"Today the Washington Post branded the U.S. led effort to build an effective Iraqi Army 'Mission Improbable.'
Yesterday Newsweek/MSNBC reporter/analyst/commentator Howard Fineman, in an article about Iraq titled 'Was it Worth It?', wrote that '[w]e had noble goals in Vietnam, but achieving them was too costly and the Vietnamese didn’t share them,' thus telegraphing Fineman's assessment of the Iraq front in the GWOT.
Everyone is entitled to skepticism and their own conclusions, and as ABC White House correspondent Terry Moran put it to me, we have to be aware that '[t]here is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous,' and correct for it.
But isn't it obvious that the skepticism directed by many in MSM to the rebuilding of Iraq and the necessity of succeeding there is nowhere matched by a similar MSM skepticism of the 'roadmap' process on the Israeli-Palestinian front? Or that skepticism of the Oslo accords was rarely heard within MSM, even as the second intifada lurched into being, and that few if any in MSM dared question the necessity of Israel trying again to reach peace with the Palestinian Authority even after suicide bomber after suicide bomber took hundreds of lives?
Does anyone want to argue that the new Iraqi government has less of a chance of stabilizing Iraq than the PA has of controlling Hamas and Hezbollah? If not, then how to explain the unrelenting skepticism directed at the reconstruction of Iraq --of which the above two articles are only the most recent high-profile examples-- with the near complete absence of analytical skepticism directed at the PA's future?
The reflexive production of anti-Bush/anti-Operation Iraqi Freedom pieces in tandem with an endless supply of pieces urging Israeli flexibility and concessions is not surprising giving that the left supports the PA and opposes Bush, and MSM is dominated by the left. The deep bias is also not very consequential, given the rise of new media. But pretending that MSM is other than a a semi-independent operating arm of the political left is certainly an exercise in self-delusion."
