Blaming the media for losing Iraq.

"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions." - Thomas Jefferson, 1804

It's pretty clear that the ideologues who supported the war in Iraq are adopting two strategies, now that it's been universally accepted as a disaster. They're either blaming Bush and Rumsfeld (as the neocons in Vanity Fair just did) or blaming the media.

Guess which one Putz likes?

JAMES Q. WILSON on the press at war:

But the war coverage does not reflect merely an interest in conflict. People who oppose the entire war on terror run much of the national press, and they go to great lengths to make waging it difficult...

This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone's interests.

The mainstream media's adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.

James Q. Wilson, who Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003, appears to disagree with Thomas Jefferson. I've got just a few questions for Wilson & Putz:

• Why does the corporate, publicly-traded, American-owned media want the US to lose the war on terror?
• What possible "interests" are served by the profit driven, Disney-owned ABC and the GE-owned NBC and the Viacom-owned CBS undermining the US military?
  
• You claim that we won World War II with the help of the press, and that we lost Vietnam because of negative press. But why then, didn't we win in Korea?
  
• Since the press is reflexively hostile to military intervention, and also ultimately controls the outcome of the war, why did we win so decisively in the Gulf War and in Bosnia? Did the media "change" after Vietnam and before we invaded Iraq?
  
• You claim that journalism now dwells in an age in which "truth is hard to find", while the Vice President claims that the insurgency is in its "last throes", that Saddam was on the brink of acquiring a nuclear weapon, the President says again and again "we do not torture" and has also claimed that we found WMD in Iraq. This is also an administration that illegally paid journalists to print outright propaganda and has pressured scientists to change assessments on global warming. Isn't a free press, as Jefferson argued, the best antidote to such unprecedented disinformation by the government?
• When you claim the press was suitably serving US interests in WWII, but that it has "changed", what about Hearst's propaganda campaign that helped get the United States into the war with Spain?
• If the media is reflexively hostile to US military intervention, where was all the anti-war propaganda before the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq?

If anyone else has questions, add them as comments. I'm going to E-mail them to Mr. Wilson. I doubt I'll get a response, but if I do, it will be posted on this blog.