It’s naive to suppose that the most informative newspapers are those which tell you the facts most reliably. Sometimes the newspapers that bring most news are full of lies; but if these are the lies which the powerful believe, or which they want you to believe, then this is much more interesting – more newsworthy, in fact – than the plain and obvious truth.
Something of the sort was true in the summer of 2002, when the disastrous invasion of Iraq was being prepared. The stolid respectable left-wing papers, like the Guardian and the Independent, gave their readers all the reasons why this was a really stupid idea and might never happen. Even the Daily Mail was opposed to the war, and wrote about it as if there were still real discussion about what should be done – a discussion in which we, the ordinary people of Britain, could make a difference. Only the Daily Telegraph told us, week after week, that there would be a war. Of course, it was wrong about some of the details: it thought, for example, that we would win. But it was only by ignoring the details that it was able to keep clearly in mind the main thing: that Bush invade Iraq and Tony Blair would help him.
Where can we go today for a similarly accurate prophecy? The Telegraph is no use: though there are still a couple of true believers, like Sir John Keegan (who is not a hack) and Con Coughlin, the leader writers have washed the hands of the war as thoroughly as they have forgotten Conrad Black.
No, at a moment like this, the only truly reliable guide to the future, unshackled by facts or fear of ridicule, is found on the web, where Melanie Phillips publishes the rants that the Daily Mail won’t touch. Only there in the British media will you find the world described the way that George W Bush would like it to be – and that, remember, is the world in which he makes his decisions.
You may think that her latest call for war with Iran – a war which is likely to entail the first use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima – is the product of someone quite literally deranged. She believes, for instance, that Iran is behind both sides in the Iraqi civil war, and that – rather, than, say, the countries which invaded in the spring of 2003 – is the "principal instigator" of the war there. That, in fact, is a point she regards as "blindingly obvious".
Yet she’s not mad. If you grant her premises, everything else follows logically, and I fear – I am very much afraid – that her premises are also those of the men shaping American policy.
The first is that America is powerful enough, in the last resort, to impose its will on the entire Middle East, and only fails to do so because of a lack of determination. It follows that any impression of failure is caused by a lack of will, in other words by carping liberals. Can anyone seriously doubt that this is what many Americans, along with their president, want to be true, and so prefer to believe? When he said, as he did today, that ” I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude and I believe most Iraqis express that.” he must wish he were telling the truth, and he is the kind of leader in whom the wish is father to the deed.
Anyone who disagrees with this must — to Melanie — be some kind of traitor: "Encouragingly, there are signs that Bush may have now accepted what has long been apparent – that he has been ill-served by his top brass in Iraq. The US commander–in-chief wants to win – but has realised that his generals merely want to manage a retreat."
But Melanie Phillips is more clear-sighted than most Americans, because with another half of her mind she also sees that a defeat in Iraq is quite possible, and will be catastrophic. She understands perfectly well that the generals and the intelligence community are trying to manage the forthcoming defeat, and that the report of the Iraq study group was an attempt to clothe this in a figleaf.
How, then, to reconcile the certainty of victory with the fact of a looming, inadmissible – impossible – defeat? The only answer is that we can’t have killed enough of the terrorists or their supporters. (Remember that, since America is Good, there cannot possibly be such a thing as a nationalist resistance to American occupation). So we need to kill more of the Evil Iraqis and more of their Evil helpers. Clearly, the real problem with the war so far, then, is that we haven’t killed enough Iranians. There is only one question about this analysis of the war. It is not whether you, gentle reader, find it credible. It is whether Mr Bush does, for he – as he says – is the decider.
As I type this, I remember what Dick Cheney said when asked very early on by Tim Garton Ash how the war on terror could possibly end: "With the elimination of all the terrorists."