Guest Commentary : War hawks remain popular, even when wrong
Posted on Thursday, December 20, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/nwat/Editorial/60406/
In September, over 3, 500 Stanford University faculty members signed a petition protesting Donald Rumsfeld’s appointment as distinguished visiting fellow at the university’s Hoover Institute on a task force on terrorism and ideology.
Should we be surprised that Rumsfeld was hired by one of our nation’s most prestigious universities for his alleged expertise on terrorism and ideology — after getting us into a disastrous and unnecessary war in Iraq ? There he made all the wrong decisions on how to run it, and set up his own propagandistic intelligence group at the Pentagon when CIA intelligence did not serve his political needs. He also provided terrorists with a recruiting bonanza by approving the use of torture.
For conservative hawks, as far as the media and academia are concerned, being disastrously wrong rarely has disastrous career consequences. Take neocon Bill Kristol, a founder of the Project on the New American Century, purveyors of today’s disastrous Bush foreign policy, and early advocate of attacking Iraq. His reward for being wrong ? He teaches a class in public policy at Harvard, writes as a part-time “ star” columnist for Time magazine, and has a nationwide platform from which to compound his earlier mistakes by calling for an attack on Iran.
Ann Coulter, in spite of being tragically wrong about the war, outrageously wrong about 9 / 11 widows, and unconscionably wrong about John Edwards, still has her column distributed to newspapers across the country.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classics professor and military historian much admired — and listened to — by Dick Cheney. Hanson, who was a major advocate of attacking Iraq, is now at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. In 2004, Tribune Media Services gave him a syndicated column.
There’s nothing new here. Vietnam War extender and defender Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State and played a key role in the secret bombing of Cambodia, has probably appeared as a foreign policy “ expert ” on more TV talk shows than any other former statesman.
Vehement anti-communist Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy advisor and United Nations ambassador, favored supporting friendly right-wing dictatorships because, as she put it, “ traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies. ”
The communist Soviet Union’s final leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, proved this contention wrong. His policy of glasnost, or “ openness, ” led to the end of Soviet communism and the transition to democracy of former Soviet republics and much of Eastern Europe. Yet Kirkpatrick continued to be a favorite of TV talk shows.
So if being “ right” (wing ) and wrong gives you prestige in the academy, broad media exposure and the ear of presidents and candidates, what happens to people who are “ left” and consistently right ?
The establishment media fired Phil Donahue and Bill Maher, who had the courage to speak truth to power. Despite solid ratings, Donahue was dismissed by MSNBC in 2003 because of his opposition to the Iraq war. Maher was banished from his popular nightly ABC gig for uttering the obvious truth that the 9 / 11 terrorists were correctly described as murderers but could not be called cowards since they sacrificed their lives for their deeply misguided cause.
Why doesn’t Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism czar in the Clinton and Bush administrations who rightly criticized the Bush administration for not connecting the obvious dots prior to 9-11, and opposed attacking Iraq, have a “ star” column in Time magazine ? Why isn’t World War II hero and former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern a regular on Sunday morning talk shows ? Why was his op-ed on the need for the United States to lead the world in reducing nuclear weapons rejected by top-tier newspapers and finally published in the Miami Herald ?
Rev. Bob Edgar, an early religious voice of opposition to the Iraq invasion and general secretary of the National Council of Churches, representing more Protestants than any other U. S. organization, was virtually ignored by the major national media. But major TV networks saturated the airwaves with prowar religious leaders like the late Jerry Falwell.
And it’s not just the media and academia that take seriously those on the right even when they’re proven wrong. Bill Kristol and Henry Kissinger advise presidential candidate John McCain, while Norman Podhoretz, Charles Hill, and other early advocates of attacking Iraq have the ear of Rudy Giuliani.
So the lesson is clear. If you want a platform to cheerlead for ill-advised wars, warp the minds of the future generations of policy makers now studying at our elite universities, and provide disastrous advice to current and future leaders, your best bet is to be both wrong and “ right. ”
Myriam Miedzian is the author of “ Boys Will Be Boys, ” and writes frequently on social and political issues. Gary Ferdman is a non-profit executive.