Don't get fooled again:
When George Bush's desperate 'surge' in Iraq fails, we Guardian readers will know it's all Tehran's fault.
May 22, 2007 1:00 PM
History really does repeat itself. Either that or the Bush administration has decided to show its commitment to the environment by recycling lies. Those are the only firm conclusions to be drawn from the Guardian's front page story this morning.
Iran, we are told, has a secret plan to force the US and Britain to withdraw from Iraq. Not only that, but "Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan" and is now supporting the Taliban. So when George Bush's famous "surge" - a desperate gambit to prop up a bankrupt policy - fails to usher in the cooperative commonwealth in Iraq, we Guardian readers will know it's really all Tehran's fault.
Attentive readers may have noticed that the story itself - though obviously based on a single anonymous "senior US official in Baghdad" and "a senior administration official in Washington" - was carefully drafted to include Iranian denials and the acknowledgement that even most of the US congress believe Iraq is in the grip of a civil war. No, what struck me about the story wasn't its credulous tone so much as the sense, as the great philosopher and NY Yankee backstop Yogi Berra once said, of déjà vu all over again.
I've spent most of the past month reading through accounts of the Vietnam War, particularly those of IF Stone, the legendary radical journalist, and David Halberstam, whose The Best and the Brightest could have been a shooting script for the invasion of Iraq with Donald Rumsfeld in the role of Robert McNamara.
Then, too, an internal social and political conflict was blamed on foreign meddling. Lyndon Johnson bombed North Vietnam into rubble on the theory that if he cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail the Viet Cong would have to surrender. But as Stone demonstrated - using the Pentagon's own statistics - 95% of Viet Cong weapons were captured from their foes. When the State Department issued a White Paper purporting to prove the insurgents were little more than pawns for Hanoi and Beijing, Stone demolished it. Richard Nixon used a similar argument to justify the invasion of Cambodia--with even more spectacularly disastrous results. >>>cont
History really does repeat itself. Either that or the Bush administration has decided to show its commitment to the environment by recycling lies. Those are the only firm conclusions to be drawn from the Guardian's front page story this morning.
Iran, we are told, has a secret plan to force the US and Britain to withdraw from Iraq. Not only that, but "Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan" and is now supporting the Taliban. So when George Bush's famous "surge" - a desperate gambit to prop up a bankrupt policy - fails to usher in the cooperative commonwealth in Iraq, we Guardian readers will know it's really all Tehran's fault.
Attentive readers may have noticed that the story itself - though obviously based on a single anonymous "senior US official in Baghdad" and "a senior administration official in Washington" - was carefully drafted to include Iranian denials and the acknowledgement that even most of the US congress believe Iraq is in the grip of a civil war. No, what struck me about the story wasn't its credulous tone so much as the sense, as the great philosopher and NY Yankee backstop Yogi Berra once said, of déjà vu all over again.
I've spent most of the past month reading through accounts of the Vietnam War, particularly those of IF Stone, the legendary radical journalist, and David Halberstam, whose The Best and the Brightest could have been a shooting script for the invasion of Iraq with Donald Rumsfeld in the role of Robert McNamara.
Then, too, an internal social and political conflict was blamed on foreign meddling. Lyndon Johnson bombed North Vietnam into rubble on the theory that if he cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail the Viet Cong would have to surrender. But as Stone demonstrated - using the Pentagon's own statistics - 95% of Viet Cong weapons were captured from their foes. When the State Department issued a White Paper purporting to prove the insurgents were little more than pawns for Hanoi and Beijing, Stone demolished it. Richard Nixon used a similar argument to justify the invasion of Cambodia--with even more spectacularly disastrous results. >>>cont
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 2:48 AM
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