Stuck in the last war

Jim Geraghty chronicles the state of the MSM reportage on who exactly it was that bombed the Saudi oil facilities several months ago.  The early reporting included hostile suspicion of all Trump administration attempts to pin the responsibility on Iran.  That went on for several months, until a magically quiet revolution reversed the story without any acknowledgement that the early reports were flat wrong.

Yesterday, Reuters: “Yemen’s Houthi group did not launch an attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities in September, according to a confidential report by U.N. sanctions monitors seen by Reuters on Wednesday, bolstering a U.S. accusation that Iran was responsible.”

Also yesterday, a New York Times article declared: “with tensions between the United States and Iran at the highest level in four decades, the unexpected success of the September strike on the Saudi oil facilities is a stark reminder that Tehran has an array of stealthier weapons in its arsenal that could pose far greater threats if the hostilities escalate.”

Somewhere along the line, the American national news media either decided or realized that Secretary Pompeo and the U.S. government were not lying, were not making this up, and were not using shoddy intelligence to hype a threat from an authoritarian Middle Eastern regime. The declaration that Iran was responsible stopped being controversial, disputed, or unproven. It just became a fact, one that can be cited in an article about how dangerous the current moment is and the high risks of the president’s actions.

This is all leftover guilt about the Iraq War, isn’t it? So many of the people in foreign affairs journalism imbibed the “Bush lied us into war” rhetoric so deeply that they’ve concluded that American officials must be treated with way more skepticism than officials in secretive and serially dishonest authoritarian regimes. They say generals are always fighting the last war; apparently journalists are always covering the last one, too.