Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

Much like the “debate” that took place in this country before we went to war in Iraq, the current discussion of when and how to get out is being framed by the very people — politicians, government officials, and military brass — who have everything to gain by keeping the debate narrow and the terms black and white and spinnable. The mainstream media, as they did before the war began, are facilitating this oversimplification by letting official sources on all sides of the issue dominate the daily news. As a result, the frame that most people have for thinking about what America does next in Iraq is simply to stay or go, while the question of military disengagement demands deeper thinking.

Beneath the various assertions about exit plans — from President Bush’s notion of leaving once “victory” has been achieved to Senator John McCain’s plea for more troops to Representative John Murtha’s call for a speedy pullout — there is a range of assumptions and questions that desperately need to be tested and explored, their nuances and vagaries clarified. What is the nature of Iraqis’ tribal loyalties, and will they — much as religious differences did in the former Yugoslavia — make a unified Iraq impossible? If some form of democracy is possible, what are the best ideas for how to phase it in, and what case studies elsewhere in the world — East Asia, for example, or South Africa — offer the most useful lessons? How does the presence of oil help and hinder economic development? Perhaps most importantly, what is the range of realistic outcomes in Iraq, short of the delusional notion of a Western-style, free-market democracy, that the American people should be prepared to accept?

Much of the information and expertise necessary to tease out these and other questions will not be found anywhere near the White House, or Congress for that matter. It resides in places where too few journalists are habituated to look: in the military- and security-related research institutes housed at universities, in think tanks, and within the military itself.

Consider a single example: the report published last October by the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College, entitled “Precedents, Variables, and Options in Planning a U.S. Military Disengagement Strategy from Iraq.” The title is clunky, but the sixty-seven-page report is a detailed and sobering exploration of everything from the question of how to achieve political stability in Iraq to the plausible ways to define victory there. The authors explain the historically problematic process of carrying out an exit strategy following military intervention, the dismal record of international attempts to impose democracy, and the difficulty of measuring the political legitimacy of a new government. They conclude that while it remains possible for the U.S. to devise an exit strategy that leaves both the U.S. and Iraq better off than before the invasion, “remarkably little room exists for error, ideological dogmatism, or ignorance about the nature of the multiple problems associated with such an undertaking.”

It is a rich trove to mine for story ideas, yet we have found no references to the report in the mainstream press, lending even more resonance to the charge, made in its foreword, that the issue of an exit strategy “has been oversimplified in many of the current media debates. Often, political commentators of various stripes reduce complex arguments and multidimensional planning problems to simple slogans suggesting that victory is either inevitable or impossible.”

After nearly three years of happy talk about Iraq, the Bush administration can’t be trusted to present the complicated truth, and Congress can’t be trusted to make sure that it does. By drilling beneath the rhetoric on Iraq, journalism has a chance to deliver a true public service.

To read the articles in the January/February 2006 issue, click here.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.