Saturday, August 21, 2010

All Lies, All the Time

This farcical "withdrawal," which amounts to merely increasing the number of mercenaries in the region, is a complete fabrication, motivated by pure politics and an infinite faith in the cluelessness of the Average Joe, who is too busy looking for a job to care. As to what they’ll do when the insurgency starts to rise again, not to worry: no one will notice but the soldiers in the field. Surely the American media won’t be so rude as to point it out, unless the Green Zone goes up in flames and they have to evacuate stragglers by helicopter as they did in Vietnam. In that case, the visuals would be too good to pass up.

Everything that comes out of this administration, from its pronouncements on the overseas front to its own unemployment numbers, is a lie: it’s all lies, all the time. Even in small matters, the default is a fib, such as in the case of the Pentagon’s denial that it was ever in touch with WikiLeaks about minimizing the alleged damage done by the next Afghanistan document dump. After all, why would WikiLeaks make up such a story? The feds just want the documents "expunged," thank you. I doubt they really believe it’s possible to "expunge" the Afghan war logs from the internet. If so, they are dumber than anyone has so far imagined. And so much for the myth that the Pentagon really cares about any danger to Afghan informants, who might be compromised by the release of more documents: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have given them their chance to safeguard the identities of US collaborators, and the Pentagon flat out rejected it. So be it.

The feds hate WikiLeaks because they exposed the lies this administration has been putting out about how the war is going just fine: the true number of casualties, and the toll on innocent civilians, is online for all to see, and there’s more coming. Now, no one but the naïve and the bought-off expects government officials to tell the truth: no one is surprised to discover George Washington’s heirs did indeed cut down the cherry tree, and tried to cover it up. However, I’m old enough to be shocked by the "reporting" in the news media that takes this "the war is over" narrative seriously.

That’s why we keep getting into these wars – we don’t really have an independent media. When they aren’t cavorting with Rahm Emanuel on the beach, they’re in front of the cameras repeating the most outrageous lies with a straight face. This is a very big problem, because only an informed citizenry can check the power of government, especially in the foreign policy realm. If Americans don’t know what their own government is doing overseas, then there’s not much hope for a more peaceful foreign policy.