I went back and read war coverage for much of the month of June and found many stories that conveyed the complexity and chaos of today’s Iraq. Times reporters wrote that Iraq’s political leaders were failing to meet benchmarks that would show satisfactory progress to the American government, that a formerly peaceful Shiite city in southern Iraq was convulsed by violence as rival groups fought for control, and that Sunnis feared their own country’s army because it is dominated by Shiites.
But those references to Al Qaeda began creeping in with greater frequency. Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said she takes “great pride in the whole of our coverage” but acknowledged that the paper had used “excessive shorthand” when referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “We’ve been sloppy,” she said. She and other editors started worrying about it, Chira said, when the American military began an operation in mid-June against what it said were strongholds of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
This is extremely disturbing. Given the readiness with which the Times and other media outlets parroted administration claims in the run-up to the war, it’s almost inconceivable that they would make similar mistakes at this critical juncture. And yet that’s exactly what they’re doing. Keep in mind that for the Bush administration, nothing is more important than annexing Iraq as part of the “war on terror” – that is, the war that was kicked off by the 9/11 attacks. The administration’s initial attempt to do so was a spectacular success, of course, thanks in large part to the Times et al.
Things are different now. Public satisfaction with the war has bottomed out and the administration, which once enjoyed lockstep support from the GOP, is facing the prospect of increasing defections from within the party. Bush and Dick Cheney certainly appear, for whatever reason, to want the war to go on as long as possible, and their best hope for achieving this lies in a rhetorical gambit: further blurring the line between Al Qaeda fighters and the miles-long list of other homegrown and foreign (but mostly homegrown) militant groups in Iraq. The administration has gotten an assist from the media’s chronic inability to explain that the terrorist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is not the same as Al Qaeda, but is in fact, as Hoyt puts it, a “group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.”
So it makes little sense for the media to be so frequently using terms like “Al Qaeda fighters” or “Al Qaeda-affiliated” to describe the groups fighting in Iraq. We know, as Hoyt says, that “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there.” We also know that the administration is desperately trying to once again tie Iraq to Al Qaeda. Yet we’ve seen hardly any critical reporting (with a few exceptions, such this article from the frequently excellent McClatchy Newspapers) asking why, in a country with so many warring factions, most of them homegrown, we keep hearing the emotionally charged name “Al Qaeda.”