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by the Washington Post;24 but compared to the drumbeat for war, the Kamel revelations were largely ignored by the U.S. news media, and their impact was zero. The New York Times gave Mohamed ElBaradei and Hans Blix less credence than Dick Cheney or any defector the administration or Judith Miller chose to put forward. Like the Bush administration and most of the MSM, the Times tended to regard these UN inspectors as a negative force: among the frequent Times pro-war op-ed columns by Kenneth Pollack, one with Martin Indyk was entitled “How Bush Can Avoid the Inspections Trap” (Jan. 27, 2003). Ignoring the counter-evidence and following the administration’s party line, the Times’s editors took Saddam’s WMD as an established fact: Iraq “already possesses biological and chemical weapons” (Aug. 11, 2002); “Iraq, with its storehouse of biological toxins, its advanced nuclear weapons program” (Sept. 13, 2002); “in our judgment Iraq is not [disarming]” (Feb. 15, 2003); and so on. Indeed, Friel and Falk reproduce quotes from no fewer than 14 different editorials to similar effect.25 Editorials such as these not only were not based on evidence, they required a systematic avoidance of evidence.

The “threat” posed by Saddam’s weapons also ran into several difficulties. One is that the Reagan administration, several of whose high-ranking officials like Donald Rumsfeld served in the Bush administration, had actually helped Saddam acquire WMD in the 1980s when he was fighting Iran. A second is that Saddam didn’t use those WMD during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, presumably because he realized that there would be disproportionate retaliation from the United States. A third is that well into 2001, senior Bush administration officials were claiming that Saddam posed no threat: early in that year Secretary of State Colin Powell told an Egyptian audience that “He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”26 On July 29, 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated that “We are able to keep his arms from him [Saddam Hussein]. His military forces have not been rebuilt.”27 Earlier, in 2000, Rice had made the point noted above that Saddam couldn’t use WMD even if he had them: “their weapons would remain unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.”28 The New York Times, and most of its media associates, dealt with these difficulties by ignoring them (the Times has never cited these statements by Powell and Rice).

When it turned out that there were no WMD in Iraq—except those that had been supplied by the United States in the 1980s, which had been taken under control by the UN inspectors till the invasion, after which they were left unguarded and looted!—the Bush administration moved smoothly to the claim that we were in Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people and promote democracy there. While such objectives had been mentioned in passing earlier, they now came to the forefront and were packaged within a broader goal—“democracy promotion” throughout the Middle East and in fact across the globe.29 Michael Ignatieff, writing in the New York Times Magazine of June 26, 2005, asserted that Bush has “risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right,” and that American democracy will be extended “finally to all.”30 How did Ignatieff know this? Because Bush said so! (No other evidence was offered.) The U.S. MSM more generally swallowed this claim, rarely if ever harking back to the statement that there was only a “single question” and the claim that Iraq posed a serious military “threat” to the United States, although some media did raise questions about whether we should be spending huge resources for the benefit of others, whether democracy can be imposed by force, whether Iraqis are sufficiently rational and advanced to take advantage of our help—and whether they might also make the wrong choices.31

In addition to having to glide past the earlier claim of a “single question,