When Dishing Out Blame, Don't Stop With Bush (media/others allowed Bush)

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-naim2jun02.story

When Dishing Out Blame, Don't Stop With Bush
Many in government and the media went blind as a war-hungry administration shed time-tested principles.

By Moisés Naím, Moisés Naím is the editor of Foreign Policy magazine. This essay appears here by special arrangement with the Financial Times.


Don't put the blame for Iraq on President Bush alone. Nothing, it would seem, could have stopped the Bush administration from pursuing its long-standing plans against Saddam Hussein. But placing responsibility for the Iraq debacle solely on Bush's shoulders is too simple and even potentially dangerous. It blurs the responsibilities of others who contributed to an environment in which new, bad ideas were embraced while proven, good ones were shed.

It is important to learn that whatever the threat — terrorism included — no government should be afforded the latitude enjoyed by the Bush administration. The media — both reporters and commentators — are among the prime culprits here. The promise that democracy would spread from a liberated Iraq, for example, was as poorly scrutinized as the notion advanced by the administration that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the war against terror.

Today few doubt that the administration's performance in postwar Iraq has been inept. This consensus, however, risks eclipsing the reality that many potentially influential players seem to have been stunned into submission or ineffectual opposition to the whims of the White House.

It is not just that intelligence agencies were too willing to confirm the "facts" that their political bosses wanted to hear. Many Democrats were too frightened of appearing "soft on terror" and thus signed political and military blank checks to an administration prone to overdrafts. Blinded by partisanship, congressional Republicans were subservient to the White House's wishes even when these wishes contradicted age-old Republican values such as fiscal conservatism. Fearing irrelevance, U.S. diplomats were too quick to accept the notion that negotiated approaches on Iraq had run their course. Some journalists were so deferential to official sources that their reports seemed almost stenographic. <snip>

But perhaps the ultimate enabler was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. In the U.S., the shock and pain caused by the attacks fed the widespread notion that "business as usual" in American foreign policy was no longer an option. They also led to the renouncing of fundamental principles that never should have been abandoned. Many basic rights, including safeguards against indefinite detention without charges, were cast aside as obsolete notions for a nation fighting a global war on terror.<snip>

[sniffa]

1. i don't stop there

i rip into any/aLL bush supporters. there is no excuse anymore. i used to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were just naive.

i can no Longer do that. there is too much info out there for them to ignore. to continue supporting this fraud in Light of what seems to be daiLy reveLations of his incompetence/deceit is an act of maLice.

these maLevoLent fucks shouLd be treated as such.

[SlingBlade]

2. Good Point

I addressed this same subject in a reply to an article written by John Leo in our local paper called:
Liberal media? I'm shocked!
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040607/opinion/7john.htm

This as I’ve said in my reply was proof positive that it was one of two things that prove him wrong.

1. Total incompetence on the part of the Media
OR
2. The media is not slanted to the liberal left but rather intimidated by the Conservative Right.

The proof summed up in one word.

IRAQ

[peacetalksforall]

3. 'He' could be gone in a quick turn of events - his handlers policies will

continue, his handlers are on a mission for the corporations. The media is corporate and they are also the handlers, along with tax payed government agencies, the military, the banks, the churches.

[nodictators]

4. The "ultimate enabler was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11" ???

If so, then the PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (Sep. 2000) was amazingly prescient. In fact, as many know, the report allowed that a "catastrophic attack" similar to Pearl Harbor on the US would help to accelerate their plans.

Next was the Stolen Presidental Election (Nov./Dec. 2000).

At the WH Correspondents Dinner in the Spring of 2001, the entire format was changed (from the previous "roast" of the president), and the "press" served as the laugh track for Bush's stupid jokes.

As we now know, Bush began to implement PNAC agenda (for example, by his termination of the ABM treaty) and plan for the invasion of Iraq as soon as he took the office of president. There were other curious events, such as the little-reported grant of $43 million to the Taliban.

And, only then, came 9/11.