Iraq: "Quagmire, Quagmire, Vietnam."
The biggest lie told to and by the media.
By Mark Kilmer Posted in War — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I was a little stunned after reading a piece by Amir Taheri in the New York Post: IRAQ: WHY THE MEDIA MISSTEP. (I found it from a link at Flopping Aces.) Call me naïve for an instant.
UST outside Um al-Qasar, a port in south east Iraq, a crowd had gathered around a British armored car with a crew of four. An argument seemed to be heating up through an interpreter.
The interpreter told the Brits that the crowd was angry and wanted U.K. forces out of Iraq. But then a Kuwaiti representative of Amnesty International, accompanied by a journalist friend, approached - and found the crowd to be concerned about something quite different.
The real dispute? The day before, a British armored vehicle had an accident with a local taxi; now the cab's owner, backed by a few friends, was asking the Brits to speed up compensating him. Did these Iraqis want the Brits to leave, as the interpreter pretended? No, they shouted, a thousand times no!
So why did the interpreter inject that idea into the dialogue? Shaken, he tried a number of evasions: Well, had the Brits not been in Iraq, there wouldn't have been an accident in the first place. And, in any case, he knows that most Iraqis don't want foreign troops . . .
He gives an example of a source lying to the MSM and being paid for the "exclusive."
Read the entire article. Calamity in five Baghdad neighborhoods becomes quagmire, quagmire, Vietnam all around. Taheri does not blame the AP or BBC or the rest of them, though some has to go that way because they are hearing and reciting what they want to see and report, not what they've actually discovered – which is nothing, for they rely upon stringers.
And Read More…
The MSM is given and gives what the MSM wants.
Iraq's new political life is either ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. The creation of political parties (some emerging from decades of clandestine life), the work of Iraq's parliament, the fact that it is almost the only Arab country where people are free to discuss politics to their hearts' content - these are of no interest to those determined to see Iraq as a disaster, as proof that toppling Saddam was a modern version of the original sin.
Iraq may still become any of those things - but right now it is none of them. When the real history of the Iraq war is written, posterity might marvel at the way modern media were used to manufacture that original sin. [emphasis mine]
We have a problem. A lie is generated by people who want to believe that the United States is a great Satan presiding over quagmire, quagmire, Vietnam. The media wants to believe this, because of disgust with the POTUS or for to be the next Bob Woodward, and they want POTUS to fail, to be recorded as a failure. The media prints the rubbish, we read the rubbish, and Tim Russert recites the baseless polls to yammering and stammering politicians every Sunday morning. The media did not do its job. It repeated the dangerous lie without verifying a whit, and they will be judged harshly for this.
The President wants to clean up Baghdad, to eliminate the bulk of the problem which is being transposed onto all of Iraq. If he succeeds, there goes the lefty myth, so it stands to reason that the left, if cynical enough, would wish for him to fail. To them, then, the failure of the United States – the country and the military – becomes the failure of Bush. They acquire immediate gratification, and the world is left to deal with the disaster.
Hey, if the Dems block the President's plan to succeed, the disaster can be pinned on them and they may never win another election. Happy Days be here again? Sit on it, Fonzie: hardly. That's not how we win political battles. There just has to be a special place in hell for those who'd treat this as a political game.
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Iraq: "Quagmire, Quagmire, Vietnam." 5 Comments (0 topical, 5 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Amir Taheri might not be the best messenger for this story -- his own credibility took quite a hit after he peddled that disinformation about Iranian Jews being forced to wear the yellow star.
... what's your point?
Are you saying he's lying here or what?
I got a math question wrong once. Does that mean anything that anything I say involving chemistry can be safely dismissed?
... is this part;
From the start, the war was also waged in Western circles, with their pro- and anti-war camps. A newspaper that had opposed the war would not tolerate "positive reporting" from Baghdad. One young British reporter who didn't understand that was surprised to see himself shifted to Paris to become a European correspondent. He had made the mistake of reporting that Iraq looked almost like a success, given where it had come from.
With the bulk of the media having opposed Saddam's ouster, negative reporting from Iraq became the norm. (Afghanistan gets a better press; Western elites are at worst ambivalent about the Taliban's fall.)
* Another problem is that Iraq has become the focus of anti-American passions. Millions want Iraq to fail so that the United States will be humiliated. And Iraqis watch satellite TV - including channels from Iran, Egypt and Qatar that make a point of presenting post-liberation Iraq as a tragic quagmire. When CNN and the BBC send a similar message, Iraqis can be persuaded that their country is lost.
Imagine a resident of, say, Mandali or Nasseriah, who is told day and night that Iraq is sinking in a sea of fire and blood. He looks around and sees no evidence of that - but one can't blame him if he thinks that what the media say must be true in other parts of Iraq.
The fact that more than 90 percent of the violence that dominates reporting from Iraq takes place in five neighborhoods in Baghdad, plus one of the 18 Iraqi provinces, is neither here nor there. The perception is that all of Iraq is lost.
The War is being lost in the media - the American will to win in Iraq is progressively being broken by the very distorted picture of the situation on the ground being transmitted unto the nation's TV screens.
Does anyone else remember a book "Our Vietnam Nightmare" that was published just after JFK's assination? It was written by Maggie Higgins, a war correspondent in both World War II and Korea. She visited South Vietman in 1963 and wrote articles for eight newspapers in the US. Maggie had an edge on the other media types reporting on Vietnam. She spoke Vietnamese having been born in French Indochina and been educated through what we would call high school before she went to France for college. The American media's interpreters were furnished by the Viet Cong. In fact, Morley Safirs number one assistant retired from Vietnamese Intelligence as a colonel. Good old Morley cannot see how that could have made a difference!
is the continuation of politics by other means.