Thursday, March 19, 2009

Oh By The Way, The War In Iraq Turned Six Today

On this day six years ago, then-President Bush lied the country into occupying Iraq and leaving us with enormous costs in blood and treasure. Then there is the untold damage done to Iraq for this action. The millions who protested the war were mostly ignored, certainly by George Bush and in general by the media. I guess then it should be no surprise that on the sixth anniversary of our this particular national debacle the media will conveniently forget to mention its' passing.

From ThinkProgress:

Today marks six years since former President Bush launched the invasion of Iraq — a preventive war of choice based on “intelligence fixed around the policy.” Since that time, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, over 4,000 U.S. servicemen and women and hundreds more from coalition countries have died (tens of thousands more physically and mentally wounded), nearly 100,000 (or more) Iraqi civilians have parished and nearly 5 million have been displaced. Yet the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other major American newspapers are ignoring the anniversary today. Only USA Today printed a story noting the anniversary of the invasion. Today’s Progress Report has more on the good, the bad, and the ugly of developments surrounding the Iraq war over the last year.
To be fair, a ThinkProgress reader noted the Washington Post mentioned it this past weekend, but by and large the traditional media is silent on the matter. Charlie Rose had Condoleeza Rice on the show yesterday to talk about it, but she was allowed to lie about how the whole affair had started. It'll be interesting to see in ten or twenty years how the public will view the war in hindsight (granted that we are finally out of there by then), especially since we have a media that is so willing to forget about the death and destruction we caused the Iraqi people and ourselves for the last six years.