|
|
|
|
11/4/03 More Yellow Journalism The press has seized upon the most recent war crime committed against our forces in Iraq, the downing of a Chinook helicopter and the deaths of 18 and injuries to dozens of servicemen on their way to R&R. They can barely contain their glee at the prospect that public support for this war will wane as a result. They play pictures of grieving family members calling for us to get out of there so no one else has to suffer. Their grief is understandable. The so-called journalists' macabre need to exploit it is worse than deplorable. The case in point is ABC's Nightline last night (11/3/03), on which Chris Bury's opening report showed the grief-stricken relatives and then found a military medical technician almost laughing over the wounded, saying "All major combat operations have ceased? Right!" This was clearly, on the part of the technician, a reference to the President's speech on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln in May. But pointedly, on the part of the editors who put the piece together, it was an attempt to continue to dupe the American public into thinking the President had been out of touch with reality when he gave that rousing speech. The President never declared an end to "All major military operations" (emphasis added), as the young man said (implying that "all" the fighting was done). The editors failed to point out that what Bush had declared was an end to "major combat operations." Does anyone know what that means? It means that we don't have any more huge columns of troops on the move in Iraq. And it's true. We occupy every strategic plot of ground in that country, and so far there hasn't been even one attack by any enemy force, large or small, that has threatened to dislodge even one unit. The President's statement was correct then, and remains correct today. The journalists have been putting up straw men ever since, trying to make it seem like he said something that was untrue or deceptive. It might be deceptive to someone with no understanding of a major combat operation or of the English language; no journalist can take either excuse unless he's willing to resign as an incompetent. What the enemy are engaged in has a name, and it isn't guerrilla warfare. Remember, guerrilla warfare implies uniformed military hiding and attacking military units, fighting them, facing them, and either winning or retreating. These cowards don't attack military units frontally or from the side. They use booby-traps and fire from hiding and attempt to escape. These are terrorists, not soldiers. And since they are not soldiers, every such act is a war crime. That is what journalists should focus on, but instead they try to imply that our President is slow on the uptake. Well, it is the journalists who are out of touch with reality. In addition to the first attempt I've outlined to dupe the public into a false impression of what the President said all those months ago, Chris Bury also said that "The President finally acknowledged in last week's press conference that Iraq is a dangerous place." Taken at face value, that would naturally imply that the President has had his head under a rock for eight months, since everyone with a pulse knows that there are parts of Iraq in which you wouldn't want to hang out these days, if you had any choice about it. But not only is Bury's claim a deception, but it is a blatant deception, since in the same speech the editors of the opening segment tried to portray as an out-of-touch declaration of final victory, the President said the following: "We're bringing order to parts of [Iraq] that remain dangerous" (I added the emphasis for the benefit of any journalists who might read this, since they seem to have a block when it comes to words like that spoken by President Bush.) By the way, he also pointed out in that speech that "we also [had] dangerous work to complete" in Afghanistan, and that "Al Qaida is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people. The proliferation of deadly weapons remains a serious danger." Well, Chris, does anyone still want to pretend that it was just yesterday that Bush recognized that we aren't living in Shangri-la, yet? I know you do (since if you didn't you would have acknowledged these facts, which are part of the public record, in your report), but hopefully it won't get you any traction. If the public responds to your not-so-subtle post-Vietnam manipulation, and we pull out prematurely, the best we can hope for is that someone less brutal than Saddam Hussein will come to power in his place, and maybe it'll take them a few years to start up another nuclear program. The worst we can hope for is that Hussein returns to power, and that Iran conquers the weakened Iraq and creates the single largest economic and military power in the middle east, reconstitutes their nuclear weapons program, and creates the kind of hegemony we were trying to avoid by deposing Saddam in the first place. Charming. [1/1/03: Since Hussein has since been captured, he cannot now be expected ever to return to power.] Bury went on to claim that the recent attack (the first single attack costing double-digit lives in many months) is part of a clear trend, a "trickle" of casualties increasing to a "stream." But then the commanding officer of an Army surgical unit interviewed by Bury's own field reporter said that he did not see any evidence of such a trend. Why do you insist, Chris, on trying to draw such alarming conclusions from insufficient evidence? Is it just that you think you can get better ratings by attacking our administration and the military, and failing to report very prominently the dozens or hundreds of enemy that are killed or captured every week, dwarfing the numbers, if not the tragedy, of our own losses? What we ought to be calling for, in the wake of this brutal attack on a military transport, is cold, hard vengeance. Every person involved in the attack should end up a smoking corpse on a battlefield or a body swinging from a gallows after a speedy trial for war crimes. If we retreat in the face of this most recent outrage and the deaths it inflicted, we render those soldiers' sacrifices meaningless because we will have lost what they and all the others who have died and been wounded were fighting for: stability in the Middle East and freedom for the Iraqi people. We must stay the course. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
|
|
All Original Content (C) 2003, 2004, 2005 SoothSeeker.Com
SoothSeeker Welcomes your Comments at letters@soothseeker.com Report problems to webmaster@soothseeker.com
Hits on this site:
|