Let’s recap media’s track record post-911.
Aided by their carefully selected future telling experts, the MSM’s preconceived narrative of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was a fate similar to the Russians. They couldn’t have been more wrong, as they unscrupulously tried in vain to erase that country from their news pages while a once enslaved people voted in real democratic elections for the first time in history.
Then came Iraq where the media proclaimed the U.S. was “rushing to war” as if the ten or so year period of repeated U.N. violations never existed. Forgetting that the Balkan bombardment lacked U.N. sanction, the left-leaning media loudly declared the war illigitimate without explicit U.N. endorsement. The oil-for-food scandal simply exposed what many had believed all along- that the U.N. was a corrupt institution run by a motley collection of bureaucrats and dictators scratching each other’s proverbial backs. So much for putting U.S. foreign policy under U.N. control.
After the invasion came the incessant predictions of a civil war, Vietnam style quagmire and, my favorite, the proclamations that Iraqis weren’t ready for democracy. Well, we all know what happened there. Funny how those of us in the blogosphere weren’t as “shocked” at the elections as the media claimed to be. Could it be that they were actually believing their own spin?
Notwithstanding that democracy began to take root throughout the region, the media still clung to one last bit of anti-Bush spin – that the results may have worked out for the best, but Bush was still wrong to push for war under the guise of a false WMD threat, utilizing the intelligence agencies as his propaganda tools. He wasn’t just wrong, he knew he was wrong and actively sought out intelligence to further his political goals. Now comes the 600 page report on the U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq. It’s key conclusion:
“We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.”
Ouch, that’s gotta hurt. (Hat tip Powerline)
