[Peace] Dan Froomkin | Salon: Why is MSM going easy on Biden on Iraq?

[Robert Naiman]

https://www.salon.com/2020/01/18/press-watch-why-is-the-mainstream-media-so-gentle-with-joe-biden/
Press Watch: Why is the mainstream media so gentle with Joe Biden?Joe Biden
gives addled, incoherent answers about his troubling record — and most in
the media just let it slide
DAN FROOMKIN <https://www.salon.com/writer/dan_froomkin>JANUARY 18, 2020
5:00PM (UTC)This article was co-produced with Press Watch
<https://presswatchers.org/>, a new website that monitors and critiques
American political coverage.
[...]

mainstream journalists in the best positions to demand answers — during
sit-down interviews and televised debates — have been remarkably gentle
with Joe Biden.

They ask about his decision to authorize the war in Iraq, but not about the
many documented times he has lied about why he made that decision, and when
he first realized the war was a mistake.

[...]

They let him associate himself with Barack Obama, but don't make him
address the administration's many failures and betrayals, such as the way
Obama embraced Bushism on matters of national security, and embraced
neoliberal economics. Would he appoint the same roster of people to run his
foreign and domestic policy? What reason is there to believe he wouldn't?

[...]

Most likely, these journalists — the most elite of the journalistic elite —
are just plain comfortable with Biden, and don't feel remotely
antagonistic, because he reflects their centrist, Washington cocktail-party
ideology.

He's not talking about rocking the boat. He's talking about going back to
the way things were, and they were happy then.

By not actively asking Biden any hard questions, these top-tier journalists
are offering de facto support for the pre-Trump status quo ante, without
overtly looking like they are taking sides.

But if they allow a weak candidate to become the sole alternative to Trump,
which appears to be the unacknowledged or unconscious goal, the net effect
may be paving the way for four more years.
*Biden and Iraq*

Let me now expand on a few of the areas where Biden has avoided needed
scrutiny and some recent missed opportunities, starting with Iraq.

Biden has repeatedly maintained that he was deceived into voting for the
authorization to use military force in Iraq by George W. Bush, which is
flatly ludicrous.

For a while, he insisted that he opposed the Iraq invasion as soon as it
was launched, which is a lie. His comments are impossible to misinterpret.

>From the Democratic debate on July 31
<https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/democratic-debate-transcript-july-31-2019-n1038016>
:

*Biden*: From the moment "shock and awe" started, from that moment, I was
opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the
Congress and the administration.

Biden also told NPR in early September that "Immediately, that moment it
started, I came out against the war at that moment."

Since then, Biden has made some muddled attempts at clarification. But
regardless, there is ample evidence in the public domain that he was a
booster of the war both before and after.

As Tara Golshan and Alex Ward
<https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/15/20849072/joe-biden-iraq-history-democrats-election-2020>
have
written for Vox,

[H]is record, well documented in speeches on the Senate floor,
congressional hearings, and press interviews from 2001 through his time in
the White House, is that of a senator bullish about the push to war who
helped sell the Bush administration's pitch to the American public …

Biden bought into the Bush administration's argument. He elevated the
administration's concerns about Hussein in the press. And in the months
leading up to the vote authorizing war, he organized a series of Senate
hearings, in close coordination with the White House, during which he
echoed the administration's talking points about weapons of mass
destruction."

Soon after the invasion, Biden criticized the war effort for being
underfunded. But that's a far cry from opposition.

He said in September 2003
<https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1214659091261464576>:

If the Lord Almighty had come down and said, "Look, we're going to go in,
we're going to take out Saddam, but let me tell you this administration is
really going to mess this stuff up, the aftermath," then, I think I still
probably would have voted, because you I believe that you had to enforce
those international agreements that Saddam made. But it's a much closer
call.

And he added:

I think to make the case that the use of force against Saddam was
unjustified is, I think, the wrong case to make.

In the Sept. 12 Democratic debate
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UWVO0Trd1c&feature=youtu.be&t=6170>,
Biden stumbled through an attempt to explain. All these Biden quotes are
[sic]:

Biden: I said something that was not meant the way I said it. I said "from
that point on." What I was argued against in the beginning, once he started
to put the troops in, was that in fact we were doing it the wrong way;
there was no plan; we should not be engaged; we didn't have the people with
us; we didn't have our — we didn't have allies with us, et cetera.

Clearly, Biden still hasn't come to terms with his massive error in
judgment regarding what Sanders correctly described in the Jan. 14 debate
as one of "the two great foreign policy disasters of our lifetimes," both
of which "were based on lies."

Letting him say he made a mistake and moving on is letting him off way too
easy.

[...]
DAN FROOMKIN

Dan Froomkin is Editor of Press Watch. He wrote the daily White House Watch
column for the Washington Post during the George W. Bush administration,
then served as Washington bureau chief and senior writer at Huffington
Post, covering Barack Obama's presidency, before working as Washington
editor at The Intercept.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace/attachments/20200123/e8c5e75b/attachment.htm>