http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/061007.htmlPowell Belies 'Commander Guy' Bush
By Robert Parry
June 10, 2007
For the past several months, the Washington press corps has dutifully reported George W. Bush’s attack on Democrats as politicians who wish to impose their Iraq War judgments on the military commanders in the field.
According to Bush, the Democrats think that U.S. commanders in Iraq should “take fighting directions from politicians 6,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.,” while he by contrast is “a commander guy” who follows the advice of military men on the front lines.
Very few U.S. journalists have dared to contradict this presidential fiction, even though they watched in December and January as Bush spurned the advice of virtually all his top commanders before adopting recommendations of neoconservative theorists for a “surge” in U.S. forces. Bush then fired key commanders who opposed him.
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No press uproar followed his “commander guy” comment just as there was no protest over the past four years whenever Bush insisted that Saddam Hussein didn’t let U.N. inspectors into Iraq before the invasion. (For details on that fib, see Consortiumnews.com’s “GOP/Media Rewrite Iraq War History.”)
But now on “Meet the Press,” a high-profile Washington news show, media darling Colin Powell has spelled out that Bush repudiated the counsel of virtually every senior commander in order to clear the way for a neoconservative scheme that has escalated the pace of U.S. military deaths in Iraq, which now exceed 3,500.
Many Americans, however, won’t be surprised if the U.S. press corps still manages to look the other way and leave the responsibility of pointing out these unpleasant facts to Internet sites and blogs.