Too little, too late?
WikiLeaks War Diary Prompts Bored Media To Finally Admit Afghanistan Is Not Going Well
Jason Linkins - Huffington Post Reporting
At some point, one could have predicted that the WikiLeaks document dump story would turn into a critique of the WikiLeaks document dump itself. Objectively speaking, there's very little that can be called authentically new information contained in the thousands of classified documents that WikiLeaks, in conjunction with the
New York Times,
Der Speigel, and the
Guardian, rolled out on Sunday. But the conversation on the lack of revelations is starting to shift into one that insists that there's nothing important to see here, let's move along!
I present to you my own mini-document dump, showing how WikiLeaks has exposed the fact that the media is just bored to tears with a life-or-death situation that costs American lives and untold sums of taxpayer dollars.
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Quoting Richard Cohen in The Washington Post:
Indeed, what would have been major news is if these documents supported any optimism. That would have been a stunning reversal of what is fast becoming conventional wisdom: The war in Afghanistan cannot be won as winning is now defined -- defeat of the Taliban, eradication of al-Qaeda and the preservation of a functioning central government run by someone like our close friend and cherished ally, Hamid Karzai. This is not going to happen.
Oh, what? You mean you didn't know the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable and there's no cause for "optimism?" My, my,
Washington Post readers! That's been the "conventional wisdom" for a long time.
(Cohen continues):
The Obama administration will go through the motions of hunting down the leaker and denouncing the leaks, as it should. (Government is entitled to some secrets; it needs them to protect us.) But after taking a deep breath, it may conclude that Wikileaks has done it a favor -- speaking the unspeakable, and not in the allegedly forked tongue of the mainstream media but in the actual words of combat soldiers. This will make the inevitable decision easier. Barack Obama, an unemotional man, will wind down the war in Afghanistan -- not just because he wants to but because he has to.
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Bar: Word Up
