Will Anyone Pay for the Iraq War?

By Robert Parry
January 15, 2008

If the latest polls are to be believed, the Republican frontrunner is John McCain, who favors continuing the Iraq War for decades if not centuries, and the leading Democrat is Hillary Clinton, who voted to give George W. Bush the power to start the misadventure in 2002 and remained a staunch war supporter until the eve of Campaign 2008.

In Congress, the Democrats appear so spooked about being accused of “partisanship” that they have replaced their periodic little white flags of surrender to President Bush on Iraq with a permanent large one. For his part, Bush is on his own personal victory lap of the Middle East, hailing the success of his “surge.”

In the U.S. news media, the Washington Post’s editorial page, which beat the drums early and often for invading Iraq, is not only still run by the same neoconservative writer, Fred Hiatt, but is still baiting those who “refuse to acknowledge progress in Iraq,” much as the Post ridiculed and marginalized early war opponents.

At the New York Times, publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. sought out and recruited prominent neoconservative writer William Kristol to bolster the op-ed ranks of other Iraq War enthusiasts, David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman. (Sulzberger’s reputed first choice, Charles Krauthammer, was already locked up by the Washington Post.)

So, even though the neocons (and their political/media fellow travelers) deceptively maneuvered the United States into possibly the worst national security debacle in the nation’s history (or acquiesced to the catastrophe), they pretty much have avoided any real accountability and have a good chance of dodging any in the future.

In one of his first Times op-eds, Kristol followed the lead of the Post’s Hiatt in pounding the new drum of neocon triumphalism by mocking Democratic presidential candidates for failing to recognize the great “leadership of George W. Bush” and praise his courageous “surge” policies...[Open in new window]