Slow Burn: The Road to the Iraq War. Noreen Malone. Podcast Audio, 2021.
“At some point,” host Noreen Malone muses in episode four of Slate’s 2021 Slow Burn season on The Road to the Iraq War, “I started to think war in Iraq was like Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone did it.”[1] Telling the story of forever wars requires a long cast list. It is a lot of story—maybe even a forever story—not only because it must communicate an overwhelming amount of information about an event that has not yet ended, but also because it is the story about ourselves that Americans must compulsively return to, retelling it again and again in an effort to make sense of the imbroglio that has defined the United States for the last twenty years. The podcast, a form of narration born in 2004, just one year after the initial burst of American post-9/11 fervour fuelled the invasion of Iraq, is a fitting form to hold the complex, myriad details of the decisions leading to the Iraq War. As with forever war, a podcast is an unwieldy beast, an aural deluge of information that if poorly managed threatens to overwhelm. It is of its time, a serial literary form that encapsulates post-9/11 life in a particularly post-9/11 narrative style.
In fact, the podcast form denies closure as much as the war itself does. Its episodic segments create meaning by selecting, spotlighting, and ordering particular subplots and their myriad characters, prodding listeners to acknowledge both the multiplicity of connections and the informational gaps across the segmented narrative while refusing to wrap it all up with a tidy ending. Podcast journalism is unabashed narrative journalism. It seamlessly blends the art of storytelling with the communication of facts. And particularly since 2014’s wildly popular Serial, the podcast has become a narrative about how we make narratives rather than about how narratives resolve. Or perhaps I should say the American podcast has become a narrative about how we make narratives. A distinctly American podcasting style has emerged that foregrounds the spoon-feeding of complex information and deliberately cultivates listeners’ feelings of intimacy via anecdote and personal experiences, delivered in a relaxed and even chatty manner. This style works. Research indicates that roughly 25% of Americans, or approximately 68 million people, listened to weekly podcasts in 2020, and the American-style podcast is asserting marked global influence in contrast to the European style’s immersive soundscape, which is considered the more artistic but also the more difficult of the two continents’ podcasting narrative forms.[2]
The Road to the Iraq War crafts a particularly American narrative about American identity in direct relation to the post-9/11 narratives Americans told themselves about who we were in the leadup to Iraq. And, while it organizes a collection of new interviews and archival tape into neatly marshalled facts, it also leans into narrative as a form of storytelling. The story of recent history is in fact Slow Burn’s brand; the podcast series is “built on great storytellers with the ability to make the biggest stories of our time feel unfamiliar and surprising,” as Gabriel Roth, the editorial director for Slate’s podcasts, puts it.[3] Yet Malone—a veteran journalist and, for Roth, a “fantastic storyteller”—tells listeners a story most of us have heard before.
The Road to the Iraq War crafts a particularly American narrative about American identity in direct relation to the post-9/11 narratives Americans told themselves about who we were in the leadup to Iraq.
From start to finish, it is primarily a story about individual responsibility. Though she emphasizes that it is complicated, Malone begins the 8-episode arc with Ahmed Chalabi, the aristocratic exile who founded the Iraqi National Congress in the 1990s and once declared Saddam Hussain “an insult to [his] being” and “an insult to [his] country.”[4] Chalabi’s ranking of these insults, the personal first and political second, is telling. Malone ends with George W. Bush and “one important truth: this was Bush’s war. He might not have brainstormed it, or mastered the details of it, but he decided on it. He put on the flight suit, he took credit.”[5] Along the way, the usual suspects—Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, and even New York Times national security reporter Judith Miller—get their day and their say in the sun, as the podcast reflects on their respective roles in the run up to the war.
Throughout its catalogue of the Bush administration’s personal obsessions and the choices that went with them, the podcast highlights the immense power of narrative to sway national decisions and dictate global histories. One of the most befuddling aspects of the Iraq War was its popularity among liberal elites, including Bill Keller of the New York Times, David Remnick of the New Yorker, and Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek. Malone interrogates the responsibility of the left’s writers and intellectuals, noting that many of those convinced of Saddam’s danger by Chalabi were the type who “liked to talk about big ideas. Stuff like what is the United States’ role in the world? How can we bring peace to the Middle East?” What they want us to know now, she says, about why they supported the invasion of Iraq, is that “there was a logic to their thinking…They wanted to make the world better.” To her credit, Malone does not exactly let this fly, pointing out how such rhetoric “reduces a war that destroyed millions of lives to a dinner party debate topic, which was part of the problem.” [6] She is right to frame the issue in this way.
But what narrative convinced so many Americans that invading Iraq could make the world better, so much so that they wanted the invasion? As retired Air Force Colonel Randy Larson wryly remarks to Malone, “There’s no way you can convince 300 million Americans to do something they don’t want to do that they don’t think is in their best interest.”[7] The Bush administration’s most effective rhetorical strategy in ramping up public approval for the war proved to be their savvy repurposing of the proverb that there is no smoke without fire, or in this case, there is no smoking gun without a mushroom cloud. The statement “we don’t want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud” became the administration’s favorite interview catchphrase as they strategically made their case to the public that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat, and therefore it was in the best interest of Americans—and the rest of the world—for the United States to assert its superpower status and take preemptive action. The media, liberal and otherwise, was more than happy to buy into a narrative of American exceptionalism. Vanity Fair even featured an Annie Leibovitz cover shoot of Bush and his cabinet with the caption “War and Destiny” in 2002.
