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Gates
Agrees, Bush's Wars Were Nuts
by
Robert Parry
When DefSec Robert Gates told West
Point cadets that you’d have to be crazy to commit U.S. troops
to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, media commentators quickly
detected a slap at his predecessor,
Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw those conflicts.
But what about everyone else in the U.S. power structure who went along
with those insane and bloody wars?
Shouldn’t such people – whether they acted out of ideology or
opportunism – be kept away from levers of
authority that might get others killed?
For instance, what about the top editors at the Washington Post, the
New York Times and a host of other
establishment publications and TV outlets who hopped on the pro-war
bandwagon and mocked anyone
who suggested that negotiations or some less violent means might be
preferable?
If even a long-time war hawk like Gates recognizes the obvious – that
committing U.S. land forces to such
conflicts is nuts – then what’s to be said about the Post’s
editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt or the Times’
executive editor Bill Keller or a host of other senior media executives
and pundits who endorsed the wars
and have suffered no dents in their shiny careers?
These hot-shots got the biggest stories of their lives dead wrong – and
countless thousands have paid with
their lives, not to mention the $1 trillion-plus drain on the U.S.
Treasury – yet they float along as if nothing
happened. Amazingly, Keller even got a promotion to the top editorial
job at the Times after he was
bamboozled by President George W. Bush’s bogus case for invading Iraq.
Is America addicted to wars?
We just hop from one war to the next.
Why are so many Americans eager to volunteer to go into combat?
I guess wars are just too profitable to pass up?