Sunday, November 20, 2005

Don't Trust Anyone Who Can't Speak Their Minds

Whenever I hear people talking about how they have hard from soldiers in Iraq how much they support the war, hate the media for lying about it, and think that everything is going so swimmingly that they cannot understand how people could think we are losing, I tend to be skeptical. After all, it's not like soldiers are free to speak their minds.

This post from TPMCafe neatly sums up my feelings on the topics of soldiers telling us how wonderful the war is going.

Of course, there is also the "Your Lying Eyes" issue. When the fatality rate is increasing, and all official reports show that the Iraqi casualty rate has increased compared to the beginning of this year, and some of the major roads have become unsafe to travel since 2003, it seems that there is a basis for worry about how the war is going independent of the media coverage. So reports that "things are a lot better than the media is reporting" seem to me to translate into "we are pretending that things are going a lot better than they are."

That is all.

No comments: