Posted on 08/28/2005 12:07:17 AM PDT by RadicalSon2
As the American people wise up about the war in Iraq, and the shifting rationale behind it, they aren't letting the press off the hook.
Good for them.
As President Bush led the nation into the invasion of Iraq, the evidence he cited as justification for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime was too often echoed by news organizations that holstered the skepticism they customarily bring to their work. As a result, any doubts about the wisdom of the war focused on strategy rather than factual truth.
Hussein's purported possession of weapons of mass destruction was accepted as established fact. His alleged attempt to build nuclear bombs was reported without the qualifying statements it deserved. And members of the Bush administration were given greater credibility than those who remained skeptical, including United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.
The public now knows that. It says so in a new Gallup poll commissioned by the McCormick Tribune Foundation of Chicago.
Sixty-one percent of the poll's respondents said the press keeps them well informed on military and national security issues. That might not sound so bad, but 79 percent gave the same response to the same question in 1999.
More telling is that more than 60 percent of people criticized the news media and the government for failing to inform them adequately before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The problem wasn't that news organizations uniformly expressed support for an invasion -- some did and some did not -- but that they almost universally confirmed the factual basis for it. Since that factual basis has been found to have been untrue, some of the larger organizations responsible, notably including the New York Times, have publicly acknowledged their errors.
Many smaller organizations, however, served as an amen chorus for the drumbeat of news about how dangerous Iraq was. This page, for example, opposed the invasion itself, but spoke uncritically of Saddam Hussein's dangers, at least to his neighbors.
It turned out Hussein was a paper tiger, in more ways than one. His menace to the world existed only on paper -- and in the nation's newspapers.
Most Americans apparently have learned that lesson. Let's hope most of the news organizations responsible for it have. -- J.F.
I completely agree with you.
I personally think he is a left wing fruitcake after reading some of his other posts on other threads.
Remind me later and I will be happy to explain. I have to go to sleep and go to work etc ... But I should be able to get back to this interesting question.
You already answered the question.
The point is, when you ignore a problem it can, and often will, get worse. We will never know what Noriega and Milosevic might have done because we took them out . Had we and the rest of Europe stood up to Hitler early on, who knows what the world would be like today. Sticking your head in the sand the way Clinton did with the terrorism never works.
I hope you share your wisdom here. Just post the list on this thread. I'm sure that I am not the only one who would like to see even one reason.
Yeah, but they had all been used before -- by Neville Chamberlain.
Great response. Thanks
Ditto , especially "that make sense".
Does this make him a commander in the terror movement?
But not about the North. Got to go :)
Your screenname is misspelled. There is a "P" where there should be an "H".
Your screenname is misspelled. There is a "P" where there should be an "H".
Literally ROTFLMAO.
You guys listen too much to Hush Bimbo. He flatters you that you are so smart listening to him. But you only get hypnotized by the rumblings from the "Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies" .
"Advanced" my a**
The north had slaves. Typical DU lacking history lessons.
Why do you guys at DU insist at cramming your elitist views on us?
As Bugs Bunny would say,"What a Maroon!" That is the problem with liberals, they don't want to get involved because someone might get killed and then if you don't get involved they say, Why didn't you do something? You can't have it both ways. Spoiled children, just like removing the W,s from the computer keyboards.
Nah. A. Pole and Billbears are hard core isolationist Patsies (as in Buchananites).
Ahh, the old realpolitik argument. Better to have a stable brutal dictatorship, like, say Stalin, than a risky, unstable, unpredictable Democracy. After all, brutal dictatorships are so reliable in their actions that it gives comfort to the State Dept.
The devotés of realpolitik prefer the "stability" of an Iraq under Saddam to the risk of a failed Weimar. In 1938, you probably would have been arguing that National Socialism was an expression of natural equilibrium for the entity composed of "Greater Germany".
The problem with your outcomes that you outline is the Fallacy of False Dilemma. You go from "two most likely" to "second possible", denying the third through "n"th possible outcomes. Indeed, with the historical examples of postwar Germany and Japan having democracy thrust upon them compared with postwar East Germany and China with the "stability" of dictatorship, your analysis ignores the most recent large scale examples of success.
The stable dictatorship model has been tried in the Middle East for a hundred years, and is an abject failure. Time to do something that actually works once in a while.
Why does A. Pole say Carter was a very good president and calls Rush names even know there is/was a rule on FR not to do that?
Your points are good but I like to point out, least Stalin wasn't killing Amaricans.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.