They will tell us all the same lies about Afghanistan we heard about Iraq and the major media will never question it. In fact, they will aid Obama in pushing the lie as truth, and more innocent people will die at US military hands because of it.
It seems the US military is bound and determined to continue to out-do the Taliban and Al Quada as the number one terrorist threat on the planet.
The obvious conclusion is that we've learned absolutely nothing.
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The Script Calls for Victory, No Matter What
The Battle for Marjah
By PATRICK COCKBURN
American and Afghan forces are poised to attack the town of Marjah, the largest Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, in the first major US military offensive since President Barack Obama announced that he was sending 30,000 reinforcements.
The US strategy is to expel, kill or capture the Taliban, prevent their return, and then provide aid and services to a grateful populace. Described as a sophisticated attempt "to win the hearts and minds of Afghans", its covert and more realistic aim is to win the hearts and minds of the American press, particularly those back in the US who direct the efforts of reporters on the ground. The message the US military wants to send is that in Afghanistan it is fighting a winnable war and not blundering deeper into a quagmire.
The press likes short wars. Its audience is never so eager for news as during an armed conflict. The first newspapers date from the wars of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Television likes the melodrama of exploding shells and blazing tanks. And it is this very eagerness to report the fighting that makes it so easy to manipulate. The US army successfully sold the "surge" in Iraq as a military victory so that the American public scarcely noticed that US troops were withdrawing, leaving Iraq in the hands of a government closely allied to Iran.
Television is surprisingly ill-adapted to covering wars. It needs pictures, but on a modern battlefield there is very little to see. Ever since soldiers started using long range rifles everybody has very sensibly kept their heads down. Films are wholly misleading about what warfare today looks like, giving the impression that D Day was fought at close range, much like the battles of Hastings or Agincourt. "Saving Private Ryan" was praised for its gritty realism, presumably because it showed blood and guts. In reality, the film understandably enough goes along with the fiction that highly visible soldiers blaze away suicidally at each other at point blank range.
A frustrating lack of anything to see during real fighting explains why so many of the iconic photographs or films showing 20th century wars, such as a soldier at the moment of death in the Spanish civil war, or the raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in Berlin 1945, turn out to have been staged after the event.