In 2009, I got a call from Eric Garris, founder and editor of Antiwar.com. Would I consider writing a column for the website? As a reporter who covered politics for Fox News, hardly a bastion of skepticism during the second Bush administration, I gratefully agreed. My first of some 350 articles for the next five years talked about how the fad of counterinsurgency had taken over Washington, making mindless disciples of everyone in the national security state and slobbering media.
The columns I wrote for Antiwar echo like dark relics from wars most Americans have left far behind: birth defects in Fallujah, “bacha bazi boys” in Afghanistan, the flying Kagans everywhere, and those shiny COINdinistas in Washington, D.C.
These stories may be hard to find at first, given that Google search has reduced browsing to a bulletin board of approved news sources on any given subject, and war is especially proscribed. As such, the history of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror is at risk of becoming a largely sanitized cautionary tale: the government exploited our fears of 9/11, lied, overreached, blew up the world, and we lost. Of course, all of that is true, but none of the texture, the daily failures and follies, the people who made it happen and how, the media handmaidens and the martyrs of the trade, the atrocities and war crimes — they make up that tapestry, and without it all true understanding is lost.
But it is all there if you know how to look for it— three decades worth — thanks to Antiwar.com. I am proud to have been part of that during the most desperate years for the War Party, which was resolved to keep U.S. forces rotating into combat, the money flowing, and the American people on board. With daily dispatches and searing criticism, and under the guidance of Garris and co-founder Justin Raimondo, Antiwar played a critical role in giving readers the tools they needed to explore their skepticism, ask questions. Not soon enough, the mainstream media could not ignore what tenacious news gatherers and analysts had reported all along — that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable and the “Surge” in Iraq was just a convenient way to get the U.S. out with face, damming the millions of Iraqis left suffering behind.
In those days, the mainstream press operated in the shadow of a furious establishment Borg. With few exceptions, they deferred and sucked up to, genuflected, and jock-sniffed their way into the good graces of the military and the imperial court. In many ways, they had no choice — the embed program (reporters sanctioned to cover the war inside Iraq and Afghanistan) was designed for obedient media only, guaranteeing coverage largely aligned with the mission. Only now are we getting the full scope of what our military did in Afghanistan and Iraq, nearly 25 years later.
Not surprisingly, when freelance reporter Michael Hastings transgressed this code of the courtier, the peacocks of the Washington news establishment unleashed a professional righteous anger on him that should have been reserved, but wasn’t, for the crimes of the U.S. government, like say, Abu Ghraib.
But Hastings had committed one of the highest sins among the elite corps, he did not protect his sources from themselves. He traveled through Europe and Afghanistan in 2010 for several weeks with the commander of U.S. forces, General Stanley McChrystal, and his hard-charging special operations staff who had cheekily taken to calling themselves “Team America.” They took Hastings into their confidence, drank hard, bragged, boasted, and inadvertently exposed to him the lie of the just and “winning” war that the American people had sent their sons and daughters to fight.
McChrystal was fired after his nasty comments about Obama and Vice President Obama were reported in a profile Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone on June 8, 2010. But the real dark stuff was reserved for his book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, which was published in 2012.
As I wrote in my Antiwar review of The Operators:
For their part, the men surrounding the general should have been more with it. Getting “totally shitfaced” in front of a Rolling Stone reporter — one who is clearly staying sober throughout all of it, with his trusty notebook and tape recorder always at hand — turned out to be deadly for their careers. If this were a MTV “Behind the Music” documentary, Paris would have been the dramatic turning point in the demise of the band.
And McChrystal, was he so dizzy up there on Mount Olympus that he couldn’t see the folly in saying things like “bite me” in reference to Vice President Joe Biden, or in calling the war in Afghanistan “very questionable” in the presence of a reporter whose magazine all but demands by reputation that he come back with something edgy and subversive?
These answers may never really be known. Even Hastings questioned it. “I’d seen another side of (McChrystal’s) personality. I didn’t quite know why they had shown it to me,” he wrote, noting that, after covering the war since 2005, he had never heard such high-ranking officers badmouth such high-ranking civilians before — at least in front of journalists. “The wars had been going on for nearly ten years, and it had clearly taken its toll… McChrystal appeared to present a new kind of military elite, a member of the warrior class that had lost touch with the civilian world.”
“Or maybe the side I had been shown was there all along, and no one else had decided to write about it,” he surmised.
McChrystal’s firing exposed how screwed up the wartime Fourth Estate’s priorities had become. Where were the Neil Sheehans and David Halberstams, who as reporters in Saigon in the early 1960s went after government officials hammer and tongs when they thought they were being lied to in the lead-up to the Vietnam War? They would have rushed to Hastings, called him one of their own, and defended him.
Instead, you had two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Burns exclaiming in an interview shortly after McChrystal was fired, “I think it’s very unfortunate that it has impacted, and will impact so adversely, on what had been pretty good military/media relations.”
Lara Logan, who was then with CBS and pumping up the soldiers and contractors she traveled with so hard I called her the military’s “secret weapon”, told CNN derisively: “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way Gen. McChrystal has.”
Hastings knew their number.
“Famous journalists would say they heard these kinds of things all the time, but never reported them… it didn’t seem to make a difference that I hadn’t violated any agreement with McChrystal. The unwritten rule I’d broken was a simple one: You really weren’t supposed to write honestly about people in power.”
Therein lies the reason the war went on for 20 years in a nutshell. I recall this because I got a chance to exchange a few emails during this time with Hastings before he was killed in a fiery car crash at the age of 33, just a year after his book was published. He was thankful for the Antiwar review and for coming to his defense against the jackals (many of whom I suspect were more than a titch jealous).
A canary in the coal mine, Hastings would not live to read how hundreds of government officials secretly told the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) that they knew the war was a farce from the start. Their testimonies would be the subject of a FOIA request and later the 2019 “Afghanistan Papers” by Craig Whitlock, who would win awards for his reporting, and lead to a movie, BodyGuard of Lies. Hastings would never see the amazing reporting by infantry veteran Seth Harp, who traced an unaccountable, violent, criminal ecosystem roiling the special forces world at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, back to McCrystal’s JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) in the war.
No one in the media says the war was worth it now because reporters like Hastings made it alright to say so. Antiwar made it alright to question and deny the military and the U.S. government our unconditional trust in their self-serving narratives. They didn’t win awards, but they deserve them.
Maybe medals too. Certainly for bravery under fire: Antiwar was once under an FBI investigation, suspected of being a potential “threat to national security” during the early days of the Patriot Act. I wrote about that too. More recently, Antiwar was pulled into the dragnet of “disinformation” crackdowns and smear campaigns amid the Democrats’ Russiagate hysteria.
My greatest thrill is watching the continuity of energy and bravery at Antiwar under the younger editors — Dave DeCamp and Kyle Anzalone — and the meteoric success of Scott Horton, who replaced Justin’s role as editorial director when he passed away from cancer in 2019. Unfortunately, the War Party has not learned from its hubris and mistakes, has absolutely no humility, and is on a continuing death march, dragging the nation with it.
Fortunately, Antiwar has only flourished, and the memory of Hastings and other brilliant canaries can serve, not as dark echoes, but as inspiring lights leading a new generation of dedicated readers and fans.
Congratulations on your 30th!
