Thursday, November 02, 2006

Would have been nice to hear this 3.5 years ago

The press pisses me off, a lot.

While in some sense I appreciate their honesty in this article. It is the type of thing that they should have brought to our attention when it happened. Take this little nugget:

Anne Garrels
NPR

People were shocked that the U.S. did nothing, and they will forever remember that virtually the only building — it wasn’t the only building but one of the few buildings — that was protected was the oil ministry; that just summed up to so many Iraqis why the U.S. was there, and confirmed their worst fears. And it also played to the utter naïveté of the Americans, because it wasn’t just Iraqis letting off steam, as Rumsfeld said. It was Baathists going around destroying documents — making Iraq ungovernable: destroying drivers’ license records, all of the things that make a city able to be governed. And it was the beginning of the insurgency.
Years from now when we retell the history of this era, the media will ask about the failings of the government and the military. However, they will never bring up how they were perfectly complicit in all of this and are, perhaps, the party most responsible for this mess.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is not new news, this has been reported in the past.

Broca said...

You are correct that this was reported in the past. But what you get from the series of comments made by these journalists is how screwed up the situation was in Iraq. It seemed to be the consensus opinion (at least in their retelling) that they recognized the problems with the invasion.

The fact that Iraq was totally screwed never seemed to be part of the meta-narrative. It is only now that these journalists come out en masse to reveal their feelings.