But Keller seems to think that his engagement in this self-aggrandizing self-criticism is punishment enough, not only for him and his fellow "liberal hawks" but apparently for Bush, Cheney, Blair and others who waged this war of aggression.
The fact that Keller doesn't even mention international law -- let alone the harsh penalties set aside for those who engage in war crimes like aggressive war -- suggests that he remains a member in good standing of the "We're-So-Special-We-Can-Do-Anything Club."
You may note that most of the "estimable" members of Keller's hawk club remain highly regarded opinion leaders and some -- like Friedman, Zakaria and Cohen -- retain big-dollar perches in the major news media. Keller even got promoted to Times executive editor, arguably the top job in American journalism, after the case for war in Iraq was debunked.
Double Standards
Given that many worthy journalists have seen their careers ruined simply because they are accused of failing to meet some perfect standard of journalism -- for instance, the late Gary Webb and his heroic reporting on Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking -- it is striking that almost none of Keller's club members have suffered professionally at all.
It seems that if you offend the Establishment -- as Webb did -- you are held to the most rigorous rules and suffer humiliation and disgrace, deprived of your livelihood and denied employment. (Unable to find work in journalism, Webb eventually committed suicide.)
However, if you go with the flow -- and are surrounded by enough "estimable" fellow-travelers -- you are protected from serious consequences for making grievous mistakes, like falling for lies from ideologues and letting your personal feelings dominate your judgment.
In the months before and after the Iraq invasion, the major U.S. news media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, were little more than conveyor belts for Bush's pro-war propaganda. In his half-hearted mea culpa on Sunday, Keller admits that some of the Times' pre-war reporting on Iraq's WMD was "notoriously credulous."
But Keller and the Times were essentially part of a bigger propaganda machine that did its best to first justify and then sanitize the war, at least in the early days.
Rather than troubling Americans with gruesome images of mangled and dismembered Iraqi bodies, including many children, the TV networks, in particular, edited the war in ways that helped avoid negativity and gave advertisers the feel-good content that plays best around their products.
Fox News may have pioneered this concept of casting the war in the gauzy light of heroic imagery, where Iraqi soldiers were "goons" and interviews with Americans at war were packaged with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as the soundtrack.
But MSNBC carried the idea to even greater lengths with Madison-Avenue-style montages of the Iraq War. One showed U.S. troops in heroic postures moving through Iraq. The segment ended with an American boy surrounded by yellow ribbons for his father at war, and the concluding slogan, "Home of the Brave."
Another MSNBC montage showed happy Iraqis welcoming U.S. troops as liberators and rejoicing at the toppling of Saddam Hussein. These stirring pictures ended with the slogan, "Let Freedom Ring." Left out of these "news" montages were any images of Iraqi death, destruction and despair.
Civilian Deaths
In the conflict's first days, the haste to kill Hussein led Bush to approve the bombing of a restaurant where Hussein was thought to be eating. Though Hussein wasn't there, the restaurant was obliterated and the bodies of more than a dozen civilians, including young children, were pulled from the rubble.
"When the broken body of the 20-year-old woman was brought out torso first, then her head," the Associated Press reported, "her mother started crying uncontrollably, then collapsed." The London Independent cited this restaurant attack as one that represented "a clear breach" of the Geneva Conventions ban on bombing civilian targets.
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