Frank Rich: Iraq Everlasting

At his absolute best.

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"When Michael Hastings was killed in a single-car crash in Los Angeles at age 33 last June, journalism lost a rare specimen of the breed it needs most: a reporter who doesn’t care whom he pisses off. Hastings was the hothead whose 2010 Rolling Stone article “The Runaway General” led to the dismissal of the Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal, for the infraction of trash-talking his civilian bosses. Hastings, too, was pilloried after the piece—by his own journalistic peers, in a manner that would prefigure some of the profession’s more recent hostility toward Glenn Greenwald. “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has,” said Lara Logan of CBS News.


The Atlantic’s James Fallows on Standing Up to Warmongering D.C.
Former New Republic Editor Peter Beinart on His Pro-War Stance
We now know that Hastings served both his country and profession with more honor than Logan, who later maimed her own career and 60 Minutes by perpetrating a Benghazi hoax. And his service isn’t done yet. After Hastings died, a former colleague at Newsweek, where he worked as an intern and war correspondent from 2002 to 2008, sent his widow, Elise Jordan, the draft of a novel he had finished just before his 2010 embed with McChrystal. Titled The Last Magazine, it is being published this month on the anniversary of his passing.

We’ll never know how Hastings might have revised this scrappy debut effort or whether it would have led to a career as a novelist. But as a provocative piece of thinly fictionalized nonfiction, it’s a posthumous mission accomplished. The Last Magazine—set at a fictional newsweekly called The Magazine that might as well go by Newsweek—tells the story of the run-up to the Iraq War from a perspective that many of his colleagues would like to forget or suppress: as an embed deep inside the so-called liberal media, much of which cheered on the war with a self-­righteous gravity second only to Dick Cheney’s. Hastings’s book is a message in a bottle that has belatedly washed up on shore to force us to remember how we landed where we are now."

More at:

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/iraq-war-2014-6/