Off-Topic General Discussion - Page 4903

On May 02 2015 04:28 Lord Tolkien wrote:

I am well aware of her reputation, and about the book tour (which is unlikely to do much for her career except make her some royalties at this stage). Nonetheless, Stewart is attempting to push the narrative that the Bush administration manufactured the war, and that Judith Miller was either an active accomplice or an unknowing dupe, and fed information by the administration to garner support for the war. While she is was an accomplice to war, this is necessarily a jaded and partisan view (one popular among the Daily Show audience, mind; anti-Bush sentiment is pretty strong amongst younger Americans, and only somewhat unwarranted), given the conclusions reached by numerous Congressional inquiries into the intelligence failures that lead to Iraq. There was no overt influence by the administration, and it's more that they used the intelligence to confirm their own policy and push for a (popular, even in 2001 based on the polls) war.

Hindsight is 20/20, as are the conclusion of issues like Iran (1953), or the Vietnam War, but at the time, the US intelligence community had largely agreed on what we know now was deeply flawed information, for a variety of reasons (overall groupthink and wishful thinking, an overzealous response to 9/11, etc), of which direct pressure from the White House to produce doctored intelligence was not one of them. While statements made by top officials, and the interest in Iraq, may have had an indirect influence on analysts, there is nothing to say Judith Miller was fed information by the Bush administration, as Stewart was trying to push through the entire interview, when her sources within the intelligence community were most likely long-standing ones: predating the administration, and were likely genuine in their (erroneous) tips. As a journalist, she is entirely culpable for what she publishes; however, to lay the blame for this particular fubar at her feet is somewhat misplaced (though her behavior afterwards during the Iraq War, as she tried to confirm the existence of WMDs to save her own career, was not), when the failure was so systemic. The media, intelligence community, the political system, and indeed the American people, all share responsibility.


As always, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to human stupidity.


this sounds like something you and scip would do