In Bradley Manning, We Finally Have a Scapegoat for the Iraq War

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/22-1


Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, in handcuffs, is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland, February 23, 2012. (Reuters/Jose Luis Magana)

The best way to cope with humiliating military disaster is to find a scapegoat. For the Germans after World War I, it was leftists and Jews who “stabbed the nation in the back”—the Dolchstoßlegende that set the global standard. In the resentful folklore that grows like kudzu around our Vietnam War, American defeat is blamed on the hippies and anti-American journalists who sabotaged a military effort that was on the verge of total victory. (More sophisticated revanchists season this pottage with imprecations against General Westmoreland’s leadership.)
 
The horrible problem with our Iraq and Afghan wars is that policy elites can’t find anyone to blame for their failure. Widespread fatigue with both wars never translated into an effective antiwar movement with any kind of mass base or high public profile. As for journalists, even liberal media platforms like The New Yorker and MSNBC dutifully mouthed administration propaganda in favor of both wars. (The liability of thoroughly embedded media is that they can’t be blamed for military failure.)

In other words, the usual suspects for stabbing-in-back whodunits all have ironclad alibis. Who will save us from this thoroughly unsatisfying anticlimax?

Enter Pfc. Bradley Manning. In the young Oklahoman we finally have a fall guy for two failed wars against whom Republicans and the deeply compromised Democrats can unite in vindictive harmony. His release of 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks is well under 1 percent of what Washington classified last year, but the moral panic it has generated among American media and policy elites has scratched a certain punitive itch. His thirty-five-year sentence is a sign that he must have done something seriously wrong. Finally, we have held someone responsible.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

1. Not quite sure I understand the logic of this OP

The prosecution of Manning for leaking classified information didn't have anything to do with trying to "scapegoat" him for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Who is claiming/suggesting that he was "responsible"?