Imagine, for a moment, that U.S. troops invading Iraq had, as they neared Baghdad, been fired on by an artillery unit using shells filled VX nerve gas — an attack that would have lasted minutes before a U.S. aircrew had taken out the battery, and may have brought a horrible death to a handful of American soldiers. Imagine, further, that the conquering troops had later discovered two warehouses full of VX and mustard gas shells. And later, that inspectors in a science lab had discovered a refrigerator full of Botulinum toxin or even anthrax.

The Administration and its allies in the punditocracy would have “proved” their case for war, and the media would have hailed President Bush as the kind of Churchillian visionary that he imagines himself to be. And goodness knows what new adventures the Pentagon ideologues would have immediately begun planning.

Now, ask yourself, had the above scenario unfolded and the “case for war” (on the terms accepted by the media and the Democrats) been proven, would Iraq look any different today? Would it be any less of a bloodbath; any less of a quagmire for U.S. troops; any less of a geopolitical disaster; any less of a drain on U.S. blood and treasure? Would the U.S. mainland or U.S. interests and allies worldwide be any safer today? In short, would the Iraq invasion seem any less of a catastrophic strategic blunder had the U.S. discovered some caches of unconventional weapons in Iraq?

The answer to all of those questions is obviously no.

And it’s from that point that we must begin our discussion on Iran, and the media’s role in preparing the American public for another disastrous war of choice. The “necessity” in the American public mind to go to war in Iraq was established through the mass media — a failure for which there has been precious little accounting. But that failure runs far deeper than is typically acknowledged even by critics: It was not simply a case of the media failing to properly and critically interrogate the spurious claims by the Administration of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction capability. Sure, even the likes of France and Germany suspected that Saddam may, in fact, have still had a few piles of chemical munitions left over from the Iran-Iraq war. The point, however, is that they did not see these as justifying a war. They recognized from the outset that invading Iraq would cause more problems than it would solve.

The more important failure of the U.S. media, then, is its failure to question the basic proposition that if Iraq had, indeed, had unconventional weapons, then an invasion and occupation of that country was a wise and prudent course of action.

Of course many of the decision-makers in the U.S. media in the wake of 9/11 were scared and confused, and looking for John Wayne-style authority figures for comfort — read back now and you’ll find some astounding toadying up to the self-styled tough guys of the Administration: Bill Keller’s wet-kiss profile of Paul Wolfowitz in the New York Times suggested to me a man playing out Robert Mitchum’s epiphany in The Green Berets, the jaded liberal recognizing the harsh truths of John Wayne’s approach to making the world safe for freedom. And Donald Rumsfeld’s loquacious buffoonery created a comforting sense of certainty among a liberal media intelligentsia suddenly desperate to embrace an imperial mythology, and in the case of the George Packers and Peter Beinarts, to render it profound as a narrative of global liberation. Others simply preferred to avoid anything that might have demagogues branding them “un-American,” for fear of losing ad dollars.

That may help explain the failure, but it does not excuse it.

The fact that carnival barkers like Kristol and Beinart continue to be touted as having opinions worth heeding on these matters is ample evidence that the media has either learned little, or else is more dedicated to a kind of edutainment vaudeville than in empowering the American people to make informed foreign policy choices.

Beinart, in a mawkish attempt to account for himself in the excellent Bill Moyers documentary Buying the War, offers up this little gem: “The argument in the fall of 2002 was not mostly about the facts, it was about a whole series of ideas about what would happen if we invaded.”

Exactly. The fact that Beinart and company were wrong on the facts was only part of the problem. More importantly, it was their ideas about the use of force and its consequences that proved so disastrously flawed. And most of the decision-makers in the mainstream media did not bother to challenge the basic proposition that if Saddam had certain categories of weapons, then an invasion was necessary and beneficial.

The very idea that there are certain categories of weapons that draw down a red mist over rational discussion of geopolitical options is an exceedingly dangerous one — that should be one of the key lessons drawn from Iraq. And that’s exactly what’s being cooked up over Iran, too.

The very same crew of neocons and liberal hawks and the Israeli political establishment and its allies in Washington, are goading America to attack Iran. They insist Iran is going hell for leather to acquire nuclear weapons, and allowing it to do so represents a mortal threat to the West, Arab moderates and Israel. And just when a convenient excuse was needed for the U.S. failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, wouldn’t you know it, it’s those darn Iranians “interfering”. Don’t even think about discussing, what, are you Neville Chamberlain or something? Don’t you know it’s 1938 all over again?

Of course, not all of it is as plain silly as the paragraph above.

(For the record:

First, there is no evidence that Iran is actually building a nuclear weapon; merely that it is building a civilian nuclear energy program with all elements of the fuel cycle permissible under the NPT that would, in fact, put nuclear weapons easily within reach should they opt to build them.

Second, even if Iran did possess nuclear weapons, the idea that it would use them to initiate a conflict in which Tehran would certainly be destroyed is based on tabloid-style alarmism about the nature of the regime in Tehran — in fact, Iran’s Islamic Republic has long proved to be guided more by unsentimental realpolitik than by revolutionary fervor in the pursuit of its national interests and regional influence.