Quote:
|
Originally Posted by NirvanaMan
The issue I raised is that the media decided for the American people that this is a quagmire and a failure before it even began...and that is how it has been spun.
|
Well, we have to be a litte saavy about the media's spin, too.
It's come 360, btw. Contrary to NirvanaMan's picture of a consistently anti-IraqWar press ... the media were so anachronistically gung-ho, patriotic and Up-Bush's-A$$ for the first year or so of the conflict that I had to keep checking my watch to see what
decade I was in.
Sure, now the mainstream press is calling it a quagmire, a civil war, a bloodbath. But at least there are reports of facts in there, upon which we can form some sort of informed conception. I'm not saying things aren't denied us or spun by the American media ... people who watch Al Jazeera probably get a wider view of things.
But bare facts are bare facts ... and if we are to believe the intregrity of reports from many sources that, for instance, 100-people-per-day have been dying violently in Baghdad for months now, I think we can paint our own picture of that part of Iraq - quite apart from either the media spin or the politico spin.
The uptick in violence in Baghdad coincided with our launch of a major military campaign to return order and security to that city. I don't need any spin to see, from the simple facts on the ground, that this campaign is a dismal failure, in a line of many dismal failures.
Last week began the trial of the soldiers who raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killed her and her family. We destroy entire cities like Fallujah, and the enemy simply melts away to regroup somewhere else. Then we utterly destroy the next town, while the enemy keeps surviving and eluding and regrouping elsewhere.
We can't be everywhere at once.
We can't defeat a guerilla insurgency with American military might.
We can't even quell an ongoing bloodbath in our occupied nation's capital ... with all the treasury-draining resources of the United States Armed Forces brought to bear.
I really don't need to hear opinions or spin one way or the other to see what's going on. This is really beyond all spin.