He declared that on March 5. A Week or so earlier, Dick Cheney complained on national TV that "there's a constant sort of perception, if you will, that's created because what's newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad." Evidently. with Judith Miller forced to the sidelines, it's been harder to manipulate the press.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, things continue to deteriorate, as an official report leaked by a government official to the NYT shows (article linked above). Interestingly, the report came out in January, weeks before the shrine bombing that sparked the recent wave of violence.
So why do Cheney publicly contradict what their own underlings on the ground are telling them? Isn't that called lying--and isn't lying about matters of war and peace fatal to democracy?
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3 comments:
Tom: Did Judith Miller report favorably due to intimidation? I thought she just wanted to advance herself.
OK, so things are going terribly in Iraq. Does that make the invasion wrong? No. Do I want the Vice President to "tell the truth" about this? What I want is for him to make the best case possible, and win the war while killing the least possible number of civillians and without torturing even the worst enemies. I don't want his comments serving as victories for the people who want to kill you and the rest of Maverick Farms for violating their religious superstitions.
Today there's at least a hope and a chance for self rule, prosperity, and human rights ("democracy").
Last night I watched a History channel episode about the US Civil War, and read some chapters about New Orleans during and just after that conflict, which was much more blooding and destructive than what's going on in Bahgdad. If you think it's tough to be a Shia or a Sunni in Bahdgad in 2006, imagine being a black person in 1870 New Orleans. Evidence of horrible conduct, hard times, and infrastructure destruction does not invalidate possible justification for a war.
The Civial War episode had historians claiming that Robert Lee knew he couldn't ultimately win on the battlefield, but that he was trying to win just enough to cause voters in the north to turn against the war via abhorant accounts in the press. His plan certainly succeeded for about three years, and was only foiled when the Union finally won a big battle.
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