Here's an commentary from NationalReviewOnline that pretty much sums up why the US never seems to win any argument, anywhere, anytime. The media changes the rules, it distorts what it said in the past, and is constantly moving the goal posts to insure US defeat, frustration, and/or embarassment. And they're supposedly on [u]our[/u] side! Yeah, right.
[size=4]Heads They Win
Tails we lose.[/size=4]
By Victor Davis Hanson, Nov 9, 2001 8:25 a.m.
We all recall that when Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were not being eliminated as prescribed in the armistice agreements, moderate Arab governments, our own State Department, and those on the Left opposed unilateral military action to take out his missiles, germs, and stored nuclear material. Instead we were directed to the U.N. Yet once international sanctions began to have some moderate effect, the Iraqis nevertheless continued splurging on their elite, stealthily purchasing weapons, and broadcasting on CNN pictures of purportedly starving children. At that point, the initials "[b]U.N.[/b]" were insidiously replaced with "[b]U.S.[/b]," and we incurred the world's blame for "U.S. sanctions" that "killed babies" — but without the benefit at least of ridding Iraq of the mechanisms for killing us. Of course, had we used force to blow up Iraq's ordnance of mass destruction by sustained air strikes, in 1992 or 1993, we would have been roundly denounced as interventionists and crude unilateralists, insensitive to the nuances of the Muslim world.
Pundits here and abroad wax on about how we "created bin Laden" and then "abandoned Afghanistan." They should look at histories of the Soviet invasion written during the 1980s. Most accounts, after outlining Russian atrocities, are bugle calls for U.S. action and castigation of the slow American aid to the "freedom fighters." Soviet mines disguised as dolls and toys were said to have been dropped from the sky. Prisoners were tortured, and carpet-bombing of entire villages, we were told, made it imperative to help these brave but outclassed patriots. The media saturated our screens with images of flintlocks against attack helicopters, piety pitted against atheism. And so Stinger missiles, sophisticated automatic weapons, and mobile artillery followed, sensationalized by Dan Rather and others caught up in the zeal of helping the seemingly helpless. Most military historians agree that such heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, and the Stingers turned certain Muslim defeat in 1983 into virtual stalemate by 1985. However, what once was seen as principled assistance to indigenous underdogs now is reinvented as cynical CIA machinations — "chickens coming home to roost." Of course, had we done nothing to help the Afghanis, we would then have been scolded that we were amoral Kissingerians, who did not think dying children in Afghanistan were worth confronting the wrath of the Soviet Union. Had we stayed on to create democracy we would have been dubbed naïve "nation-builders," intent on idealistic secularism in a fundamentalist society. And so we pulled out our military assistance, kept giving millions of dollars in food aid, and accepted the charge that we had "ignored" our "friends," all the while "giving aid to the Taliban."
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