Who The Media Won't Have on to Talk About The Fracturing of Iraq As They Continue Spinning It

A lot of people predicted that Bush II's invasion of Iraq would empower sectarian factions, exacerbate ethnic and factional strife and violence and could well lead to the eventual splitting of Iraq along those lines.  Some people who, unlike the neo-cons and Bush-Cheney hacks, knew something about Iraq and the region predicted what we are reading and hearing in the news, today.   Some of the more informed warned that the immediate result would be the strengthening of Iran's influence in Iraq in those areas where Shia Muslims were a majority and Sunni fundamentalists in areas where that faction of Islam predominated.  The Kurds took advantage of their release from domination by setting up a quasi-state.

Those people were largely ignored by the media which, from the NYT and NPR to CNN and FOX, by and large, carried the Bush II narrative of the invasion of Iraq, from the lies used to sell it and the lies used to sustain it.   Now that their predictions are turning into reality, the free-press of the United States will continue to ignore the people who were right all along.

Ours is the news media of a corrupt, aristocratic and decadent empire.  That is the media that the fifty years of The New York Times v Sullivan and broadcast media deregulation and the failure to regulate cabloid media and hate-talk radio has brought us.   That is the media that sold us an illegal invasion that was as clear an example of what Barbara Tuckman identified as the serial marches of folly that corrupt empires take into disaster.  That same media will continue to lie about the results of their criminal irresponsibility.  And I do say criminal, propagandists for war crimes and crimes against humanity have been prosecuted by courts which the United States has participated in, only in other countries.

Here is how one of those criminals described some of what he did.

[Foreign Minister Joachim von] Ribbentrop informed us that the war against the Soviet Union would start that same day and asked the German press to present the war against the Soviet Union as a preventative war for the defense of the Fatherland, as a war which was forced upon us through the immediate danger of an attack of the Soviet Union against Germany. The claim that this was a preventative war was later repeated by the newspapers which received their instructions from me during the usual daily parole of the Reich Press Chief. I, myself, have also given this presentation of the cause of the war in my regular broadcasts.

Hans Fritzsche

Change a few names and it could stand as a description of how our media sold the invasion of Iraq and which continues to pretend what they said the entire time was not absolutely wrong about virtually the entire thing, while others, who they ignored and disappeared, were right about the entire thing.