These missteps did not hold either man back for long. Petraeus joined a private equity firm, became a nonresident senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, cochaired a task force at the Council on Foreign Relations, and taught a course at the City University of New York. By 2016 he was back in the public eye: making regular media appearances, testifying on Capitol Hill, appearing in the Financial Times’ weekly profile “Lunch with the FT,” and being interviewed as a potential candidate for secretary of state in the Trump administration. McChrystal decamped to Yale, where he taught courses on leadership to carefully screened undergraduates. Both men also received lucrative speakers’ fees in retirement, as other former officers have.
What went largely unnoticed in the glare of their individual indiscretions were their limited accomplishments as military leaders. Like the other U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, Petraeus and McChrystal failed to achieve victory. The much-heralded surge in Iraq in 2007 was a tactical success but a strategic failure, for the political reconciliation it was intended to foster never materialized.66 No workable political order could be created absent that reconciliation, and so the ramped-up U.S. effort was largely for naught.67 Similarly, McChrystal’s short-lived tenure in Afghanistan did not reverse the course of the war, and the escalation he helped force on a reluctant Obama did not produce a stable Afghanistan either.
To be sure, it is doubtful that any strategy could have brought the United States victory in Iraq or in Afghanistan after 2004, and neither Petraeus nor McChrystal bears primary responsibility for these failures. As Bacevich notes, holding commanders accountable during protracted counterinsurgency wars is more difficult “because traditional standards for measuring generalship lose their salience.”68 But like their predecessors in Vietnam, Petraeus, McChrystal, and other U.S. commanders do bear responsibility for not explaining these realities to their civilian overseers or to the American people. On the contrary, both men consistently presented upbeat (if carefully hedged) assessments of the U.S. effort in both countries and repeatedly advocated continuing the war, offering assurances that victory was achievable provided the United States did not withdraw prematurely.69
More recent events suggest that little has changed. In November 2017, the current U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, announced that the United States had finally “turned the corner,” even though the Taliban were now in control of more territory than at any time since the original U.S. invasion.70 Unfortunately, that corner had been turned many times previously: commanding general Dan K. McNeill had spoken of “great progress” in 2007, and David Petraeus, Barack Obama, and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had all claimed that the United States had “turned the corner” back in 2011 and 2012.71 Meanwhile, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that military officials in Kabul had begun classifying performance data on Afghan casualties and military readiness, making it harder for outsiders to determine if the war was going well and even more difficult to determine if commanders in the field are performing well or not.72
These anecdotes—and the larger pattern that they illustrate—do not mean that accountability is completely absent. Former secretary of defense Robert Gates relieved his first commander two months after taking office and continued to fire incompetent military leaders throughout his tenure.73 More recently, the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, Admiral Joseph Aucoin, was relieved after a series of collisions and accidents involving U.S. warships. Senior military officials have also expressed their own concerns about eroding ethical standards and are said to be trying to address them.74 On the whole, however, the U.S. military exhibits the same reluctance to hold leaders accountable as the rest of the foreign policy community.
This combination of chronic failure and lack of accountability has repeatedly compromised the nation-building efforts that liberal hegemony encourages. As of 2016, for example, the United States has spent more than $110 billion on assorted reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, as part of the broader effort to help the Afghan people, strengthen the Kabul government, and marginalize the Taliban. Unfortunately, audits by the Pentagon’s own Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) documented a depressing record of waste, fraud, and mismanagement, along with numerous projects that failed to achieve most of their stated objectives.75 Yet as Special Inspector John Sopko told reporters in 2015, “nobody in our government’s been held accountable, nobody’s lost a pay raise, nobody’s lost a promotion. That’s a problem.”76
In fairness, these failures are not due primarily to those who have commanded or fought in America’s recent wars, and the U.S. Armed Forces are still capable of impressive military operations. Rather, this poor record reflects the type of wars that liberal hegemony requires—namely, long counterinsurgency campaigns in countries of modest strategic value. The fault lies not with the men and women who were sent to fight, but with the civilian leaders and pundits who insisted that these wars were both necessary and winnable.
ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE MEDIA
As discussed in previous chapters, a vigorous marketplace of ideas depends on a vigilant, skeptical, and independent media to ensure that diverse views are heard and to inform the public about how well their government is performing. This mission requires journalists and media organizations to be held accountable as well, so that errors, biases, or questionable journalistic practices do not corrupt public understanding of key issues.
