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Sunday, November 27, 2005

Toward a Unified Theory of How the Iraq War was Sold

Posted by on November 27 at 11:08 AM

I hope I don’t jinx things by predicting a Pulitzer in Commentary for Frank Rich’s Op-Ed columns in the New York Times this year. His column this Sunday is one of his best, and I would love to link to it, but unfortunately it’s hidden behind the TimesSelect wall — which I guess also means that rather than posting choice Frank Rich excerpts here, I have to suggest you go out and find the piece by any means necessary.

I can say this: Rich references an LA Times story that I posted about last Sunday, as well as this National Journal story and this Rolling Stone story, in what I predict (if I may make another prediction) will become a common online form as the Bush administration’s selling of the Iraq war gets reexamined by the media, mainstream and non.

The tale of how the Iraq war was sold is so sprawling, with each pre-war fiction now requiring so much investigative effort to debunk, that no one media outlet seems to have the space or resources to do it all on its own. Thus, to get to a unified theory of how the Iraq war was sold (not the theory people have long suspected is true, but a theory supported by evidence), one has to gather up a bunch of disparate links from different publications and weave them all together in one master narrative.

Which is what Frank Rich does, week after week, brilliantly.