History Should Also Punish Dan Rather for Cheerleading the Iraq War
In a Friday interview with MSNBC the notable journalist and former CBS evening news anchor, Dan Rather, stated that, “History will punish Donald Trump for leaving the Paris climate deal.” In my opinion, this kind of bold accusation is precisely the tone towards the ruling class which the media should always assume. The press should act as a “fourth estate”, as another check on the power of our elites. For this, I give Rather credit.
However, in the same interview, Rather also says, “We haven’t had a President this psychologically troubled in this way since at least Richard Nixon.”
Narratives such of this, that Donald Trump as a hiccup in an otherwise decent society known as the United States and if we could just do something about him we’d be okay, have run rampant since Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton even implied it during the general election when she claimed, “America is great because it is good.”
The point is, Dan Rather is correct in criticizing Trump on his decision regarding the Paris Agreement. But in diagnosing Trump as an aberration in the otherwise good, perhaps even perfect, American political and economic system, Rather has failed to learn not only from the media’s legacy of failing to speak truth to power, but his personal one as well.
On September 17, 2001, six days after 9/11 and two years before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Rather appeared on the David Letterman Show. Aided by Letterman, Rather implied that to defeat Al-Qaeda the United States would have to invade not only Afghanistan but also “Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya”. Keep in mind, these are all but two of the countries General Wesley Clark Jr. named in his revelation that our endless wars in the Middle East were planned in the Pentagon following the 9/11 attacks.
Rather then stated, ”George Bush is the President, he makes the decisions and as just one American where ever he wants me to line up just tell me where and he’ll make the call.”
But this wasn’t enough. Again, not yet on the eve of the Bush administration’s Shock and Awe invasion, not even a full week after 9/11, Rather pretended that Saddam Hussein had something to with the strikes. Rather,labeled the Gulf War a “great triumph”, but claimed that America’s forces, “didn’t have the staying power to finish and get rid of Saddam Hussein,” adding as an afterthought,“There’s no question, we made a big mistake.”
I can already envision a liberal Bush apologist reading this and postulating a rebuttal. Despite Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq based on lies, the ensuing decimation of civil liberties under the PATRIOT Act, the torture facilities at Guantanamo Bay which imprisoned innocent Arabs, and the constant gaslighting of the American people which helped make all this possible, liberal pundits are now attempting to rehabilitate the image of George W. Bush, painting him as a cushy old Uncle who simply is a bit incompetent but not “insane” or “rude” like Trump. Dan Rather’s remarks regarding Trump’s mental capacities are a part of this revisionist psy-op.
Make no mistake, George W. Bush is just as “psychologically troubled” as Trump or Nixon. The Iraq War killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The Iraq Body Count project has said somewhere between 175,000 and 190,000, while the Public Library of Science says the numbers could be as high as 500,000. In Guantanamo Bay and similar camps all over the world, many of which are secret, prisoners were and still are tortured in ways that are difficult to comprehend for those of us outside its walls. At least $1.7 trillion dollars is owed by the American taxpayer because of the war, with that number reaching a staggering $6 trillion over a period of four decades.
Two years after his appearance on Letterman, Dan Rather sat idly by as the Bush administration launched their Shock and Awe campaign. The entire purpose of this strike and the ensuing carnage was to kill as many civilians as possible, decimate the infrastructure of Iraq, and, using massive amounts of deception, misinformation, and disinformation, dominate the citizenry of both Iraq and the United States. Rather simply leads us in, offering a cold, detached description of military machinery. No insight, critique, or even emotional response is given by Rather as bombs decimate houses and blow up human beings who never did anything to the United States. The tone of war was set as one of indifference and stoicism by Rather.
When asked to reflect on his time as anchor during the Bush years, Dan Rather said:
“If we journalists, including myself, had right from the get go, from the opening pop, had started asking the kind of tough, digging, aggressive questions we should have been asking and doing our reporting...if we had done our job I do think a strong argument can be made that perhaps we would not have gone to war.”
Yet Rather, and the rest of the mainstream media, refuse to learn from this mistake. In scrutinizing Trump for every action imaginable, whether it is something actually atrocious such as the recent decision regarding the Paris agreement, or something completely inconsequential such as a typo on a Twitter status, the mainstream media is covering up the fact that Trump emerged from the tyranny not only of George W. Bush, but also those of Barack Obama, and virtually every President since Nixon. In doing so, they can deny that a decaying neoliberal economic policy and a dastardly neoconservative foreign policy, cultivated in academic Ivory Towers and shoved down the throat of the working class in the interest of Wall St. and the military-industrial complex over the last 4 decades, are quite literally destroying the planet and creating characters like Trump.
Thus, even when Dan Rather or any other journalist or pundit of note says something partially correct, we must hold them accountable for the part they get wrong. When it comes to the ruling class and the talking heads who sell us their global holocaust, we must never forget and never forgive. Now is the time to constantly demand more-more information, more accountability, more humility-from the elite of our world. If we fail to do so Trump’s climate incompetence will only be a sliver of our sorrows.