One might think that the explosion of new media outlets produced by the digital revolution would multiply checks on government power and that increased competition among different news outlets might encourage them to adopt higher standards. The reverse seems to be true, alas: instead of an ever-more vigiliant “fourth estate,” the growing role of cable news channels, the Internet, online publishing, the blogosphere, and social media seems to be making the media environment less accountable than ever before. Citizens can choose which version of a nearly infinite number of “realities” to read, listen to, or watch. Anonymous individuals and foreign intelligence agencies disseminate “fake news” that is all too often taken seriously, and such “news” sites as Breitbart, the Drudge Report, and InfoWars compete for viewers not by working harder to ferret out the truth, but by trafficking in rumors, unsupported accusations, and conspiracy theories. Leading politicians—most notoriously, Donald Trump himself—have given these outlets greater credibility by repeating their claims while simultaneously disparaging established media organizations as biased and unreliable.77
The net effect is to discredit any source of information that challenges one’s own version of events. If enough people genuinely believe “The New York Times is fake news,” as former congressman Newt Gingrich said in 2016, then all sources of information become equally valid and a key pillar of democracy is effectively neutered.78 When all news is suspect, the public has no idea what to believe, and some people will accept whatever they are told by the one with the biggest megaphone (or largest number of Twitter followers).
Unfortunately, the commanding heights of American journalism have contributed to this problem by making major errors on some critical foreign policy issues and by failing to hold themselves accountable for these mistakes. These episodes have undermined their own credibility and opened the door for less reliable and more unscrupulous rivals.
The most prominent recent example of mainstream media malfeasance is the role prestigious news organizations played in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times published false stories about Iraq’s alleged WMD programs, based almost entirely on fictitious material provided by sources in the Bush administration. As the Times’ editors later acknowledged, the stories were poorly reported and fact-checked, containing numerous errors, and they undoubtedly facilitated the Bush administration’s efforts to sell the war.79
But the Times and the Post were not alone: the vaunted New Yorker magazine also published a lengthy article by the journalist
Jeffrey Goldberg describing supposed links between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, connections that turned out to be wholly imaginary.80 A host of other prominent media figures—including Richard Cohen, Fred Hiatt, and Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post; Bill Keller and Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times; Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal; and Fred Barnes, Sean Hannity, and Joe Scarborough of Fox News—all jumped on the pro-war bandwagon along with mass-market radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh.
Yet with the sole exception of the Times reporter Judith Miller—who wrote several of the false stories and eventually left the newspaper in 2005 with her reputation in tatters—none of the reporters or pundits who helped sell the war paid any price for their blunders.81 Goldberg switched from hyping the threat from Iraq to issuing equally inaccurate warnings about a coming war with Iran, but these and other questionable journalistic acts did not prevent him from becoming editor in chief of The Atlantic in 2016.82 Other pro-war journalists continued to defend the war for years from lofty positions within the media hierarchy, apparently feeling no responsibility or guilt for having helped engineer a war in which thousands died.83 And in the rare cases where one of them did admit they were wrong—as managing editor Bill Keller of the Times eventually did—the mea culpa was accompanied by a cloud of excuses and a reminder that lots of other people got it wrong too.84
The situation was no better at The Washington Post. After taking over the editorial page in 2000, Fred Hiatt hired a string of hard-line neoconservatives and transformed it, in the words of James Carden and Jacob Heilbrunn, into “a megaphone for unrepentant warrior intellectuals.”85 The Post enthusiastically promoted the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (by one count printing twenty-seven separate editorials advocating the war), and it described Secretary of State Colin Powell’s tendentious and error-filled presentation to the UN Security Council as “irrefutable.” Its editorial writers saw the invasion as a triumph, writing in May 2004, “It’s impossible not to conclude that the United States and its allies have performed a great service for Iraq’s 23 million people,” and expressing confidence that Iraq’s nonexistent WMD would eventually be found.86 The Post defended the decision to invade for years afterward, with the deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl opining that the real cost of the war wasn’t the lives lost or the trillions of dollars squandered, but rather the possibility that the experience might discourage Washington from intervening elsewhere in the future.87
Yet the Post’s disturbing record was not confined to Iraq. The editorial board led the successful campaign to derail the nomination of Ambassador Chas W. Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council in 2009 and the unsuccessful effort to block Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense in 2012, in both cases by distorting Freeman’s and Hagel’s past records and present views. A 2010 editorial scorned Obama for believing “the radical clique in Tehran will eventually agree to negotiate” over its nuclear program, which is precisely what Iran eventually did.88 The Post columnist Marc Thiessen denied that waterboarding was torture and said it was permissible under Catholic teachings, and Thiessen later received “Three Pinocchios” from the Post’s own in-house fact-checker for a 2012 column falsely accusing President Obama of skipping his daily intelligence briefings. Then, in 2014, Thiessen wrote an alarmist column suggesting that terrorists might inoculate themselves with Ebola and fly to the United States in order to infect Americans, a claim quickly dismissed by knowledgeable experts.89
As the most prominent newspaper in the nation’s capital, the Post has significant impact on elite opinion. If there were even a modest degree of accountability in the leading newspaper in the nation’s capital, or even a commitment to publishing a more representative range of opinion, Hiatt’s performance in this important gatekeeper’s role would have led to his dismissal long ago. And if the Post’s leadership were genuinely interested in publishing a diverse range of opinion on its op-ed pages, its stable of regular columnists would be rather different from its current lineup. But that is not how major news organizations operate in the Land of the Free.
