George W. Bush has declared that major combat operations in Iraq have ended. But a different war continues—the one that depicts whether the war was justified.

At different times, the Bush administration has presented different rationalizations for attacking Iraq, ranging from “liberating” the Iraqi people as part of a regime change to the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Of course, no such weapons have been found and Bush said last week, in yet another explanation, that invading Iraq was, in part, a response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Even members of his cabinet acknowledge that they have established no solid links between the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq. And what makes this even more troubling is that the State Department claims that Iran has the closest ties to terrorism than any other country. So why attack Iraq rather than Iran, if we just had to attack someone?

Another pretext for invading Iraq was that it was developing nuclear weapons. Well, North Korea is not developing such weapons—it admits that it already has them. So why go after a country that might be a threat rather than one that already is one?

These are the kinds of questions one would expect journalists and experts to raise on network news programs and the lily-White Sunday TV talk shows. There are reasons those kinds of questions are not being raised.

One reason is the amount of influence the Pentagon exercised in selecting the retired generals to be “embedded” in the TV studios. In a shocking admission, Eason Jordan, head of CNN’s news division, revealed that he sought the government’s prior approval of war commentators.

In an appearance on the cable network’s “Reliable Sources,” Jordan said: “I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, ‘Here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war.’ And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”

Hardly. What’s important is that he answer this question: Why would a supposedly independent news operation ask for the government’s approval of what are supposed to be an independent analysis of a government-lead war in Iraq? That’s an outrageous practice that should be condemned by the entire journalism community.

While other networks might not have gone to the extent CNN did to curry favor with the government, they are just as guilty of presenting a distorted view of the war.

Fairness of Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a two-week survey from Jan. 30 to Feb. 12 that showed at a time when 61 percent of respondents in a CBS poll were saying that more time was needed for diplomacy and inspections, only 6 percent of the U.S. news sources on four major TV network were considered skeptics of the impending invasion.

Of the 393 on-camera sources on “ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings,” “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather,” “NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw” and PBS’s “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” 76 percent of them were either current or former government officials. Consequently, opponents of the war were rarely heard.

Of the 393 people interviewed, 267 were from the United States. Of those, 75 percent were either current or former government officials or military officials. Not surprisingly, only one official—Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)—expressed skepticism or opposition to the war.

And even Kennedy’s statement was mild. He said on “NBC Nightly News,” “Once we get in there, how are we going to get out, what’s the loss for American troops are going to be, how long we’re going to be stationed there, what’s the cost is going to be?”

The report notes, “…Those without a current or former government connection had slightly more balanced views; 26 percent of these non-officials sources took a skeptical or critical position on the war.”

It says, “Half of the non-official U.S. skeptics were ‘persons in the street;’ five of them were not even identified by name. Only one U.S. source, Catherine Thomason of Physicians for Social Responsibility, represented an anti-war organization. Of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups.”

With many flag-waving journalists being as uncritical in their questioning of Bush as White House stenographers, it is no surprise that Bush has been able to constantly change the pretext for invading Iraq. We can only hope that they will not be as malleable when Bush tries to assert that the war and his proposed tax cuts are the reasons he has no meaningful domestic policy.