Diehl’s Deal: The Post’s Wannabe Broder

By Ken Silverstein

Speaking recently on the House floor, Congressman David Obey of Wisconsin said that the Washington Post editorial page had “helped drive the drumbeat that drove almost two-thirds of the people in this chamber to vote for that misbegotten, stupid, ill-advised war that has destroyed our influence over a third of the world.” That’s a generous description of the Post’s role. The newspaper’s pre-war editorials labeled as “irrefutable” the Bush Administration’s charges that Saddam Hussein possessed stocks of WMD and described regime change in Iraq as “essential to American security.”

And no matter how hideously wrong events turn in post-invasion Iraq, the Post is always prepared with an editorial calling for a stay-the-course approach or, echoing the administration, denouncing critics of the war as unpatriotic turncoats. Last month, it called the House plan to withdraw troops from Iraq by next August “an unconditional retreat.” (It was this editorial that prompted Obey’s remarks.)

Fred Hiatt directs the Post’s editorial page and is commonly blamed for its right-wing tilt on Iraq (and other matters), but a recent story in the Washington City Paper identified Jackson Diehl as even more important in shaping the paper’s positions. The story calls Diehl, a Yale-educated columnist and the editorial page’s deputy editor, “the panel’s specialist on foreign policy” and cites a memo from retiring columnist Colbert King that says Diehl’s “dogmatic” views have intimidated those with less hawkish opinions.

I went back and examined Diehl’s columns on Iraq and, as expected, the Post’s resident foreign affairs guru has been wrong on just about every key issue surrounding the Iraq war. Make an inventory of every cliché ever uttered about Iraq by war advocates, every hysterical charge of the global threat posed by Saddam Hussein—you’ll find them all in Diehl’s writings. You’ll also find that Diehl didn’t seem to consider that serious problems might arise in the aftermath of an invasion. When they did, he didn’t acknowledge that his own analysis might have been flawed, but instead blamed poor execution by the Bush Administration for everything he failed to foresee. Apparently, if Diehl had been deputized to run the war things would have turned out differently.

Consider a Diehl column from December 2, 2002, just a few months prior to the invasion that Diehl viewed as essential. There were the obligatory comparisons between Iraq and Nazi Germany (“Saddam Hussein today commands one of the world's most brutal apparatuses of repression, one that is demonstrably guilty of some of the most significant war crimes since World War II”), the disparagement of U.N. inspectors as bumbling incompetents (“some even wonder if Iraq's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons will turn out to be as large and threatening as the White House suggests—assuming, that is, that Hans Blix's inspectors manage to find it”) and the faithful repetition of numerous other administration talking points (a war had “the potential to catalyze a long-overdue liberalization of the Middle East”). Diehl’s main point, though, was that it didn’t really matter whether Iraq had WMDs or ties to Al Qaeda; Saddam was an evil dictator and that alone made war—and only war—a moral imperative.

Later that month, Diehl wrote a column called “The Accidental Imperialist,” which argued that Bush hadn’t been predisposed towards war with Iraq, as many argued at the time and as now is manifestly apparent, but that war had been forced upon him. “[T]here is another way of looking at the history of the last two years: not as a tale of an arrogant cowboy stirring up the world's rattlesnakes, but of an initially cautious, uncertain and quasi-isolationist president reacting to the crystallization of a new global era,” Diehl wrote. “Then a new era came knocking, and not just in the form of hijacked airliners. As sanctions on Iraq crumbled, it became more and more obvious that Saddam Hussein had not been contained: He had developed new weapons—drone aircraft and longer-range missiles—and was aggressively hunting for nuclear materials.”

Diehl cited the “long, eloquent, and revealing” comments made by an unnamed Bush Administration official who had visited the Post. The official had said that the United States was “the only state capable of dealing” with the threats of terrorism and WMDs, “just like it was America standing between Nazi Germany and a takeover of all of Europe.” (Note to unnamed official and Jackson Diehl: I have a vague recollection that there were others standing between the Nazis and control of Europe, most notably England and Russia.) Of course, Diehl used this to again raise the specter of Saddam as Hitler, warning that during the pre-World War II period “Americans were slow to understand the threat, and reluctant to take it on—until inaction seemed the worst choice.”

Diehl repeatedly expressed the view that the war might jumpstart a flowering of democracy in the Middle East. The evidence: a number of Arab leaders and officials had told him so. These included Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa Thani of Qatar (whose country hosted “the Saddam-symp journalists of al-Jazeera”), Adel Jubeir (“the suave counsel” and “silver-tongued adviser” to then-Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia), and King Abdullah of Jordan (who was “moving steadily ahead” in his determination to bring democracy to Jordan).

But my favorite Diehl column was from January 5, 2004 (“Foresight was 20/20”), in which he criticized the Bush Administration for claiming “there was no way of knowing in advance what challenges might come up [in Iraq] and what it might take to meet them.” At that very moment Diehl had piled upon his desk “more than a dozen studies and pieces of congressional testimony on the likely conditions of postwar Iraq,” and there had been a remarkable degree of consensus among the authors of those works: “Iraq's reconstruction would be long and costly, violence was likely and goodwill toward the United States probably wouldn't last for long.”

All the problems that the U.S. was now facing in Iraq had been clearly and accurately predicted, from the Sunni insurgency to the need for a larger occupation force. Diehl seemed to be implying that anyone with the least bit of foresight could have known that there were going to be serious problems. But what about Diehl himself? His columns (and the Post’s editorial pages) exhibited little of the skepticism contained in the studies he was now touting, so either he didn’t bother to read them at the time or he simply dismissed them as the mad ranting of Saddam-symps.

One Post staffer with whom I spoke about Diehl damned him as a “young David Broder.” “He’s relentless in pursuit of the conventional wisdom,” said the staffer. “He’s about 50 but he writes and thinks like an old man.”