The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public

This month, a lot of media stories have compared President
Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan. The
comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned
-- the media's insistent support for the war even after most of the
public has turned against it.

This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media
functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time, a fairy
tale so widespread that it routinely masquerades as truth. In fact,
overall, the default position of the corporate media is to bond with
war policymakers in Washington -- insisting for the longest time that
the war must go on.

In early 1968, after several years of massive escalation of
the Vietnam War, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of 39 major U.S.
daily newspapers and found that not a single one had editorialized in
favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. While millions of Americans were
actively demanding an immediate pullout, such a concept was still
viewed as extremely unrealistic by the editorial boards of big daily
papers -- including the liberal New York Times and Washington Post.

A similar pattern took shape during Washington's protracted
war in Iraq. Year after year, the editorial positions of major dailies
have been much more supportive of the U.S. war effort than the American
public.

In mid-spring 2004, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll was showing
that "one in four Americans say troops should leave Iraq as soon as
possible and another 30 percent say they should come home within 18
months." But as usual, when it came to rejection of staying the war
course, the media establishment lagged way behind the populace.

Despite sometimes-withering media criticism of the Bush
administration's foreign policy, all of the sizable newspapers steered
clear of calling for withdrawal. Many favored sending in even more
troops. On May 7, 2004, Editor & Publisher headlined a column by
the magazine's editor, Greg Mitchell, this way: "When Will the First
Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?"

Today, the gap between mainline big media and the grassroots
is just as wide. Top policymakers for what has become Obama's
Afghanistan war can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials
of the nation's mighty newspapers -- at the same time that opinion
polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war.

While a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 51
percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn't worth fighting,
the savants who determine big media's editorial positions insist on
staying the course.

Recycled from the repetition-compulsion department, a spate of
new hand-wringing editorials has bemoaned the shortcomings of
Washington's allied leader in the occupied country. Of course the
edifying pitch includes the assertion that the Afghan government and
its armed forces must get their act together. (Good help is hard to
find.)

"President Obama has rightfully defined success in Afghanistan
as essential to America's struggle against Al Qaeda," the New York
Times editorialized on Aug. 21. Yet Al Qaeda, according to expert
assessments, is scarcely present in Afghanistan any more. There are
dozens of countries where that terrorist group or other ones could be
said to have a much larger presence. Does that mean the U.S. government
should be prepared to wage war in all of those countries?

Paragraph after paragraph of the editorial proclaimed what
must be done to win the war. It was all boilerplate stuff of the sort
that has littered the editorial pages of countless newspapers for many
years during one protracted war after another -- in Vietnam, in Iraq
and in Afghanistan.

When congressional leaders and top administration officials
read such editorials, they can take comfort in finding reaffirmed
support for their insistence on funding more and more war. If only
public opinion would cooperate, there'd be no political problem.

But, increasingly, public opinion is not cooperating. While
the media establishment and the political establishment appear to
belong to the same pro-war affinity group, the public is shifting to
the other side of a widening credibility gap.

In a word, the problem -- and the threat for the press and the state -- can be summed up as democracy.

Now, one of the pivotal questions is what "liberal" and
"progressive" online organizations will do in the coming months. Many
are led by people who privately understand that Obama's war escalation
is on track for cascading catastrophes. But they do not want to
antagonize the leading Democrats in Washington, who contend that more
war in Afghanistan is the only viable political course. Will that undue
deference to the Obama administration continue, despite the growing
evidence of disaster and the sinking poll numbers for the war?

A cautionary note for those who assume that the impacts of
public opinion will put a brake on the accelerating U.S. war in
Afghanistan: That assumption is based on a misunderstanding of how the
USA's warfare state really functions.

Under the headline "Someone Tell the President the War Is
Over," the New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote: "A president
can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies)
won't stay with him." That was way back in August 2005.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14rich.html

(The next day, I wrote a piece headlined "Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over.")
https://www.commondreams.org/views05/0815-24.htm

The war on Vietnam persisted for several horrific years after
the polls were showing that most Americans disapproved. The momentum of
a large-scale and protracted U.S. war of military occupation is massive
and cataclysmic after the engine has really been gunned.

That's one of the most chilling parallels between the wars in
Vietnam and Afghanistan. The news media are part of the deadly process.
So are the politicians who remain hitched to some expedient calculus.
And so are we, to the extent that we go along with the conventional
wisdom of the warfare state.