The Young Turks

Cenk Uygur: I think that, you know, one of the things that has not been discussed enough in this McClellan issue is, and these revelations, is the press' role. He said the press is an enabler here, but one thing we have not seen is a lot of mea-culpa from the press.

Michael Hirsh: Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I mean, that's, you know, I was inspired to write that. Because McClellan, I mean of all people Scott McClellan, the human punching bag, a zealous Bush advocate, as you can see now because of this sense of betrayal by his former colleagues in the White House you can hardly believe what he came out and wrote. But, you know, he himself has come and out and said, "You know what, this was a bad idea. This Iraq War was a misconceived strategy." And yes, you have these very prominent gentleman, and sometimes ladies of the press who have not been able to make an equivalent mea-culpa. And I point out that in my case, in my article, you know, I think example number one has got to be Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who embraced what he called "a war of choice," which, you know, in my view is just the euphemism for a war crime. And he's never been held accountable for it. He continues to go from success to success, and best seller to best seller. And I find that somewhat astonishing. I mean, it's quite clear, it should be by now, that he had no idea what he was talking about. And, so, you know it's a little bit ironic to have Scott McClellan having made that journey, you know, to recognizing his errors, and yet we can't get these very prominent pundits. And to say, this is not just a matter of correcting the historical record, it's also a question of getting the debate in the country right. I mean, if a few more of these prominent pundits had stepped up and said, "You know what, we all got the war on terror wrong," people might be a little bit more clear in their own minds now why they think the Iraq War was a bad idea. Polls show that they do, but a lot of people still aren't sure why.

Cenk Uygur: Now, the quote that you had from Tom Friedman before the war, in your article, is damning. It's damning to the utmost, and you point out correctly, look, it wasn't only people who got it wrong. There were also people who got it right. There were clear-headed people at the time. And a really great quote from Maureen Dowd's article before the war as well, and of course as you pointed out, you saw it was a bad idea to go into war as well, before the Iraq War. And a lot of did, right?

Michael Hirsh: Yeah, no, I mean there was a substantial number, you know, a few columnists, and some reporters, McClatchy Newspaper reporters got a lot of it right. There were those of us, including some of my colleagues at Newsweek, who were reporting serious doubts in the intelligence committee about WMDs....couldn't really get stories into the magazine or into the newspaper, because a lot of the leading editors at that time, and still at this time, you know, found a way to embrace this war, and went along with the momentum. And Maureen Dowd was clearly right about this. I mean, she's gotten very little credit for it. But she was.

Cenk Uygur: See, Michael, this is what I want to focus on though...what you just said there towards the end. A lot of the editors at that time, and even till this day, those are two separate things. Let's address at that time first. They did not want to carry those stories, and if they did carry those stories, they didn't want to put them in the front of the paper, or the front of the magazine, or headlining the news on television.

Michael Hirsh: No.

Cenk Uygur: And how do we address this? Because it's not just that Thomas Friedman hasn't apologized for it. The New York Times hasn't asked him to come forward and say, hey did you get this right of wrong. It hasn't just been that the editors got it wrong, or the executive producers of these news programs and these news programs got it wrong. But no one has asked them to come forward and say, "hey, you know what, we blew it here and we shouldn't have done it." And it isn't just an academic exercise. It's so we can have some degree of confidence that they won't get it wrong again. How do we address that?

Michael Hirsh: Well, I'm not sure how. I mean, one of the problems is that the majority of them, the truly prominent members of the punditocrisy if you will, and the top editors were for the war. I mean, the editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, just before he became editor, wrote an article in Times Magazine called the, you know, the "I Can't Believe I'm a Hawk Club," where he grouped himself with other so-called liberal interventionists who were trying to fit in their support for the Iraq War with their support for the, you know, actions against the Bosnia Slobodan Milosevic in the 90s. And, you know, they went about this as an intellectual exercise all without realizing that the Iraq War, essentially had absolutely nothing to do with the challenge of 9/11, which was the preeminent challenge before us...which has always what's gotten me upset, cause you know, whenever I have taken this position, I've often been accused of being a liberal, a weenie, whatever, when actually I'm a hawk. I've always been a hawk, and as a hawk I wanted vengeance for 9/11 and I wanted justice, which meant getting Bin Laden and Zawahiri getting and making sure they were all very dead. That was the objective. That was the only objective we could have after 9/11. And somehow, all of these reporters of the Iraq War have deafly avoided the fact that Bin Laden and Zawahiri and too many of the Lieutenants are still out there thriving. So that's the argument that I make, and I don't know. I think that the problem is, again, you know, you got Keller, you got the leading editors of the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland, who's a columnist there, Fred Hiatt the editorial page editor, David Remnick of the New Yorker. A lot of the truly preeminent editors of our time were among those who supported the war. So it stands to reason that you're not going to be hearing cries from them for each other to step forward.

