Say Anything Blog

They claim it’s because the war has gone on longer than they expected, but we all know what the real reason is.  The war is over in Iraq, and we won.

Quietly, as the United States presidential election and its aftermath have dominated the news, America’s three broadcast network news divisions have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq.

“The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it,” said Jane Arraf, a former Baghdad bureau chief for CNN who has remained in Iraq as a contract reporter for The Christian Science Monitor.

Joseph Angotti, a former vice president of NBC News, said he could not recall any other time when all three major broadcast networks lacked correspondents in an active war zone that involved United States forces.

Except, of course, in Afghanistan, where about 30,000 Americans are stationed, and where until recently no American television network, broadcast or cable, maintained a full-time bureau.

At the same time that news organizations are trimming in Iraq, the television networks are trying to add newspeople in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with expectations that the Obama administration will focus on the conflict there.

Even with the war all but over in Iraq, and with the defeatist media finding it’s defeatist coverage from in-country no longer sustainable, it’s interesting that it still gets more coverage than the still very active war in Afghanistan.  Which just goes to show just how driven by politics the media really is.  The war in Afghanistan is, and continues to be, every bit as important as the war in Iraq but it didn’t get coverage.

Because the Democrats didn’t turn Afghanistan into a political issue like they did with Iraq.  The Democrats didn’t pin their foreign policy agenda on the idea of defeat in Afghanistan, so that war wasn’t deemed as important as the war in Iraq.

It’s sad and cynical, but that’s just the way it is.

What’s really sad, though, is that our troops deserve to be heralded by the media and the public for their victory in Iraq in a fashion not unlike (though smaller in scale) our troops who won WWII were celebrated.  But they won’t get that celebration, because again the left (which includes the media)  turned Iraq into a game of politics and they lost.  So now I guess we’re just going to pretend like it never happened.