Have they learned anything since then? In a nation that considers itself peaceful and civilized, the case for military action should be overwhelmingly stronger than the case against. It must face, and survive, aggressive questioning. When political leaders are too timid to push back, that responsibility falls entirely to the media. But in 2002 and 2003, covering the run-up to war in Iraq, our nation’s top reporters and editors blew it badly. Their credulous, stenographic spreading of the administration’s deeply deceptive arguments made them de facto accomplices to a war undertaken on false pretenses. I’ve written about this failure countless times, but – believe it or not — the best thing I’ve ever read about it was actually written by Scott McClellan, the former Bush White House press secretary. In an era of almost universally self-congratulatory memoirs from government officials, McClellan’s 2008 book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” was full of confessions and accusations. I first wrote about it for NiemanWatchdog.org, a since-shuttered website from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where I served as deputy editor. As press secretary, McClellan was a robotic and iconic source of deception himself. But then he came clean. This is what he wrote in his book: It took members of the elite media a remarkably long time after the invasion and the resulting chaos to realize just how credulous and wrong they had been. In a February 2004 piece in the New York Review of Books, media observer Michael Massing then…