medialens | It is certainly a harder question to answer honestly:
'Some of the warmongers believed that deploying shock and awe in Iraq would enhance American power and influence around the world. Some saw Iraq as a sort of pilot project, preparation for a series of regime changes. And it's hard to avoid the suspicion that there was a strong element of wagging the dog, of using military triumph to strengthen the Republican brand at home.'
Here Krugman was trying very really hard to focus on any obscure
corner of the living room to avoid noticing the elephant. In his book,
'Fuel on the Fire', based on declassified British Foreign Office files,
Greg Muttitt explains:
'The most important strategic interest lay in expanding global energy supplies, through foreign investment, in some of the world's largest oil reserves – in particular Iraq. This meshed neatly with the secondary aim of securing contracts for their companies.'
Ironically, having himself failed to write frankly about this key
issue, Krugman then speculated on the causes behind the political and
media silence:
'Some of them, I suppose, may have been duped: may have fallen for the obvious lies, which doesn't say much about their judgment. More, I suspect, were complicit: they realized that the official case for war was a pretext, but had their own reasons for wanting a war, or, alternatively, allowed themselves to be intimidated into going along. For there was a definite climate of fear among politicians and pundits in 2002 and 2003, one in which criticizing the push for war looked very much like a career killer.'
Again, this was a deeply irrational analysis from Krugman. Politicians and journalists were
foolish, duped, intimidated, fearful of losing their careers, of
course. But this hardly explains a pattern of political and corporate
media subservience to corporate power over decades, with the same
mendacity on virtually every issue impacting power and profit.
A rational analysis would at least glance at the structure and
corporate funding of political parties; at the profit-orientation, elite
ownership and advertiser-dependence of the corporate media. Why focus
on poor 'judgement' and a 'climate of fear' when political and economic
structures endlessly producing the same pattern of media 'failure' are
staring us in the face? Why was rational analysis of this kind suddenly
impossible for someone as astute as Krugman? Had he suddenly become a
fool?
Of course not, he was exactly repeating the self-censoring
behaviour he lamented in other journalists - honest analysis of the
corporate media is taboo in the corporate press.
Krugman also seriously misled his readers when he wrote:
'On top of these personal motives, our news media in general have a hard time coping with policy dishonesty. Reporters are reluctant to call politicians on their lies, even when these involve mundane issues like budget numbers, for fear of seeming partisan. In fact, the bigger the lie, the clearer it is that major political figures are engaged in outright fraud, the more hesitant the reporting. And it doesn't get much bigger — indeed, more or less criminal — than lying America into war.'
In fact, corporate media are the corporate arm of the
propaganda system they are supposed to be monitoring. Far from having 'a
hard time coping with policy dishonesty', they have a hard time coping
with the occasional journalists who attempt
to expose the dishonesty. Immensely powerful economic and political
forces select, shape, mould, reward and punish editors, journalists and
whole organisations to ensure that they do not deliver the kind of
'frank discussion' Krugman promised but failed to supply.
Apart from the motives for war and the structural conditions behind
media performance, there was one other crucial consideration missed by
Krugman. What reasonable analysis would discuss a spectacular
contemporary example of political mass deception without placing it in
some kind of historical context? Was the great Iraq deception a one-off?
Was it an outlier event? Was it a standard example, a carbon copy of
similar events over years and decades? Have we seen similar events since
2003? Are they happening now? Again, one of US journalism's
finest – at the extreme left of the 'mainstream' spectrum – had nothing
at all to say about these key questions.
And in fact, as we and others have documented, the Iraq deception was not
at all an outlier. It was a standard example of corporate
political-media deception that just happened to go so catastrophically
wrong that the reality could not be entirely ignored - although the
propaganda system was far more effective in burying the truth than we
might imagine. According to a 2013 ComRes poll,
44% of UK respondents estimated that fewer than 5,000 Iraqis had died
since 2003. 59% thought fewer than 10,000 had died. Just 2% put the toll
in excess of one million – the likely real toll.
Krugman did not even mention that Iraqis had died, let alone discuss
the almost unimaginable scale of the bloodbath. He concluded:
'But truth matters, and not just because those who refuse to learn from history are doomed in some general sense to repeat it.'
Crucially, Krugman was unable to recognise that history had already
repeated itself, not least in the repetition of his own self-censoring
analysis. The West's overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 was
based on exactly the same kind of lies and media complicity,
the same enthusiasm for war waged by Western powers who somehow,
miraculously, were said to retain moral credibility as humanitarian
agents.
In fact, this was an even more extreme example of propaganda
deception than Iraq, precisely because it happened in the aftermath of
that earlier deception. And, unlike Iraq, the media have not yet
summoned the courage to expose even a portion of the US-UK governments'
lies, or the media's complicity in them. All of this falls beyond
Krugman's idea of a 'frank discussion'.
