The editorial page of the Times while giving a fairly good rhetorical bitch-slapping to Beloved Leader manages to gloss over their part in the Iraq War with amazing dexterity. It's almost an act of prosaic auto-fellatio:
It took President Bush a long time to break his summer vacation and acknowledge the pain that the families of fallen soldiers are feeling as the death toll in Iraq continues to climb. When he did, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Utah this week, he said exactly the wrong thing. In an address that repeatedly invoked Sept. 11 - the day that terrorists who had no discernable connection whatsoever to Iraq attacked targets on American soil - Mr. Bush offered a new reason for staying the course: to keep faith with the men and women who have already died in the war.
"We owe them something," Mr. Bush said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for." It was, as the mother of one fallen National Guardsman said, an argument that "makes no sense." No one wants young men and women to die just because others have already made the ultimate sacrifice. The families of the dead do not want that, any more than they want to see more soldiers die because politicians cannot bear to admit that they sent American forces to war by mistake.
So far, so good. Nicely said. But wait...
Most Americans believed that their country had invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but we know now that those weapons did not exist. If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion would have been stopped by a popular outcry, no matter what other motives the president and his advisers may have had. (my emphasis)
Let's see...the Times, instead of doing their job in 2002-03 and acting like an actual newspaper spent enormous amounts of time repeating every administration lie, instead of investigating contrary views and facts, allowed St. Judy of the Gutters to front-page the propaganda of Chalabi and the Neo-cons as fact with the explicit blessing of the administration. And when they finally gave their mea culpa, never came clean on their failure to rein in Miller and others who were instrumental in aiding the 1600 Crew's rush to war.
It's nice that the Times is finally saying that the emperor has no clothes, but that's an observation they should have been making with the same energy and commitment that they had to say...hmmm, I don't know, Whitewater...?
posted by Jo Fish on 08.24.05 at 12:25 PM
Comments:
We must honor our war dead by adding to their number.
