Beware a Times/Pentagon 'Virtual Coup' on Aghanistan

[Joanne98]

by Harvey Wasserman

Some military coups are still done the old-fashioned way. Tanks surround the capital, generals grab the radio station, the slaughter begins.

Here, the Declaration of Independence scorned King George III for elevating his army over our colonial legislatures. The Founders opposed a standing army. Our first Commander George Washington warned against military entanglements. So did Dwight Eisenhower nearly two centuries later. These "quaint" monuments to civilian rule form the core of our constitutional culture.

So when the Pentagon wants to trash inconvenient opposition and escalate yet another war, it seeks subtler means. For example: the "virtual coup" now being staged in league with the New York Times, aimed at plunging us catastrophically deeper into Afghanistan.

It's how they drove us into the abyss in Vietnam and Iraq. It demands we decide who will rule---the Pentagon, or the public.

It was the military's manipulative mis-reporting in Vietnam that fueled Lyndon Johnson's 1965 disastrous escalation. With the much-medalled William Westmoreland front and center, the Pentagon concocted a non-existent attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, warned that a communist victory would bring on the Apocalypse, told LBJ he could win, and ran its occupation army up to 550,000 troops.

When its last advisors fled in shame off that Saigon rooftop, the Pentagon blamed those who had opposed the war from the start. It assaulted the heroic independent reporters who exposed the war's true horrors. It even attacked the corporate media that had been its willing partner in the war's creation.

To its credit, the Times broke from its early support, making welcome history by publishing the Pentagon Papers, among much else. As today, it published opposing views all the way through.

But its big guns enlisted again in Iraq. The Bush Administration needed no convincing, but the American public did. Led by warhawk cheerleaders Thomas Friedman and Judith Miller, the Journal of Record sold a war based on Weapons of Mass Destruction and Dick Cheney's "grateful" Iraqi citizenry, both of which were non-existent.

Today central casting has brought us Stanley McChrystal to re-run the role of Westmoreland/Cheney. Now the hero of an endless stream of hauntingly familiar puff pieces, the General's carefully leaked "secret" demand for "a bare minimum" of 40,000 more troops to avoid "mission failure" has become the ultimate blackmail note, the core of a virtual coup in the making.

It comes as the Times concocts a report on "frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military." Among "active duty and retired senior officers" there is "concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room."

"Unduly influenced by political advisers"? Does this mean that for the Commander in Chief, elected by the people of the United States, advice is duly acceptable only from hawks in uniform?

Joining Tom Friedman (again!) is the Times's Roger Cohen, who says Obama needs "endurance" because if we lose in "Afghanistan, Pakistan and Pashtunistan" there "would be a disaster for Western security."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/25

[tekisui]

1. It is obvious. The excuses for escalating in Afghanistan change with

the wind. Exactly the same way the reasons fro going into Iraq changed almost weekly. They will keep throwing excuses against the wall until the find the one that sticks with the American people.

[saigon68]

2. Anything to mesmerize the SHEEP

[bertman]

3. The New York Times is the biggest print mouthpiece for the Military-Industrial-Corporate-

Intelligence Complex. Why anyone would consider them a liberal rag is beyond me.

Lately I have been reading a lot of books about the assassination of JFK. Last night I began reading "Four Days In November" by Tom Wicker, that was published in 2003. I was astonished to read in the intro that the NYT still holds firmly to its initial reporting of the JFK assassination that it got from its "exhaustive" parroting of the Dallas Police Department regarding the killing of the President and the subsequent murder of his alleged assassin.

Despite the finding of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that there was evidence of a CONSPIRACY to kill the President, the NYT has once again shown that it will say and do anything to please its corporate masters.

Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. Propaganda Organ for the Reich-wing.