Gates And The War In Iraq

Now that Robert Gates has been sworn there is going to be an almost certain attempt by the White House to bury the War in Iraq in the back pages of the news papers, somewhere right before the sports section. The media has been in goose step with the administration from the begining which is why some very important questions are never brought up and why certain issues concerning Mr. Gates will never be mentioned on stations like Fox or CBS, Cable or PBS for that matter. This is why blogs are considered by some to be the closest to actual news that we can get with minimal corporate interest for better or worse. Of coarse you have exceptions like Pacifica a or freakradio.org but, they're rare and fare in-between.  

Robert Gates who by most accounts is the Washington fixer whose only real job is to rely information handed to him and depoliticize the war in Iraq much like he did in the late 1980s with Panama, Grenada, the Contra scandal and so on. He was the spin docker back in those days not much different than that Karl Rove is today, only with alot less success in cowing his opposition. He is the answer to the question why CBS didn't tell the American public that U.S. marines killed thousands of Panamanian citizens who just happened at the wrong place at the wrong time in the our invaison in 1989. The slaughter went beyond anything we saw on 9/11. But the lack of any mention of this story certainly can be considered one of Gate's true success stories.  Perhaps what is further troubling is that he was able to pull the media strings from behind the walls of the CIA building. So now he is some how expected to minimize the backlash from Iraq. The task however will probably be easier said than done however since the story is already out of the bag.

In a twist of irony, Bush may not really need Gates at this point, however. The Democrats have already climbed on board with the idea of increasing troops in Iraq. This doesn't mean that there isn't a split in the party. Ted Kennedy has already come out against the increase as has the more progressive members of the party. But, lets not kid ourselves here. It was Bill Clinton who continued a bombing campaign throughout the 1990s. And it is Harry Reid who is in a leadership position in the party and he has been running his seat the same way Bill Clinton ran the oval office. So it should come as no surprise that Reid who is very much a Clintonite Democrat would come out in favor of such a plan.

Then there is the social issue of the war in Iraq, both emotional and othrewise. The financial cost of the war is already over 351,496,619,777 dollars. http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182 . At the same time, we continue to see our social progrms getting slashed every year by millions of dollars while the U.S. public school system is little more than a joke these days.  One Florida school, expects only 25% of it's students are to graduate this year, you can watch the link below.  From an emotional level, close to 200,000 U.S. military soliders will need mental care that they will never recieve due to no fault of their own. Vietnam was but a mere taste of what troops have to deal with when they come home from less access to schools to burn wounds from weapons never before used.

For more on this story you can check out the link below. 

http://www.groundhog.tv/apps/editor/staticplayer.jsp?clip=1166565682827.wmv

http://www.groundhog.tv/apps/editor/staticplayer.jsp?clip=1166566233062.wmv

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Posted to ProBlogs.com on Monday, January 01, 2007
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