For years, mainstream media have parroted the language of their own governments, and that of lsrael, with little critical coverage of or challenge to the dominant political narrative in the West. Palestinians have been systematically dehumanized, along with the broader Arab and Muslim world, to serve the foreign policy objectives of governments without questioning the moral and legal implications. The horrors that have been normalized in Gaza are the culmination of this long history of racism and injustice. But it is not the first time in recent memory that the media have played a central role in legitimizing war crimes.
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It is often said that hindsight is twenty-twenty—a phrase that suggests we are better equipped to judge past events once their consequences have come to light. This could not be truer than in the case of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. More than two decades after the incursion that claimed so many Iraqi lives, wrought havoc on the region, and sowed the seeds of ongoing conflict, there is now a clear consensus among analysts and the American public that the war was a catastrophic foreign policy mistake. Launched under the guise of national security, framed as a righteous mission to rid the region of WMDs and to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein—whom the United States had supported as early as the 195os and in the 1980s during his war of aggression against Iran—the invasion stands today as a textbook case of how deceit, racism, and empire were packaged for popular consumption, with the U.S. media serving as willing accomplices.
Rather than holding power to account, media figures and institutions were complicit in shaping public opinion to support the war.
But while hindsight may offer clarity, the warnings were there from the start. Experts, scholars, and millions of protesters around the world questioned the Bush administration’s push for war in Iraq and the expanding “war on terror.” They demanded evidence for the WMD claims, called out anti-Arab and anti-Muslim fearmongering used to demonize Iraq, and highlighted the likely humanitarian and geopolitical consequences of launching a preemptive war. These voices, however, were largely drowned out, while the loudest platforms were reserved for government officials and pundits making a case for war.
In September 2002, the former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu testified in front of the U.S. Congress that Saddam Hussein was aggressively developing WMDs, advocated for preemptive U.S. strikes in Iraq, and made his now-infamous claim, “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” Just a few months later, in February 2003—a month before the invasion—Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a dramatic case to the United Nations, citing mobile weapons labs and hidden stockpiles of WMDs as justification for war. Despite internal dissent within the intelligence community and a glaring lack of hard evidence, the media did little to challenge these claims.
After the invasion was already under way in July 2003, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, continued to insist that there was “absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes.” Powell’s statements, along with Netanyahu’s and Blair’s, were later exposed as false, something Powell himself would admit years later, but the damage had already been done. Iraq was invaded, the lives of ordinary Iraqis were shattered, and no weapons were ever found. Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq, as well as 179 British service members, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed either directly or indirectly as a result of the war, and millions more were displaced. The war unsettled the region, paved the way for the rise of ISIS, and triggered a cascade of violence that continues to this day. By some estimates, as noted by the Costs of War project at Brown University, up to 4.7 million people have died in the post-9/11 war zones in the Middle East, with Iraqis bearing much of that toll. Yet no one was held accountable, not the Bush administration officials who orchestrated the war based on falsehoods, nor the journalists and editors who failed to do their jobs.
Indeed, rather than holding power to account, media figures and institutions were complicit in shaping public opinion to support the war. Polling from early 2003 showed that more than two-thirds of Americans falsely believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and a majority believed Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. What explains this gap in public knowledge and the facts on the ground? These beliefs were not inevitable; they were constructed through repetition, strategic messaging, and, most important, media coverage that echoed the administration’s line rather than interrogating it.
The role of the media in manufacturing consent for war is not merely a tale of journalistic failure; it is evidence of how deeply the media can be entrenched in systems of power. As renowned scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said have described, the media in the West have long functioned not simply to inform but to reaffirm the legitimacy of empire, especially when that empire operates under the banner of liberal democracy. The Iraq War is a case study in this phenomenon, where the U.S. media presented a narrative of benevolent intervention.
We must also consider what the absence of accountability reveals about the health of democracy. No structural reforms were made, no editors were dismissed, nor were any anchors held accountable. To the contrary, many of the very media figures who pushed for war went on to prestigious roles in academia, think tanks, and major media outlets. Some of them are now repeating the same tropes, this time to defend a state engaged in genocide. However, this is not simply a media failure. It is a systematic pattern rooted in imperial power and a racialized hierarchy of whose suffering matters. Iraqis in 2003, like Palestinians today, were not seen as full human beings deserving of life, freedom, or justice. They were rendered invisible in the dominant discourse, their deaths acceptable costs in a game of power politics and conquest.
The sins of 2003 were not merely in launching a war but also in how the story was told and masked.
In 2004, a year after the invasion, President George W. Bush joked at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner about the failure to find WMDs, quipping, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.” The audience of journalists responded with uproarious laughter for an admission of war crimes being committed based on the fabrications they disseminated. It was a moment that captured the grotesque disconnect between the ruling class and the human cost of its actions. That moment also reflected the normalization of impunity for the powerful, a pattern we now see repeating itself with horrifying familiarity in the case of Gaza.
The parallels between the Iraq invasion and Israel’s assault on Gaza are striking. In both cases, state violence was repackaged as a moral duty and a defense of “Western civilization.” In both cases, the lives of Arabs and Muslims were devalued to the point of erasure. In both cases, the media played a critical role in shaping public opinion by framing, by omission, by repetition of official talking points, and by an overall failure to include dissenting voices or the perspectives of those most impacted.
The sins of 2003 were not merely in launching a war but also in how the story was told and masked. In Gaza, we witnessed the resonance of those mistakes with growing calls for media accountability as events unfolded and the evidence was live-streamed for everyone to see. The question is whether the media will ever learn from their mistakes or answer for their culpability. In Iraq, the words “shock and awe” described a brutal bombing campaign that terrorized a civilian population. In Gaza, we hear terms like “precision strikes,” “military targets,” and “human shields” to validate the wholesale destruction of refugee camps, hospitals, and entire cities. Now, as then, the dehumanization of Arab and Muslim lives is embedded in the very language used to describe their slaughter.
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Language and words are not neutral; how we use them defines our perceptions of global affairs and relationships. A narrative is simply a story, and how that story is told helps mold public opinion. As such, the narratives constructed by mainstream media outlets are not mere reflections of events but active tools of persuasion. Word choices and how stories are framed influence the way people think about them, often in ways that may appear subtle but with an impact that is quite profound. In the case of the ongoing violence in Gaza, the language deployed by Western media plays a crucial role in guiding the views of their populations, contributing directly to the dehumanization of Palestinians and the perpetuation of pro-Israel biases.
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From Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide by Assal Rad. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Assal Rad.
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