When I wrote for The Washington Post my boss was Michael Getler, who was in charge of the paper’s foreign coverage. He was a wizard at his job, and in his current position, as the Post’s ombudsman, he is, once more, a provocative master. In his column today, he chides the media for being too timid and not asking hard questions about the upcoming (it seems) war with Iraq: “Since 9/11, Bush has become a popular president and leader. But you could argue that because of 9/11, debate over national security issues has not been as intense as it should have been, that challenging the president was just too risky. Whatever was proper, there now seems, to me at least, a sense of unreality about this moment. A war is approaching that may go fast and well. But in this new environment, one doesn’t have a strong sense of whether the effect and aftermath will be the start of a better era or the beginning of something even worse. The burden of war will be borne by a tiny fraction of Americans who happen to be in the military or reserves. No sacrifice is asked of anyone else. A possibly more dangerous crisis has arisen in North Korea, yet the talk is of tax cuts. In another month or two, it will be too late for second thoughts, or for discovering things that the government should have thought about, the press should have asked about and the public should have been told about.”
