Iraqnam - Those
Who Got It Right
By Douglas Herman
3-23-6
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. |
