Steve Coll Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 3 of 8
Before we talk about your book, one other question along this line. The press has been subjected, on many campuses, to a lot of criticism [for] its inability, especially in the foreign policy area, to identify the right problems, to not be beholden to the [presidential] administration, and so on. I wonder if you would comment on that, as somebody who was managing one of our [greatest], if not the greatest, paper that we have.
One of the most important things that newspapers can contribute to the accountability of our government and to public discourse is independent foreign correspondents, especially in the world we live in now. We maintain about twenty-five or thirty professional foreign correspondents around the world, and these people work on their own, independently, sometimes in difficult circumstances. They bring inconvenient facts to the table, literally to the breakfast table in Washington through the Post, and at other papers with similar audiences and resources, the same process occurs. Their work is crucial to this moment in American foreign policy and American national life. Holding government decision making to account in Washington, in the theater in which those decisions are being made, is also crucially important. Newspapers have to be determined to take the time and to push in directions that the crowd isn't going, and it's very difficult, both mechanically to dig out information from governments that are determined to keep it secret, but also culturally to be persistent in asking unpopular questions.
We have reporters who broke aspects of the Abu Ghraib story who persisted with reporting about, say, torture and abuse in Guantanamo and elsewhere, or the secret rendition programs of the Central Intelligence Agency. Every day they come to work and in their in-box are 350 hostile e-mails denouncing them, individually and in the most personal terms. It takes a certain personality and it takes a certain kind of support mechanism to come to work every day and just keep pushing, because you'd think that it's the right thing to be doing, to expose this information for public consumption and debate.
I would address a question you didn't ask but which may be certainly part of the criticism the press received, which is about the run-up to the Iraq war, where the press is generally criticized for failing to discover that Iraq didn't possess weapons of mass destruction or that the administration was exaggerating the claims that they were making about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
I honestly think that that criticism is misplaced, because first of all, we did publish a lot of information about the doubts that the UN inspectors and others had started to surface about the Iraqi WMD programs. But more significantly, the truth is (and I think any honest review of the record would confirm) that everybody believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Hans Blix believed that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, the French believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He had had them, he'd used them. The debate wasn't about whether he possessed them, the debate was about whether an invasion was the right way to address the threat that his possession posed. So to criticize newspapers standing outside of the resources of the participants for failing to expose the fraud just seems to me absurd.
That's not to absolve ourselves of our performance before the war. I think we did fail. I think we failed, though in a different area. To me, the work we could have done successfully before the war that might have helped to shape the debate to invade -- or certainly, at least, would have created a better record around the debate -- was about a subject that was easier for us to understand, report on, and describe, which was the history and character of Iraqi nationalism and the assumptions that seemed to accompany the plan for the invasion, that Iraq was like Romania, that once the police state was destroyed that Iraqis would peacefully, after a couple of weeks of perhaps a little bit of rioting here and there ...
Give flowers to American [troops]...
Yeah, flowers -- you know, that basically they would accept this occupation.
If you look at the foreign correspondence that was filed out of Iraq in the pages of the Post and in many other places before the invasion, there were lots of statements along the lines of, "We will resist this invasion, and we will persist in our resistance after the occupation is established." But everybody discounted that on the grounds of [their belief] that these were police state stooges, this is just propaganda, and so forth, in fact, they'll melt away. What was available to work on more than we did was to look into the history and the character of Iraqi nationalism and the Iraqi nation that was going to be left after the Ba'athist police state was destroyed, and to challenge some of the assumptions that drove postwar planning.
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