The "WE WILL BE DEFEATED" Media Awards
TOP NOMINEE:
"Many of the Afghan women who have been warning us about the Taliban for years say that bombing would be the surest way to unite most Afghanis around them."
--- Gloria Steinem, Village Voice.
2nd RUNNER UP NOMINEE:
"Right now we are using beards as beards, trying to prop up the Northern Alliance and hoping that somehow a Southern Alliance will materialize like a genie from Aladdin's lamp. But the stories about the lame rebel force with its wooden saddles and line of old Russian tanks get sillier and sillier, like scenes out of the Marx Brothers or Woody Allen's "Bananas." TV footage shows troops practicing taking hills, and confused about whether they are supposed to advance or retreat after they win a battle with the Taliban."
--- Maureen Dowd, New York Times, November 7.
#RD RUNNER UP NOMINEE:
""I don't know how long this was supposed to take but it's certainly going a lot worse than expected. We have leading opposition figure captured and executed ... defections from the Taleban not happening on any large scale .. Afghan support for the Taleban appears to be on the increase and, if anything more was needed to dim the support of our allies for this whole adventure here we have another Red Cross warehouse has been bombed because of what is called human error. This is a war in trouble." -
-- Daniel Schorr, NPR Weekend Edition.
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HONORABLE MENTION:
"The first body bags are now on their way home to the US, adding to the number of American families stricken by grief and loss. Once again - for what? Predictably, relentlessly, this conflict shows every sign of becoming the Vietnam of our generation - the graveyard of strategic interests and ideals, as well as lives."
--- Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, October 22.
HONORABLE MENTION:
"The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it's already in one. The United States is not losing the first round against the Taliban; it has already lost it. Soon, a new credibility gap will emerge as the Pentagon attempts to massage the news."
--- Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times,
HONORABLE MENTION:
"Having found refuge in places that America cannot or will not bomb, it appears the Taliban will rule Afghanistan through the winter, thereby handing the United States a humiliating and gratuitous defeat ... Of all the proxies the United States has enlisted over the past half-century, the Northern Alliance may be the least prepared to attain America's battlefield objectives... [The Alliance] remains far weaker than its adversary, it boasts far fewer troops, and lacks the determination of its foe ... Its forces lack fuel and ammunition, remain pathetically divided, and seem in no rush to march to an American timetable."
--- The New Republic, November 8.
HONORABLE MENTION:
"Huge earth-shaking explosions, horizons filled with flame and smoke, doomsday clamour and an indiscriminate devastation: these are the familiar, unnerving symptoms of a bankrupt policy, of plans lacking or gone awry, of exponential escalation and dread futility. Familiar because the world has seen the Americans go this way before, in Vietnam, in Cambodia and in Iraq, with no good result. Unnerving because the impression strengthens that President George Bush has no clear idea how proportionately to attain his ends or even what those ends may ultimately be. Futile because carpet-bombing, whatever its immediate consequences, looks to all but an implacable American public like an act of desperation prompted by a failure of imagination. Every towering column of dust and ash obscures ever more completely the twin towers whose appalling downfall was the root of it all. With every unguided bomb that drops, with every pinpoint missile gone astray, with every child maimed and with every redoubled cry of Taliban defiance, the military assault on Afghanistan becomes more of an obstacle to justice in its broadest sense, less a legitimate part of the solution."
--- The Guardian, November 2
HONORABLE MENTION:
"You can spend so much time defending the moral legitimacy of bombing Afghanistan and damning Noam Chomsky to hell that you never need to get around, really, to the question of what the real-world consequences of this war are likely to be. Five and a half million Afghans starving, as predicted by Oxfam, if the military campaign prevents delivery of humanitarian relief? Thousands of new Taliban fans and recruits for anti-American suicide missions? A protracted war with a determined, hardy foe that draws in Central Asia, enrages the Muslim masses and destabilizes Pakistan or Indonesia or another country to be named later?"
--- Katha "Your Stammering Is Eloquent" Pollitt,
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MORAL VACUUM AWARD:
The BBC World Service, once a bastion of freedom and objectivity, continues its slide into moral relativism. According to today's Guardian, the BBC will not describe the attack on the WTC towers as "terrorism." It might alienate some listeners, presumably from the Islamic world. Perhaps they will soon begin expressing neutrality over whether the Jews were behind the attacks as well. Lord Reith must be turning in his grave.
- 11/15/2001 12:39:31 PM
clubs.yahoo.com
Messages 60645 & 60646 |
