Rumsfeld again claims link between 9/11 and Iraq invasion during his farewell tour

It makes me wonder whether anyone is buything this line of bull anymore.  I wonder how the families of the soldiers killed in Iraq are reacting to this lie these days.  Maybe it gives some of them solace, because the alternative would be so incredibly crushing. My thoughts?  Good-bye.  Good riddance. 

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Who is to blame for Iraq, Bush’s poor execution or neoconservativism?

Vanity Fair has published an extraordinary article including interviews with many architects of America's foreign policy.  What do they think now that Iraq has been such a miserable failure? Varying degrees of regret can be detected in the people interviewed, but little remose, except from Kenneth Adelman: Fearing that worse…

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Republican Senator from Oregon: Iraq War “May Be Criminal”

The following words were delivered last night by Sen. Gordon Smith (a Republican from Oregon), a 10-year veteran of the Senate: I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way,…

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How to acquiesce in a national catastrophe: a case study featuring the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Take a look at the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

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You can see the photo of an Iraqi man grieving over the body of his three-year-old daughter outside of the Baghdad hospital.  According to the paper, “the girl was killed and three other family members injured when they were caught in crossfire as clashes erupted between gunmen and US forces.”

The lead story starts with this assertion:

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.  The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.

This story line and this photograph clearly impugn the integrity of the United States.  Publishing such information is unpatriotic.  Or, at least, those are the sorts of things we’ve been told, until recently. 

It was always OK to publish pictures of our proud soldiers and our high-tech missiles taking off, of course.   It was up to Al Jazeera and the Europeans to publish pictures of what happened when those missiles exploded on the ground, however.  And when those non-American media sources published those photos of Iraqi civilian carnage, it infuriated “America.”  It’s not that American soldiers weren’t also credible witnesses to the civilian killings on the ground.   The evidence was there to be published, if anyone cared to know. 

For most of the past 3 1/2 years, the Post-Dispatch (along with most mainstream newspapers across the United States) did not publish pictures like this, certainly not in prominent places.  It simply wasn’t deemed news …

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Continue ReadingHow to acquiesce in a national catastrophe: a case study featuring the St. Louis Post-Dispatch