In Praise of Michael Hastings: On the Lies and Obfuscations of the March to War in Iraq

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/20-0


Journalist and war correspondent Michael Hastings, who died last year in a car crash in California, in this undated publiclty photo. (Photo: Blue Rider Press / Penguin)

Having read his posthumously published novel, I’m sorry I never knew Michael Hastings. That said, I’m not sure I would have wanted to hang out with him. Hastings’s leisure-time pursuits, including the one that appears to have caused his untimely death last year, were a little reckless for my taste.

Nevertheless, anyone interested in the politics of journalism — the politics that led a cavalcade of mainstream journalists and liberal “intellectuals” to support George W. Bush’s mad invasion of Iraq — should read The Last Magazine, which was discovered by Hastings’s widow after he crashed his car and died, in Los Angeles, on June 18 of last year. I can’t stop being angry about the Iraq catastrophe, no matter how much I try to ignore it. It seems to follow me, though I’ve never set foot in the country and didn’t witness any of the ugliness and gore that informed this outraged, satirical, and pornographic express-train of a book.

On June 9, I was in a beautiful, very peaceful part of rural Vermont when I casually picked up the Sunday Boston Globe. The front page was quiet enough, but the Associated Press dispatch on page two made me wince — fifty-two people killed in car-bomb attacks in Baghdad and dozens of students taken hostage at Anbar University. Earlier in the day, the city of Mosul, as of this writing in the hands of Sunni rebels, had been the scene of fighting that killed twenty-one police officers and thirty-eight antigovernment militants.

Much of this unrelenting violence is the result of Sunni fury at the repressive Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki. But the match was lit by Bush and his neoconservative advisers, as well as by their “humanitarian” handmaidens in the media and academia, whose fantasy about a democratic, subservient Iraq continues to pile corpse upon corpse.