This sort of double standard has come to pervade Official Washington. If you are part of the club, you can do no wrong. If you're an outsider, you get hazed, marginalized or ignored, even when you're right.
So, perhaps, it should have come as no surprise that most of the journalists and strategists who misled the American people into the catastrophic Iraq War would escape any serious punishment.
The Washington Post's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt remains in place as do most of the war enthusiasts on the Post's neocon-dominated op-ed page. Yet, Hiatt not only oversaw an editorial section that was disastrously wrong about Iraq's WMD but he continued his smearing of war critics for years after his own errors had become obvious.
Hiatt's attacks on former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an early critic of the Iraq War, were especially vituperative. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Plame-gate: Time to Fire WPost's Hiatt. ]
No Change
Even today, most early Iraq War skeptics are excluded from elite opinion circles -- punished for being right -- while the usual suspects who helped sell the Iraq War can get a well-placed op-ed column with a wave of their hand.
Theirs are the views that now dominate the debate over Afghanistan, just as the free-marketeers remain powerful voices in the debates on health care, unemployment and financial reforms.
At the Washington Post, Hiatt's editorial section is back marching almost in lockstep in favor of a major escalation of the Afghan War. Almost daily, Hiatt berates anyone daring to consider another course by suggesting that they may be blamed for "losing Afghanistan.
On Oct. 6, the Post's lead editorial was entitled "If We Lose Afghanistan, with the subhead "Yes, al-Qaeda would return. But that's just the beginning. Much as they did regarding the Iraq War, the Post's editors mock anyone who doubts that only a U.S. escalation can stop a cascade of horrors.
"The discussion often gets narrowed to the point of whether al-Qaeda, which is based in Pakistan, would gain a new haven in Afghanistan if the Taliban returned to power, so we'll start there, the editorial read. "We won't, however, linger long, because for almost all military and civilian experts on the region the question is a no-brainer.
Yet, what is striking about the Post's editorial is that it reveals how these alleged "wise men, who once considered Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD a "no-brainer, have constructed a narrative that conceals their long record of misjudgment.
For instance, the Post editorial boasted about how al-Qaeda has been "badly damaged by U.S. offensive actions, including "its defeat in places such as Iraq. However, the real history is that al-Qaeda had no real foothold in Iraq until the U.S. invasion in 2003 " and that al-Qaeda's leadership saw its post-U.S.-invasion efforts there as a way to divert American forces so the terror group could rebuild its operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Petraeus & the ˜Central Front' Myth. ]
In other words, al-Qaeda's "defeat in Iraq was instrumental in its resurgence along the Af-Pak border, which was always the "central front" as far as al-Qaeda leaders were concerned. But that reality has no place in the Post's rewriting of history.
Over the next two days -- Oct. 7 and 8 -- the Post weighed in again and again on Afghanistan, attacking a suggestion that the United States should forego a major escalation in support of a counterinsurgency program favored by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and instead focus on a counterterrorism strategy aimed at al-Qaeda's leadership.
An Oct. 7 editorial entitled "Why Did Benazir Die? chastised Obama for dishonoring the death of assassinated Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto by even considering a shift in Afghan War strategy away from defeating the Taliban.
The Post saw only a cheap political calculation in this idea, saying the motive was to "excuse President Obama from having to anger his political base by dispatching the additional U.S. troops that his military commanders say are needed to stop the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan.
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