The Old And The New

The 9/11 reflections begin today with the web copy of Ted Koppel's thoughts on the anniversary, and in a way it's a perfect microcosm of the problem the Village still has nine years later.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration's initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective -- a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared "mission accomplished," with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda's leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied.

Nowhere in Koppel's article do you see an admission of the major problem here:  it was the media itself after 9/11 that helped sell the connection between 9/11 and Iraq and got us into that deadly war in the first place.  Koppel in fact completely glosses over this, just like the media has been doing for, oh, nine years now.

What role did Koppel and his show Nightline play in selling the Iraq War to the American people?  it wasn't a small one, nor was it a small role for Koppel's employer, ABC News.  We know now that Dick Cheney's shop in the White House packaged and sold the Iraq War as a "product" to the Village media.  Getting public support for the invasion of Iraq was absolutely critical to invading and the media shaped that opinion.

In other words, the last person qualified to moan about how Bush should have stopped after Afghanistan and pulled out there was anyone involved in selling those trillion dollar quagmires to the American people....people like Ted Koppel.

Look in the mirror, man.  A healthy chunk of this blame falls squarely on the shoulders of you and your media colleagues.