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Originally posted by mo: Hey, no fair. I don't wish to see our military fail. I thought it was interesting to take note of the recent blame-shifting and recriminations (a Washington, DC, tradition not unique to any administration) -- that's not the same as wishing for failure. |
It is a Washington, DC tradition. We saw it for example in the war in Afghanistan after about 2 weeks, and before that in Kosovo. In both cases, the criticisms were absurdly premature.
I came across this interesting piece in the Spectator (linked by Andrew Sullivan). It's a British piece, but I think it is applicable to sections of the US media as well, not to mention some of the more hyperventilating people on these boards.
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Anti-war journalists hope for the worst � because the worst will prove them right Stephen Glover . . . . There were lots of reasons for opposing the war against Iraq. But even anti-war people would always admit that Saddam Hussein is a dictator who has tortured and killed many people, and impoverished his nation. They worried about legality and fretted about whether it was right to invade a country which had not made a declaration of war. I shared these anxieties. The anti-war brigade has also been sustained by anti-Americanism. Now that the allies have embarked on war, it is natural that many of the opponents in the media should want to be proven right. This helps to explain why the BBC and the anti-war press have seized on every small setback as potentially a vast misfortune. There is the war between the allies and Saddam Hussein, and there is the other, hidden war between the opponents of war in the media and those in the field who seem to be prosecuting it with remarkable success. A friend of mine said to me the other day that he hoped lots of Americans were killed because the United States would be brought down a peg or two. I suspect there are many people, otherwise decent and enlightened, who would like this war to be prolonged and bloody. They may even in a twisted sort of way want lots of Iraqi civilians to be killed because their deaths will vindicate the anti-war arguments. If we did not care about our reputations, if we did not in our silly, selfish way wish always to be shown to be right, we would all ardently hope for the war to be ended as soon as possible with as few deaths as possible, and with Saddam Hussein safely under lock and key. This is, in truth, what every person and every journalist should wish for, whatever their opinions on the war. But I am not sure it is what the Daily Mirror or John Pilger or the (admittedly brilliant) Robert Fisk of the Independent wants. One feels that, whatever happens, they and their sometimes less openly anti-war colleagues in the media will continue to say that the war is not going as well as the allies expected, and they will declare a successful outcome to be deeply unsatisfactory. The war will go on in the newspaper columns and on the airwaves long after the last shot has been fired, as journalists fight to show that they were right. . . . |
Ugly, perhaps. But human nature.