azulmagia
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- Posted: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:56:38 +0000
OK, so as some of you may have noticed already, ten years ago this week, the United States and the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" went to war against Iraq.
For myself, I don't think there's much you can say about it, except that I suppose you can murder, with impunity, more than 100,000 innocent people as long as you're the President of the United States. I don't think even the Manson Family were responsible for much more that a score of people by comparison.
And, oh yeah, no connection to 9/11, and the WMD was a complete cocksucking lie, and anyone with the faintest chops at critical thinking pretty much guessed that before the invasion began.
Besides Bush and Blair et al, the other group of people that disgraced themselves were the media and the pundits:
Jumping on this bandwagon of shame were nominal leftists Christopher Hitchens and the entire Euston Manifesto crowd, the latter of which we haven't heard much from these days for some reason. rolleyes
Among the people who were not sucked in were yours truly, and Daniel Davies, who explains here in a classic post how a few good lessons from MBA school came in handy when considering the matter:
So to summarize:
(1) Bush, Cheney, Blair etc: Lying war criminals who are still at large and who won't be arrested because Americans clearly have their heads on backwards or something
(2) The Press and the Pundits: Abetted the above, got pretty much everything wrong, yet are still, for some bizarre reason, gainfully employed even though by rights they should be discredited
(3) Christopher Hitchens: Enjoyed his AIDS cancer, but at least he knew there was no God or afterlife before he started pushing up daisies
(4) The Eustonites incl. Norman Geras: Would most probably want people to forget about them entirely.
Oh, and since the same talking heads are still in charge of what Noam Chomsky called the "manufacture of consent," get ready for another one in Iran in the not so distant future, too.
For myself, I don't think there's much you can say about it, except that I suppose you can murder, with impunity, more than 100,000 innocent people as long as you're the President of the United States. I don't think even the Manson Family were responsible for much more that a score of people by comparison.
And, oh yeah, no connection to 9/11, and the WMD was a complete cocksucking lie, and anyone with the faintest chops at critical thinking pretty much guessed that before the invasion began.
Besides Bush and Blair et al, the other group of people that disgraced themselves were the media and the pundits:
Greg Mitchell
Now let's revisit my recent posts here on when probe in the Post itself by Howard Kurtz in 2004 showed that it failed big time. For one thing, Kurtz tallied more than 140 front-page Post stories "that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq"--with all but a few of those questioning the evidence buried inside. Editors there killed, delayed or buried key pieces by Ricks, Walter Pincus, Dana Priest and others. The Post's David Ignatius went so far as offering an apology to readers this week for his own failures. Also consider Bob Woodward's reflections here and here. He admitted he had become a willing part of the the "groupthink" that accepted faulty intelligence on the WMDs.
Woodward, shaming himself and his paper, once said it was risky for journalists to write anything that might look silly if WMD were ultimately found in Iraq. Rather than look silly, they greased the path to war. “There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all the contrary stuff?" admitted the Post's Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks in 2004. And this classic from a top reporter, Karen DeYoung: “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power.“ See my review, at the time, of how the Post fell (hook, line, and sinker) for Colin Powell's fateful U.N. speech--and mocked critics. Not a "fail"?
In Farhi's piece, Len Downie, the longtime Post editor, is still claiming, with a shrug, hey, we couldn't have slowed or halted the war anyway. Farhi agrees with this. Nothing to see here, move along.
(link)
Woodward, shaming himself and his paper, once said it was risky for journalists to write anything that might look silly if WMD were ultimately found in Iraq. Rather than look silly, they greased the path to war. “There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all the contrary stuff?" admitted the Post's Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks in 2004. And this classic from a top reporter, Karen DeYoung: “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power.“ See my review, at the time, of how the Post fell (hook, line, and sinker) for Colin Powell's fateful U.N. speech--and mocked critics. Not a "fail"?
In Farhi's piece, Len Downie, the longtime Post editor, is still claiming, with a shrug, hey, we couldn't have slowed or halted the war anyway. Farhi agrees with this. Nothing to see here, move along.
(link)
Jumping on this bandwagon of shame were nominal leftists Christopher Hitchens and the entire Euston Manifesto crowd, the latter of which we haven't heard much from these days for some reason. rolleyes
Among the people who were not sucked in were yours truly, and Daniel Davies, who explains here in a classic post how a few good lessons from MBA school came in handy when considering the matter:
Daniel Davies
Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to “shade” downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can’t use their forecasts at all. Not even as a “starting point”. By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support the war and give them a quick run through Benford’s Law.
Application to Iraq: This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than “some” or “some but not enough to justify a war” or even “some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs”. My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised.
Application to Iraq: This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than “some” or “some but not enough to justify a war” or even “some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs”. My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised.
So to summarize:
(1) Bush, Cheney, Blair etc: Lying war criminals who are still at large and who won't be arrested because Americans clearly have their heads on backwards or something
(2) The Press and the Pundits: Abetted the above, got pretty much everything wrong, yet are still, for some bizarre reason, gainfully employed even though by rights they should be discredited
(3) Christopher Hitchens: Enjoyed his AIDS cancer, but at least he knew there was no God or afterlife before he started pushing up daisies
(4) The Eustonites incl. Norman Geras: Would most probably want people to forget about them entirely.
Oh, and since the same talking heads are still in charge of what Noam Chomsky called the "manufacture of consent," get ready for another one in Iran in the not so distant future, too.
