The War Party did more to enlist journalists in the cause of invading Iraq than deploying Judith Miller. Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, reveals a top secret meeting chaired by Paul Wolfowitz, on November 29, 2001, attended by thinktank wonks, government officials, and two “journalists”: Fareed Zakaria, editor of the international edition of Newsweek and columnist for that magazine, and Robert D. Kaplan, currently on the staff of The Atlantic Monthly. The purpose of the group was to produce a paper dealing with the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan and which countries to invade in the Middle East. President Bush reportedly found the paper illuminated the “malignancy” of all those damn Ay-rabs in the Middle East, especially Iraq, who had yet to be “liberated.”
Both Zakaria and Kaplan signed confidentiality agreements, and the former, at least, appears to be living up to his as best he can: Zakaria denies that he knew a document would come out of the meeting, although Kaplan says most of the meeting was spent drafting the document. The New York Times asked Senor Kaplan: “Could any of the participants have been unaware there was a document in the making?” “No,” averred Kaplan, “that’s not possible.” Who’s lying, here?
These guys are “journalists” in the same sense that the old staff of Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Soviet Kremlin, are “journalists” — that is, they aren’t real journalists in any meaningful sense of the term. They are propagandists, pure and simple: shills for the government. When the State is pushing a course of action — an invasion, either of a foreign country or the rights of its own citizens — these people respond like Pavlovian parrots, rationalizing and “explaining” from their perches in the “mainstream” media, outdoing one another in their obeisance to Power, in the hope that they’ll be invited to the next secret meeting of shills and ass-kissers.
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