The cover story in last week’s Time magazine is titled The End of Cowboy Diplomacy. The article lays out the many foreign policy problems that have arisen since the implementaion of the so-called “Bush Doctrine”; President Bush’s theory which believes in unilateral engagement, pre-emtive war and the use of “hard power” to protect American interests and advance democracy. For the most part, the article paints a fairly clear picture of the failures of this particular worldview. However, one passage in the piece propagates a popular myth that the White House has advanced since the 9/11 in regards to the reasoning behind going into Iraq. In the article, White House counselor Dan Bartett made the following statement:
The impression that the doctrine of pre-emption was the only guiding foreign policy light is not true. Iraq was a unique circumstance in history, and the sense of urgency of certain decisions in the early part of the first term was reflective of a nation that had to take decisive action after being attacked.
The September 11 commission debunked the notion that Iraq played any role in the 9/11 attacks. Yet, two years after those findings were made public, a senior White House offical is found in the pages of a major American newsmagazine spreading blatant falsehoods. If Bartlett had been talking about toppling the Taliban, that would be one thing, but he conflates the justifed decision to go into Afghanistan with the unwise war of choice undertaken by the Bush Administration in Iraq. The statement is left unchallenged in the article. When controversial statements like this are made, reporters need to challenge them because not doing so confuses the public’s understanding of the issue and allows lies to masquerade as truth.
Posted by uvasig 
Posted by uvasig 
Posted by uvasig 