What does get prominent media figures into trouble? As the cases of Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Janet Cooke reveal, outright fabrication of stories or sources can end a journalist’s career. Similarly, the NBC newscaster Brian Williams lost his job after falsely claiming that he had been embedded with a U.S. helicopter crew in Iraq (though he was eventually given a news slot on the MSNBC cable channel), and the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, the Today show host Matt Lauer, and the MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin were all dismissed after reliable accounts of persistent sexual harassment came to light.90 Making openly racist, sexist, homophobic, or obscene comments can be grounds for dismissal, and so can statements that are overly critical of Israel, as UPI’s Helen Thomas and CNN’s Jim Clancy and Octavia Nasr all learned to their sorrow.91
Being overtly committed to peace and skeptical of military intervention may be a problem too. In 2002, for example, the talk show legend Phil Donahue was fired by MSNBC, allegedly for giving airtime to antiwar voices, thereby creating anxiety for executives who believed the network should do more “flag-waving” in the wake of 9/11.92 But being consistently wrong or flagrantly biased does not seem to be a barrier to continued employment and professional advancement, even at some of America’s most prestigious publications.
As some of the sources I have relied upon in this book demonstrate, many contemporary journalists produce reportage and commentary that challenges official policy and tries to hold government officials to account. Yet accountability in the media remains erratic, and questionable journalistic practices continue to this day. When combined with the emergence of alternative media outlets such as Breitbart, not to mention even more extreme sources of “fake news,” it is no wonder that public trust in regular media outlets is at an all-time low.93 This situation is a serious threat to our democratic order, for if citizens do not trust information gleaned from outside official circles, it will be even easier for those in power to conceal their mistakes and manipulate what the public believes.
PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOR:
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU’RE RIGHT?
The failure to hold error-prone people accountable has a flip side—namely, a tendency to ignore or marginalize those outside the consensus even when their analysis or policy advice is subsequently vindicated by events. Being repeatedly wrong carries few penalties, and being right often brings few rewards.
In September 2002, for example, thirty-three international security scholars paid for a quarter-page advertisement on The New York Times’ op-ed page, declaring “War with Iraq Is Not in the U.S. National Interest.”94 Published at a moment when most of the inside-the-Beltway establishment strongly favored war, the ad warned that invading Iraq would divert resources from defeating Al Qaeda and pointed out that the United States had no plausible exit strategy and might be stuck in Iraq for years. In the sixteen-plus years since the ad was printed, none of its signatories have been asked to serve in government or advise a presidential campaign. None are members of elite foreign policy groups such as the Aspen Strategy Group, and none have spoken at the annual meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations or the Aspen Security Forum. Many of these individuals hold prominent academic positions and continue to participate in public discourse on international affairs, but their prescience in 2002 went largely unnoticed.
The case of U.S. Army colonel Paul Yingling teaches a similar lesson. Yingling served two tours in Iraq, the second as deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. His experiences there inspired him to write a hard-hitting critique of senior army leadership, which was published in the Armed Forces Journal in March 2007 under the title “A Failure of Generalship.” As Yingling put it in a subsequent article, “Bad advice and bad decisions are not accidents, but the results of a system that rewards bad behavior.” The article identified recurring command failures in Iraq and became required reading at the Army War College,
the Command and General Staff College, and a number of other U.S. military institutions, but Yingling barely received promotion to full colonel in 2010. After being passed over for assignment to the Army War College (a sign that his prospects for further promotion were bleak), he retired from the army to become a high school teacher.95
The career trajectories of Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett illustrate the same problem in a different guise. Until 2003 the Leveretts were well-placed figures in the foreign policy establishment. Armed with a Ph.D. from Princeton, Flynt Leverett was the author of several well-regarded scholarly works and had worked as a senior analyst at the CIA, as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and as senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council from 2002 to 2003. After leaving government, he worked briefly at the Saban Center at Brookings before moving to the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. Hillary Mann graduated from Brandeis and Harvard Law School, worked briefly at AIPAC, and held a number of State Department posts during the 1990s. The two met during their government service and were married in 2003.
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 23
