- Well, here we are in Year Three of American
taxpayers and Iraqi citizens held hostage. God only knows how many more
years of wasted men, money and materials before the helicopter gunships
rise slowly off the Green Zone roof. The Prez said "years" and
that might be the truest thing he has said in God-only-knows-how-long.
-
- Out of curiosity I looked up the word
"Iraqnam" on Google. I wondered who first uttered the word and
when. Boy was I surprised when I discovered that a blogger named Sammy
Standard used the word 24 hours after the Iraq War began!
-
- In his riposte---ACC :: The Iraqnam
Quagmire?---Sammy Standard sorta outflanked Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Wolf Blitzer, Bush, Powell, Perle, The Pentagon, Fox, Friedman, CNN, Coulter,
Limbaugh, DeLay, Hannity, O'Reilly---well, you get the picture.
-
- As for all those pundits at Townhall.com
and WorldNetDaily.com, as the war progressed, or regressed, they spoke
of it less and less. As if the war might just go away.
-
- Man, were they ever wrong. You really
have to wonder what sort of Zion-crack they were smoking. In the first
weeks of the war, they were riding high and rattling sabers. "Cassandras
here in the United States who were quick to predict that the evidence of
any armed resistance meant that we were in for a long guerrilla war. But
the Vietnam analogy was absurd," chortled syndicated columnist Charles
Krauthammer. CK once won a Pulitzer Prize but you have to wonder how. Not
a peep from Krauthammer now about the war.
-
- A month before the war, George Will was
lauding the boldness of George Bush. Two months after the attack, Will,
another Pulitzer winner wrote: "Swift victory in Iraq may have whetted
the appetite of some Americans for further military exercises in regime
change(but) Until WMDs are found, or their absence accounted for, there
is urgent explaining to be done." Too bad that caution didn't
apply before the illegal act of war.
-
- Like most of his fellow syndicated columnists
in the mainstream media, Will hefted a war drum in Rumsfeld's band but
adopted a cautionary tone soon after and has fallen silent in the years
since.
-
- Ann Coulter chortled with glee, a month
into the war, bashing critics of pre-emptive foreign wars: "The war
was so successful, they don't have any arguments left. They can't even
sound busyJust two weeks ago, they claimed American troops were caught
in another Vietnam quagmire. That didn't happen."
-
- At least not right away it didn't, Ann.
-
- Another Pulitzer Prize-winner (where
do they get these losers?), Judith Miller, created an entire boogieman,
crafting phrases worthy of any 2nd rate scriptwriter, for the New York
Times.
-
- "I think they found something more
than a 'smoking gun.' What they've found is what is being called here by
the members of MET Alpha -- that's Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha -- what
they found is a silver bullet."
-
- Despite all the Pulitzer Prizes, all
those highly-paid pundits fucked up, pure and simple.
-
- Meanwhile bloggers like Billmon and Standard
got it right from day one. Of course none of those guys appeared on CNN,
that once-reputable cable news station, then or now. Indeed, Will,
Coulter and Krauthammer still pound out the pro-globalist prose, indifferent
to the massive waste.
-
- One month into the war, money guru, Lou
Dobbs said: "Some journalists, in my judgment, just can't stand success,
especially a few liberal columnists and newspapers and a few Arab reporters,"
He was talking about the predicted, low cost outcome of the war. Remember
those heady days?
-
- Would you really want this guy Dobbs
advising you on your investments? I mean, I don't know diddly-squat about
investments but months ago I advised folks to buy gold and dang if gold
hasn't gone up over a hundred an ounce since then!
-
- A bunch of low-ranking US veterans, like
Charley Reese and Stewart Nussbaumer, didn't know shit about strategy and
tactics---and we still don't know the difference-but we knew human nature.
Folks just don't like being attacked and occupied and brutalized. Still
don't.
-
- Would you?
-
- Only the well-fed, well-paid dildoes
at Fox and WND and Townhall.com and those rent-a-generals with contracts
to war toymakers ever got air time however.
-
- And to a man (or woman) they were wrong.
- And man, do they twist in their wrong-headedness,
trying, trying to make it right.
- And they still collect huge paychecks
and still get airtime. Trying to make rose petals out of spilled guts and
severed limbs.
-
- Now I'm not sure Iraq is comparable to
Vietnam, even though I did write an essay years ago recalling the Viet-era
terminology: We Had to Destroy the Village to Save It.
-
- Maybe what is happening in Iraq is closer
to the insurrection in Algeria fifty years ago. Or Somalia. Maybe no parallel
exists.
-
- I do have a prediction however. When
the occupying force (us) finally packs and leaves, and civil strife-I
won't call it a war---breaks out for a year or more, the peace that results
in Iraq will arrive sooner than the three or five or ten years we've had
to wreck and mend the country. Probably years sooner.
-
- US veteran, amateur historian and war
critic from the get-go, Douglas Herman writes regularly for Rense, a website
where everyone deserves a Pulitzer for being right most of the time.
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