Sometime in the spring of 2007, something strange happened to the Iraqi coverage in the national media — it disappeared. Or rather, as soon as the news ceased to be bad, the media lost interest in covering it. It was not till July, when Michael O’Hanlon reported back from the front that the surge had been working, that the world started to realize what happened. To them, the fact that George W. Bush had succeeded in something was what the press couldn’t bear to believe.
Something of the sort is happening now in reverse regarding the current Middle East crises, which make Iraq in 2006 seem calm in comparison. This time the press, which can no longer deny that the world has been going to hell since Barack Obama started unleashing his peacemaking powers, is doing its best to insulate him completely from any possible blame for it all. Where Bush was asked every day if he regretted invading Iraq, Obama is never asked if he thinks leaving Iraq had something to do with the chaos engulfing the region, or the vulnerability of citizens here and in Europe to Islamic State-inspired attacks.
And while Bush was held responsible for every last casualty that occurred anywhere while he held office, Obama is absolved from responsibility for the massacres, rapes and enslavement of innocents that have followed his numerous foreign policy blunders — given a pass as the victim of forces he did not enable and disasters he didn’t create.
“Be very glad we don’t have a Republican president,” Walter Russell Mead told us in May of last year, warning that if such were so we would be enduring a “merciless media pounding” on the series of “failures, mistakes, and false starts” that have been our lot since Obama took office. Instead, we have a Democrat who is allowed by the press to fail quietly, discreetly, and off center stage. Thus, into a second year of beheadings and horror, we see headlines like “Attacks Don’t Shake President’s Faith in Patient Strategy” (Washington Post); “Speech Was a Plea for Patience and National Unity” (New York Times); and “Obama Addresses a Shifting Landscape,” (Washington Post), suggesting support for a put-upon leader facing conditions he never expected to meet.
“His decision to speak on the terrorist threat … days after the deadly attack in San Bernardino…reflects a broad concern in the White House that Americans … distracted by the overheated cacophony of the campaign season, are not listening to him,” wrote Greg Jaffe, as if that were the problem. “A Rational President in the Age of Anxiety” ran a column by David Ignatius, ignoring the fact that the anxiety was the result of the irrational acts on the part of the president. Was it rational to withdraw from Iraq, against the warnings of all of his generals? Rational to lay down red lines, which were always crossed over? Rational to diss Israel and our Arab allies, while handing the store to Iran?
When Bush ducked a shoe thrown at him by an Iraqi during a press conference in 2008, Eleanor Clift said that he might have deserved it for what he had done to that country by starting the war. By those standards, by letting the war start again after Bush ended it, what Obama deserves from Iraq (and from most of the rest of that suffering region) is a volley of combat boots. But none will be flung by the press of his country, in whose eyes he can do nothing wrong.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
