AMY GOODMAN: You have, number one, the day before the invasion, Bill O’Reilly said, “If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?”
GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, that didn’t quite happen. He did have a brief period when there were all those polls came out that showed that the Iraqis, the majority of Iraqis, were in favor of shooting at Americans, and that kind of threw him off his game for about a week, and he said, “Well, if they don’t want us there, let’s get out.” But then he—you know, he kind of settled down.
AMY GOODMAN: After the fall of Baghdad, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declares, “We’re all neocons now.”
GREG MITCHELL: Well, he’s—you know, I think Chris likes to think of himself as being antiwar now, but he was a cheerleader as much as anyone back then, and that might surprise a few people.
AMY GOODMAN: But there was someone else at MSNBC: Phil Donahue.
GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, yeah, Phil was really their star before the war. And he actually took the radical position of occasionally having antiwar people on, maybe even yourself, occasionally. And because of that, he was accused of being insufficiently patriotic, and so he was, shortly thereafter, was let go at the network, even though his ratings were higher than anyone else.
AMY GOODMAN: Right before the invasion, he’s fired and that secret NBC memo comes out—
GREG MITCHELL: Right, right.
AMY GOODMAN: —that says we can’t have our flagship show having these antiwar voices—
GREG MITCHELL: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: —when other networks are waving the American flag. Then you have, the same day as the fall of Baghdad, Joe Scarborough, also on MSNBC, saying, “I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians, and Hollywood types."
GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, I mean, Joe is someone else, again, today, who thinks of himself as being critical of the war and how it was conducted and so forth, but it really is—I think one of the values of the book is that it really does allow you to go back and relive these—it may not be a happy experience, but it really lets you relive the experience as it happened. You know, it’s not just a looking back, and I’m looking back today and saying, you know, it was really screwed up, and here’s how people messed up. It really is chronicles as it happened. So you get a much better sense of how—what was being said at the time and the failures at the time.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/24/so_wrong_for_so_long_greg
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