Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone in a piece published over at Alternet nails the Friedman Unit. This excerpt is very telling but the whole piece is really worth a read.
I bring this up because Friedman’s latest column, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Know, Don’t Help,” is yet another “the war should have worked” piece, and it’s of a sort we’re likely to see quite often in upcoming years.
What we have to remember about America’s half-baked propaganda machine is that, dumb as it is, it always keeps its eye on the ball. The war in Iraq is lost, everyone knows that, but there are future wars to think about. When a war goes wrong, the reason can never that the invasion was simply a bad, immoral decision, a hopelessly fucked-up idea that even a child could have seen through. No, we always have to make sure that the excuse for the next war is woven into the autopsy of the current military failure. That’s why to this day we’re still hearing about how Vietnam was lost because a) the media abandoned the war effort b) the peace movement undermined the national will and c) the public, and the Pentagon, misread the results of the Tet offensive, seeing defeat where there actually was a victory.
After a few decades of that, we were ready to go to war again — all we had to do, we figured, was keep the cameras away from the bloody bits, ignore the peace movement, and blow off any and all bad news from the battlefield. And we did all of these things for quite a long time in Iraq, but, maddeningly, Iraq still turned out to be a failure.
In the midst of the biggest foreign policy and military disaster of my lifetime it is depressing to find that our columnists, commentators, those tasked by the print and broadcast media to give us backstory, depth and analysis, have shown themselves to be every bit as blind to reality as is the Bush government itself. Whether it is the Friedman Unit and his endless apologia for disaster or maybe even worse those pundits who are now railing on about how this invasion/occupation has been mismanaged, as if all it would have taken to pull this off was someone who got an A in his college business courses instead of a C-, these people have shown an incredible ability to dodge reality.
Now there are a whole lot of folks, in the blogs and even in the more obscure media, who have been trying to smack them in the face with a great big ball of reality but these guys are good, really good, at dodging and ducking, bobbing and weaving, and generally avoiding taking that smack upside the head that would require them to pick up that unpleasant ball of reality, hold it in their hands, and finally admit that it has substance.
I hope it won’t take much longer for all that dancing away from reality to take its toll and for them to take one right in the kisser and maybe then we can get around to some real accountability demanding on the part of the media.