The spectre of the mushroom cloud, recalling both “Cold War fears of nuclear destruction and the more recent image of the Twin Towers falling in a plume of smoke,” worked.[8] It did so despite expert opinions that there was no legitimate evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The administration’s attempt to prove nuclear weapons existed was, in the pithy words of former Senior Intelligence officer Margaret Henoch, nothing more than a “goat-rope.”[9]
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the propaganda for the Iraq War is this systematic erosion of security and intelligence expertise. When Senator Dick Durbin demanded a National Intelligence Estimate, a definitive summary of the intelligence community’s assessment of the situation in Iraq after analyzing the evidence, George Tenet asked that it be delivered in 19 days in order to keep to the administration’s timeline for invasion. National Intelligence Estimates usually take months to prepare. Malone acknowledges that the “American Intelligence Community screwed up badly in the leadup to the Iraq invasion,” but she insists that the Central Intelligence Agency “was responding to clear pressure from the administration to support a preordained conclusion.”[10]
Though she does not construct explicit parallels between the United States then and now, her narrative of The Road to the Iraq War illuminates them anyway. “This was the time when much of our present-day politics was formed,” she comments in a separate interview; “the way the administration pushed for war eroded the public’s last gasp of trust in institutions, and allowed future administrations to do away with the niceties of telling anything resembling the truth.”[11] Dick Cheney in particular emerges as a kind of proto-Trump in Malone’s portrayal of the leadup to invasion, hoarding vaults of unanalyzed and unverified raw intelligence like “his own personal Twitter feed” and then appearing “strangely compelling on television” with the “confidence and freedom to talk without discipline” all too familiar to Americans in 2022.[12]
Malone herself, in contrast, remains resolutely disciplined throughout her narrative, keeping herself at a distance from the collective American emotions she describes. “9/11 provoked an incredibly strong emotional response in people and in intellectuals,” one of her sources remarks, “and it’s embarrassing” to “go back and to see how we surrender to emotion sometimes, how we surrender to unreason, how we surrender to prejudices.”[13] In this context, Malone’s measured and clinical delivery can seem like self-righteous virtue signaling. “I was in high school at the time,” she is quick to say in episode one, “and I opposed the war on instinct.”[14] A host with adult experience of the leadup to the war and the emotions that came with it might have reached a rawer narrative and deeper communal truth.
Slow Burn’s American-style podcast ultimately conforms to a familiar American way of making sense of the world.
Genre is a way of making communal sense of the world: a shared narrative formula for producing cultural knowledge that relies on its audience’s familiarity with its conventions. Slow Burn’s American-style podcast ultimately conforms to a familiar American way of making sense of the world. The final episode makes a half-hearted turn to the horrific consequences of the war and its botched reconstruction attempts. “More than 400,000 Iraqis died as a result of the war, plus more than 4,400 Americans,” Malone reminds us. She also gives space here to ordinary people whose lives were uprooted by the chaos, such as Jamal Ali, an Iraqi engineer who migrated to the U.S., and the episode closes with her reminder that we “were told the United States invaded Iraq” to “give people a voice in their government. But ordinary Iraqis, the ones who had to live with the consequences of the war, they didn’t get any say at all in what happened to them.”[15] Haunting words, but in the end, ordinary Iraqis, the ones who had to live with the consequences of the war, do not get much of a say in this story about themselves either. The Road to the Iraq War adheres to a particularly post-9/11 American narrative formula, frequently coming across as an extension of the liberal dinner party debates faulted by Malone. It is a similar exercise in Western intellectual narcissism, little more than yet another deep gaze into the abyss of the American navel. The stories Americans like best, after all, are stories about ourselves.
Katherine Judith Anderson is assistant professor of English at Western Washington University and the author of Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain.
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Header Image: Secretary of State Colin Powell attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House with President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on March 20, 2003. (Luke Frazza/ AFP)
Notes:
[1] Malone, Noreen. Slow Burn: The Road to Iraq, podcast audio, May 12, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e4/neocons-and-liberal-hawks-enter-the-debate-over-the-iraq-war..
[2] Lindgren, Mia. “Intimacy and Emotions in Podcast Journalism: A Study of Award-Winning Australian and British Podcasts.” Journalism Practice (2021): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1943497. McHugh, Siobhán. “How Podcasting is Changing the Audio Storytelling Genre.” The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 14, no. 1 (2016): 65-82. https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao.14.1.65_1.
[3] Jarvey, Natalie. “Podcast Playlist: Slate Sets New ‘Slow Burn’ Season about Iraq War.” The Hollywood Reporter, April 12, 2020. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/podcast-playlist-slate-sets-new-slow-burn-season-iraq-war-1289854/.
[4] Malone, Noreen. Slow Burn: The Road to Iraq, podcast audio, April 21, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e1/ahmad-chalabi.
[5] Ibid., June 16, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e8/failures-of-postwar-iraq.
[6] Ibid., May 12, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e4/neocons-and-liberal-hawks-enter-the-debate-over-the-iraq-war.
[7] Ibid., April 28, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e2/the-anthrax-attacks-of-2001-revisited.
[8] Ibid., May 5, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e3/wmd-and-iraq-war.
[9] Ibid., June 2, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e6/curveball-iraq-war.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Jarvey, Natalie. “Podcast Playlist: Slate Sets New ‘Slow Burn’ Season about Iraq War.” The Hollywood Reporter, April 12, 2020. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/podcast-playlist-slate-sets-new-slow-burn-season-iraq-war-1289854/.
[12] Malone, Noreen. Slow Burn: The Road to Iraq, podcast audio, May 26, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e5/iraq-authorization-vote-democrats-bush.
[13] Ibid., May 12, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e4/neocons-and-liberal-hawks-enter-the-debate-over-the-iraq-war.
[14] Ibid., April 21, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e1/ahmad-chalabi.
[15] Ibid., June 16, 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war/e8/failures-of-postwar-iraq.