Stop spinning the lies

When are the media and the pundits going to stop spinning and get it right on Iraq. Foreign Policy has this interview with David Gergen.

Foreign Policy: After 9/11, many people said the “Vietnam Syndrome” was dead—that Americans were now willing to accept large numbers of casualties in prolonged interventions overseas. Does this election prove that wrong?

David Gergen: What we are seeing in Iraq is not a replay of the Vietnam Syndrome. Rather, it’s a sense that we are engaged in a conflict without an obvious end in sight and [that] things are getting worse. The Vietnam Syndrome argued that we should not commit force again unless our vital interests are clearly at stake. But in Iraq, we did commit our troops to conflict without a clear national interest at stake. It was a war of discretion and yet, the American people supported it. So, I don’t think the Vietnam Syndrome is what our problem is here. Rather, it is that the war has been so incompetently managed that the people have lost faith in the capacity of those running it.

So here a two pronged test is proposed, but Gergen’s comments are wrong on both of those tests. First, the media and the administration convinced the majority of the country that war in Iraq was in our vital national interest because Saddam was funding Al Qaeda, and because Iraq possessed WMDs. And second, we were told over and over that Iraq was going to be a cake walk, and there would be few casualties. So what the hell is he talking about? I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was talking about a different war than our current fiasco in Iraq.

So yes, Americans are unwilling to accept high numbers of casualties for a meaningless foray; so we are in fact seeing the "Vietnam Syndrome," that Syndrome still holds, and 9/11 never put an end to it.

This calls into question every statement Gergen makes in the interview, and reveals much of it as probably flawed.

The media needs to stop enabling these revisionists’ lies.