October 29, 2006

What American journalists did not do in analysing the events that propelled their country into deep conflicts in South Asia and the Middle East, they have started to do now, five years after Washington took some fateful decisions. Initially they applauded President George W. Bush as he gave a robust edge to the way America approached the world after the terrorist attacks on the country in 2001. Among those who cheered from the sidelines was Bob Woodward, the dean of investigative reporting. He came out quickly with two books detailing how the Bush White House had responded to the challenges of the 21st century.

Now, as the United States gets mired in Afghanistan and Iraq and is becoming increasingly unpopular in much of the Muslim world, the journalists, who should have done some serious investigative work, are playing catch-up. They have begun to publish copious accounts of what has happened since 9/11 and what has gone wrong since then. Even Bob Woodward has changed his mind. In his third book of the series, the veteran journalist has provided a devastating account of the way the Bush administration made policy. However, the subject of this review is not Woodward’s latest book but the one by Frank Rich of The New York Times. Rich focuses his attention and also his ire on the media, in particular the country’s major newspapers, including his own.

The Bush administration was spared careful scrutiny when it decided to launch itself in Iraq and allowed itself to be diverted from Afghanistan. There were many reasons for this neglect. The unexpected assault of September 11, 2001 unhinged American society and produced an enormous urge to strike back. One example of this is the way it exerted pressure on Pakistan. During his recent visit to the United States, President Pervez Musharraf revealed the way his administration was pushed immediately after the attacks of September 11. In a conversation with General Mahmood Ahmad, then Head of Pakistan’s ISI, Richard Armitage, at that time the number two man in the US State Department, warned General Musharraf that if he did not side with America in the coming attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan, his country would be “bombed back to the Stone Age”.

Although this account has been disputed by the American diplomat, what is important is not the precise language that was used in getting Islamabad to side with Washington. Armitage admits that he did use “tough words” to get Islamabad to act on the side of America.

This desire for revenge and strong action was successfully managed by a group of political operatives who had, a year earlier, seen the Texan George W. Bush rise to power. Bush initially rose to the challenge of 9/11, resorting to much muscular talk that won him favour with the traumatised American people. They appreciated his “cow boy” stance — he wanted Osama bin Laden dead or alive, he challenged the Islamic radicals to “bring on” their combatants, his administration unveiled a new strategy according to which Washington declared that it was at liberty to take preemptive action if it feared that its interests were threatened. The Americans liked this approach. The president’s approval ratings soared into the stratosphere.

However, once the 9/11 dust settled down, a small minority of people began to worry that Washington was taking the country in the wrong direction. Had the press closely investigated what Washington was doing at that time, the war in Iraq would not have tuned into a fiasco. The analysis that should have been applied then is now being used to write thoughtful books. There are many lessons to be learned. But President Bush, in spite of all the setbacks of the last three years, continues to use muscular talk. Again to illustrate this from Pakistan’s experience. The American president did not please General Musharraf a couple of days before the latter’s visit to the White House when he told the press that he will send American troops into Pakistan if there was good intelligence that Osama bin Laden was hiding in some place in that country. General Musharraf reacted testily to these comments. “We wouldn’t allow that,” he told a press conference in New York. “We’d like to do that ourselves.”

Given what has happened since 9/11, the accounts that are hitting the bookstands should make instructive readings for Islamabad’s policymakers. As Frank Rich, a theatre critic turned columnist for The New York Times, writes in his riveting new book, things went wrong and are continuing to go wrong under President Bush’s management of both global and domestic affairs in large part because the press has not done its job well. Bush’s team was exceptionally industrious and successful in managing public opinion. It was brilliant at creating “fictional stories of their own man” while trashing all those who dared to oppose him.

This approach and its success was vividly displayed in the elections of 2004 when the “president’s political managers succeeded in creating a fictional biography for John Kerry” they offset the stories of valour and courage of the Democratic Party’s candidate. This episode has led to the coining of a new verb, “swiftboating” in American political writings. John Kerry was the commander of a naval vessel called the Swift Boat that patrolled the rivers of Vietnam, hunting for communist guerillas. Kerry’s exploits should have won him kudos and political support against the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, who was up for reelection. A decorated war hero seemed a good choice to lead a country that was at war in several places around the globe. He should have been considerably more attractive than his opponent who had managed to dodge the draft during the war in Vietnam. Instead the Republican political machine succeeded in stripping candidate Kerry “of his medals — so that he would be at the same footing as a president whose Vietnam service consisted of sporadic participation in the Texas ‘Champaign unit’ stateside.”

A new book comes out almost every month detailing how America has conducted itself in the last five years. There should be compulsory reading for the policy makers in Islamabad and Rich’s account should head their reading list.