To answer my titular question, when it puts the United States Government, and specifically President Bush’s policy toward Iran, in an unfavorable light. Today the Sunday Times of London published a story about the potential resignation of at least 5 senior generals should President Bush order an attack on Iran. Yet, nary a word has been heard about this from our major American news outlets.
Just do a simple google search for generals resign Iran and this is what you find: no reports on this development in The New York Times, The Washington Post or at the online websites of CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN or Fox News. Literally nothing. Oh, there are stories about Iran all right, especially about how dangerous and aggressive its nuclear program has become, and of the US government’s plans to attack Iran, but no mention of any revolt by senior military officers at the Pentagon. You have to look overseas to find that story.
Which begs this further question: why did those generals and their confidants not leak this story to US reporters and media outlets? Did they not trust the US reporters and their editors to keep their identities secret? Or did they approach The New York Times or The Washington Post or AP or CNN or CBS, etc., only to find no one was interested in this story, or worse, that no one was willing to publish it?
Let’s be honest. Our military leaders don’t make a habit of taking their differences with Presidential authority to the news media. You have to reach back to the days of Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman to find a similar instance of policy disagreements being openly played out in the press. Only then, the American press was more than willing to openly publish the story of MacArthur’s rank rejection of Truman’s policies during the Korean War. And that was the last significant disagreement to be openly aired in public between a senior military leader and an American President that I can recall.
Most of our generals and admirals simply salute and keep their mouths shut, even if they disagree with the orders they receive. I can’t think of a single senior officer who threatened to resign over the decisions made by LBJ or Nixon during the Vietnam war, though I am certain they many of them may have secretly disagreed and regretted the tasks they were ordered to carry out. Our military culture is such that instances of the public disavowal of a President’s wartime policies are few and far between.
Which means this is an extremely significant event in our history. We are not living in normal times when senior military leaders feel the necessity to threaten mass resignations in advance of any Presidential order to attack Iran. This should be the biggest story on television news. It should be the front paged on every major metropolitan newspaper. Indeed, this story should have been broken by American journalists, not by a London paper, no matter how distinguished.
But it was not. I have to wonder why. And the answers for that failure on the part of American print and broadcast news media that suggest themselves to me are even more frightening than the fact that some of our senior most military officers have taken their objection to the Bush administration’s war plans public in the pages of a foreign newspaper.
In the United Kingdom today people are reading about a serious divide between America’s civilian and military leaders regarding President Bush’s war policy, one that could have serious consequences for the future of our nation. In America? Our newspapers and our television news shows remain silent on this topic. Or silenced. And that is the most disturbing thought I have had regarding our “freedoms” in a very long time.