Only a minority of the US public were opposed to the war. I made a posting to BBC’s “Talking Point” on the eve of the invasion in which I said that “If we invade Iraq we had better learn what the Arabic word for ‘quagmire’ is”. But I was in the distinct minority. Tha majority of my fellow Americans disagreed with me. The majority of the Senate also did. But empirically it’s a safe bet that the majority of both have an IQ over 70.

I have long suspected that most Americans knew that the case for invasion was flimsy and fabricated, but they wanted to invade Iraq anyway. Anyone who falls for the myth that the US is always the good guys with our hearts in the right place is more gullible than the people who fell for the case for war.

Fitzgerald should have centered his investigation around the media more. It seems the truth will never come out.

I’ve really lost alot of respect for Russert. One of few Democratic media types who I thought tried to show some sense of inpartiality in his reporting. He’s been caught in several contradictions and for lack of a better term lies.

I think we are all learning ( or keep re-learning) that we cannot trust this administration or anything they put out. So it’s “fool me once…you can’t fool me again”

However in allowing Judith Miller to do her reporting, it was the New York Times itself, the editors, her editors ( did she have any?) that dropped the ball. Miller was clos enough to the administration sources and could get the information/spin. But it was up to the editor to follow or couple ( in the same article or separatey) with strong analysis and even an editorial as is happening now with re the claim about Iran’s involvement in Iraq. Michael Gordon wrote an informative piece minus the appropriate skepticim ( questions) just last week. The blogs jumped all over it immediately saying “here we go again!”. The New York Times wrote an excellent editorial piece PLUS an analysis by James Glanz that pointed out the lack of evidence.

I don’t want to puts words into O’Donnell’s mouth, but it seems to me that he was trying to say that we should also be asking the questions as we read and not depend on one report or reporter ( reporters have their flaws and inclinations).

True enough as well- the NYT is the paper of record, the one that the others point to, with connections and reporters far-flung and it has a responsibility…. and it did let us down as the country was prepped for war on Iraq.

Frontline this week aired the first part of a series, as always, very good, Secrets, Sources & Spin related to this ROS program. You can watch online.

Three points:

1. Expanding on michaelmross’s comment: It was obvious for many years (well before W) that the inspections and the sanctions had nothing to do with unconventional weapons and that Saddam had been disarmed.

2. It’s not the job of the media to come up with a “smoking gun” showing that an implausible claim is false; it’s the job of the person who made the claim to provide the “smoking gun” that that implausible claim is true. For example, if the administration now claims that Ahmadinejad has a collection of bombs, each of which has the name of a D.C. area toddler written on it, then it’s not the media’s job to come up with a “smoking gun” showing that this is false; it’s Bush’s job to come up with a “smoking gun” showing that it’s true. And the best the administration could come up with viz a viz their Iraq lies was Powell’s pathetic performance at the UN, which was immediately debunked. (The American media definitely *is* guilty of ignoring the facts and instead pretending that Powell’s performance was compelling.)

3. The U.S. media at the time completely ignored the fact that the inspectors were given completely free reign to go anywhere *before* the war, and that didn’t stop Bush from pulling them out and invading. What more proof did they need that this war had nothing to do with WMD?

4. Even if Iraq *did* have chemical and biological weapons, that in no way justifies a U.S. invasion. The media’s basic assumption in all of this is the opposite.

Again, nice job Chris on calling O’Donnell on his B.S. I wish you were running the NY Times.