Assal Rad is a scholar of modern Middle Eastern history and a non-resident fellow at DAWN. She is the author of The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran.
It is often said that hindsight is 20/20, that we understand something better after it has already happened. That is certainly the case with the war in Iraq, which had support across the political spectrum in Washington and among the majority of Americans in the lead-up to the invasion, 22 years ago this month. Years later, the consensus is clear that the war was a significant U.S. blunder, launched based on fabrications and lies from George W. Bush's administration.
The American public also changed its mind in retrospect, as a majority came to see the invasion as a mistake. Still, there were many experts at the time who warned of the consequences of an unprovoked war and challenged the Bush administration's claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, which became its key, flawed reasoning behind the invasion. In 2002 and early 2003, the beating of war drums prompted protests across the globe that culminated in the largest anti-war rallies in history.
We now know, of course, that Iraq did not have WMDs, and that the Bush administration's other claims about Saddam Hussein that it used to justify an invasion were also not true. Yet as the invasion loomed, significant majorities of Americans believed the falsehoods presented by the Bush administration to justify its illegal war of choice. They accepted its claims that Saddam Hussein's government either already possessed WMD or was close to obtaining them. In a Pew Research Center survey in October 2002, 65 percent of respondents said Iraq was close to having nuclear weapons; another 14 percent believed Iraq already possessed them. Majorities of both Democrats and Republicans also believed the claim that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attackers.
What explains this discrepancy between what people believed and what was true?
As far as the media is concerned, it appears no lessons were learned from the catastrophic results of the Iraq war more than 20 years ago.
- Assal Rad
Much has been written about the role of the media in manufacturing consent for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After all, most of the public gets their information from the media, which shapes our thinking and understanding about global events, although the media landscape today is much more fractured than in 2003, when social media as we know it today barely even existed. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, there is no doubt that the failure of journalists to challenge the U.S. government's narrative and report the facts, instead of uncritically relaying Bush administration claims and talking points, was central to the American public's initial support for the war.
Yet there was no accountability for the Bush administration, which essentially got away with war crimes, or for the media outlets and institutions that helped them lie and sell the war to the American public. The lack of responsibility was so blatant that a year after the invasion, then-President Bush joked about finding no WMDs to an audience of journalists who roared with laughter, at a black-tie dinner in Washington for the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.
The consequences of this impunity played out in the vilest possible way over the past year and a half as the world witnessed the worst atrocities of this century carried out by Israel in Gaza, with the full backing of the United States. Despite the overwhelming evidence of genocide in Gaza, including a U.N. Special Committee report that found Israel's actions were consistent with genocide and reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch with the same conclusion, the Biden administration continued to arm and fund Israeli war crimes. The Trump administration has maintained the same policies of unconditional support for Israel, while in his first weeks back in the White House, President Donald Trump has called for the U.S. to "take over" Gaza and expel its entire Palestinian population.
As far as the media is concerned, it appears no lessons were learned from the catastrophic results of the Iraq war more than 20 years ago. Major Western media, such as The New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC and similar legacy outlets, have largely spent the past year whitewashing Israel's genocide in Gaza, uncritically repeating Israeli government claims and talking points about Gaza just as they did the Bush administration's about Iraq. Western media has long framed Israel-Palestine in a way that obscures or even justifies Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories and apartheid system. But the regular stream of massacres and horrors from Gaza over and over since October 2023—that the public has seen because of social media and Palestinian journalists on the ground—ignited global outcry this time.
As Israel commits atrocities in Gaza with U.S. weapons and tax dollars, it is time for Western journalists to rectify the mistakes of the past and report the truth.
- Assal Rad
Rather than challenging statements from the Israeli government and military, or the U.S. government which repeats without question whatever Israeli officials say, mainstream Western media has largely acted like stenographers of state-run media. In headline after headline, Western outlets have repeatedly failed to mention Israel at all when reporting death tolls from airstrikes in Gaza and Lebanon; used passive voice when attacks are actually attributed to Israel; cast doubt when Palestinians are killed; and dehumanized Palestinians with subtle differences in word choice used to describe Israelis.
In many cases, significant stories from Gaza are not reported or barely mentioned at all, and coverage is lacking to show the daily toll on Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza. The U.N.'s report concluding that Israel's actions were consistent with genocide received almost no coverage by Western outlets. In other cases, like the deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza—a clear war crime—the media does not attribute it to Israeli policies and actions.
I have spent over a year documenting the mainstream Western media's role in manufacturing consent for Israel's genocide in Gaza. What I hoped to accomplish was simply for people to think more critically about the headlines and reporting they see and to take note of how small edits in language can change the framing and how one understands the same story or issue.
The world has changed a great deal since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Social media, smartphones, independent journalism and citizen journalists in Gaza have shown Americans, and everyone around the world, what the U.S. government and media have tried to hide. As Israel commits atrocities in Gaza with U.S. weapons and tax dollars, it is time for Western journalists to rectify the mistakes of the past and report the truth.
