferential to official sources that their reports seemed almost stenographic. <snip>

But perhaps the ultimate enabler was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. In the U.S., the shock and pain caused by the attacks fed the widespread notion that "business as usual" in American foreign policy was no longer an option. They also led to the renouncing of fundamental principles that never should have been abandoned. Many basic rights, including safeguards against indefinite detention without charges, were cast aside as obsolete notions for a nation fighting a global war on terror.<snip>