As a United States senator, Hillary Clinton argued passionately in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq — but it’s not the current Democratic presidential candidate who’s now being held to account by media.
Rather, media figures, including Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, seem eager to make former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, whose reporting on Iraq was cited regularly by lawmakers in the months preceding the invasion, answer for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In 2005, after questions were raised about the accuracy of her reporting and after she had already spent 85 days in jail for refusing to disclose sources to a leak investigation, Miller resigned from the Times. Criticism of her reporting, and the suggestion she played an enormous role in the Iraq Invasion, followed Miller along the way.
Miller, who has continued to work as a columnist, commentator and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, emerged in April to defend her reporting, penning a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths.”
“Officials [of the Bush administration] didn’t lie, and I wasn’t fed a line,” Miller wrote. “There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong.”
She maintained that she is not responsible for the invasion, adding sarcastically, “I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.”
Critics who had not given much recent attention to Miller took notice, lining up to savage her op-ed.
In April, when Miller released a memoir titled The Story: A Reporter’s Journey, which focused on her reporting experiences during the Second Gulf War, she was again met with fierce criticism from media.
Los Angeles Times reporter Terry McDermott referred to her book as “sad and flawed.”
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple suggested in a report that the book’s defiant tone made it feel both “depressing and desperate.”
Miller’s book release included several television interviews, most of which have involved the same harsh criticism for her reporting and the accompanying suggestion that she bears some responsibility for leading the county into an armed conflict that killed more than 100,000 Iraqis and 5,000 Americans, leaving behind a seemingly permanent state of instability in which Iran’s influence has greatly increased and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has turned into a regional player.
Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart said in an interview with Miller, “I believe that you helped the administration take us to, like, the most devastating mistake in foreign policy that we’ve made in, like, 100 years … but you seem lovely.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked her in a separate interview, “You don’t feel like you played some role in bringing that about? … You genuinely don’t think that?”
In each instance, Miller rejected the suggestion she is responsible for the invasion.
Miller is not without defenders. USA Today’s Kirsten Powers suggested this week that the years-long focus on the former Times reporter is laughable considering that those who legally took the country to war are not met with the same pressure.
“Yes we are supposed to believe [Judith Miller] had more power than [Hillary Clinton] or other Dems who voted for war,” Powers said on Twitter. “When will Democrats take responsibility for voting for Iraq War and stop blaming Judith Miller? It’s pathetic to watch.”
Since announcing her candidacy for president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, who said in a 2002 senate speech that she was “attuned” to the “risk of not acting” on Iraq because she and the Empire State had “gone through the fires of hell,” has yet to face the kind of questions posed to Miller.
