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There have been five agonizing years of this war in Iraq. Five terrible years of bewilderment and rage.
Commemorating that anniversary, Frontline, the PBS investigative series, allotted four-and-one-half hours over two nights to an in-depth analysis of the war in Iraq and how it came about.
With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War and the grim milestone of 4,000 U.S. dead, the nation has been awash with news retrospectives on the war and speeches by politicians, mostly offering sanitized versions of what's transpired.
With a few exceptions, these media/political reflections have had the feel of self-rationalizations, more than self-criticisms. They’ve conveyed a sense that the U.S. system is doing just fine, thank you, although a few mistakes were made.
While the Iraqi government continued its large-scale military assault in Basra, the NPR reporter's voice from Iraq was unequivocal on the morning of March 27: "There is no doubt that this operation needed to happen."
Such flat-out statements, uttered with journalistic tones and without attribution, are routine for the U.S. media establishment.
Ever since George H.W. Bush went into “campaign mode” in 1988 and exploited black convict Willie Horton to dirty up Michael Dukakis, it’s been a staple of modern politics that you can negate your own high negatives by driving up those of your opponent.
Except in 1992, when the “Passportgate” scheme for demeaning Bill Clinton’s patriotism blew up in Poppy Bush’s face, some effective smear has been associated with every Bush national campaign. Think of John McCain’s “black child,” Al Gore’s “delusions” and the Swift Boat lies about John Kerry’s heroism.
A classified memo written by the top U.S. military officer in western Iraq reveals that a prison in downtown Fallujah is so overcrowded and dirty that it does not even meet basic “minimal levels of hygiene for human beings.”
“The conditions in these jails are so bad that I think we need to do the right thing in terms of caring for the prisoners even with our own dollars, or release them,” says the memo, written in late February by Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S forces in western Iraq.
When former Rep. Lee Hamilton gives the keynote address – entitled “Iraq: Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond” – at a Tufts University symposium on March 27, he may be thankful if he doesn’t have to discuss “yesterday.”
He probably would prefer not to revisit fateful decisions he made while chairing investigations into Republican dirty work, especially those that let George H.W. Bush off the hook and cleared George W. Bush's path to the White House.
With the Iraq War entering its sixth year and the U.S. death toll now surpassing 4,000, it has become fashionable – and rather convenient – to claim that no one prior to the invasion five years ago could have foreseen what a bloody disaster the war would turn out to be.
Typical is a recent article by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Burns, published in the New York Times a few days before the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion.
Frontline’s “Bush’s War” on PBS Monday and Tuesday evening was a nicely put-together rehash of the top players’ trickery that led to the attack on Iraq, together with the power-grabbing, back-stabbing and limitless incompetence of the occupation.
Except for an inside-the-beltway tidbit here and there – for example, about how the pitiable Secretary of State Colin Powell had to suffer so many indignities at the hands of other type-A hard chargers – Frontline added little to the discussion.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a story that observed a disturbing trend in Hillary Clinton’s campaign – her growing tendency to stretch the truth, twist what her chief rival was saying and then rely on her supporters to go on the offensive against you if you spoke up.
These tendencies were troubling, in part, because they mirrored what had become so common during George W. Bush’s years: to declare that a fantasy is the truth and then to attack the patriotism or sanity of anyone who thinks otherwise.
Passing the grim milestone of 4,000 dead American soldiers in Iraq -- not to mention hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis -- George W. Bush can now see a clear path to the finish line of his presidency, with no accountability lurking in the shadows and almost no chance that he will be forced to relent on his “stay-the-course” strategy.
Plus, with Hillary Clinton continuing her trench-warfare battle for the Democratic nomination – even knowing it could damage Barack Obama’s chances against John McCain – President Bush may end up with the happy opportunity to hand over the White House to a Republican successor who has promised to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for possibly a hundred years.
The White House’s chief information officer said the Bush administration should not be compelled to search for millions of e-mails on individual computers and hard drives that may have been lost between 2003 and 2005 because it would be too expensive and require hundreds of hours of work, according to a filing the White House made with a federal court.
The court filing late Friday came in response to an order issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola demanding that the White House show cause why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a “forensic copy” of e-mails from individual hard drives.