Cenk Uygur: See, that's the thing Michael. You know, I wrote an article, it must have been maybe two years ago, called "Fire The Editors." Because it's not that there aren't good reporters doing the stories, it's that the ones who get it right are not rewarded. In fact, they're called, I guess what's now a really bad word, a "liberal," you know..."Oh you must have been some sort of liberal pacifist or something," and you know, that could be used as a slur. One, it shouldn't be a slur. Two, it isn't even accurate. My original problem with the Iraq War was exactly what you said, Michael. I said, "WHY the hell are we going around distracting ourselves with this when, shouldn't we be getting Bin Laden?" He's in Afghanistan, he's not in Iraq!

Michael Hirsh: And it was more, you know, it was actually more complex, and that's where, you know, the mistake of these top editors, and those who proport to be experts on foreign policy is really in my view unforgivable, particularly since they haven't come forward to admit it. I mean, look the fact is, what people forget is Al Quaeda was always a creature of the anti-Soviet Jihad, and it's in the mountains of Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s. That's where the group came from. Yes, it was made up of angry Arabs and young men, but it was always a unique entity that existed there. That was it's home. And people don't acknowledge this, but there was not a single intelligence or academic study ever sited by this administration making the argument that, indeed, the source of terrorism was a lack of democracy or freedoms in the Arab world. That study doesn't exist. I can tell you that because I've reported it out. So this is a completely fallacious link being made between the war in Iraq and the challenge of Al Quaeda. In addition to that, everyone who studied that region, I'm talking about Afghanistan and Pakistan, knew just how difficult it was going to be to fix that country. As we now see, with the difficulties that are occurring with NATO. So this was all there. This was not Monday morning quarter backing. This was known at the time, and they made a huge mistake, and it's now time for them to acknowledge it. You're just not seeing it, you know, you see a few people out there writing about this now. But I thought, you know, that the McClellan book was an appropriate moment to come out and say, "My God, if this stooge in the Bush Administration can find a conscience, surely you all can."

Cenk Uygur: Well, again, I couldn't agree more with you on that Michael. But let's talk about today, though. That's the second part of this, which is I'm not convinced that anyone has learned any lesson. They talk about the Iraq War mistake and the press' role in it, as if it were ancient history, and as if it were an anomaly: "Remember that one time we got it wrong, way back in the day..." But you never got it right, you never fixed that error. And the same people are still in charge, and they still put the same pundits who have been so wrong for so long, as another person has said on TV, as the, you know, experts on this stuff. And if you'd been right all along: "Oh you can't put that guy on, he's like a liberal who's against the Iraq War." Well he's the one who's been right!

Michael Hirsh: One of the things I've learned after more than ten years of living in Washington is that, you know, being right usually only earns you a resentment. People, particularly if you're, you know, you're among the minority, it doesn't win you too many kudos, and that's what we're seeing play out here. But again, it's not just a matter of ego or setting the record straight, as I think we both agree, it's getting the debate right. And that includes the debate about how long to stay in Iraq. I mean, I happen to believe that there are serious signs of success going on now, you know, with the surge and what's happening with the Iraqi government. I wrote an article a couple months ago right after the Basra about a month ago, saying, you know, this is a model for the future of the Iraqi army. And it may well be playing out that way. That's a separate debate from whether this was a completely misconceived way of going about the war on terror or the war against Al Quaeda, as I call it. But it's important to get that debate right and keep it separate from how long we have to stay in Iraq now. And I think they are separate debates. But the country has to understand what went wrong here. Why are we so far down the world's esteem? You know, we have to understand why no one trusts us. And one of the reasons is the rest of the world didn't agree with our pundits or our president, and for the most part opposed this war for pretty sound reasons. It's only when we can acknowledge that we'll be able to get ourselves, you know, fixed...get our self identity fixed here.

Cenk Uygur: See, Michael, the last question I got to ask you about is the hardest one because we talked about the past, we talked about what's happening today. I want to ask, in the future do we have any hope that we're going to get this straightened out? Because right now I don't see a system, an infrastructure in place where the media is going to accept in mass, or in specific cases, Friedman and some of these other editors, that they screwed up, and actually say, "Hey look, in the future, here's what I'm going to do differently." I don't see that at all. Do we have any hope that they are going to go in that direction? And why would they?

Michael Hirsh: No, I don't think so. I think in the longer run though, you know, the historical record, I think will be corrected as historians understand the problems we've got in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how they weren't fixed...how the war in Iraq was a distraction. But you know, look, sometimes it takes a long time to fix the historical records. Recall David McCullough's book on John Adams, you know, and the series HBO just aired. It took about 200 years to get his reputation right, you know. So sometimes it takes a long time, and I don't have many hopes from the trends I'm seeing that we're going to get a bunch of pundits who are going to suddenly repent and fall down at their knees figuratively and admit they were wrong. It's just going to be a very slow and long process.

Cenk Uygur: It's going to be a long hard slog.

Michael Hirsh: It sure is.

Cenk Uygur: Alright, Michael Hirsh from Newsweek. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Michael Hirsh: Thanks again Cenk. Take care.