UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
As is the custom at these annual dinners, the
President was on hand, traditionally as the target
for a comic assault. Not this year. There was
no humor, no satire, no criticism, no real barbs
allowed. The New York Times called it the most
subdued such event ever. Just one big happy
family, with Press Secretary Ari Fleisher on one
side of the dais, and his nemesis, the dean of the
White House reporters and war critic Helen
Thomas, on the other. She was not invited to
speak.
This was the year for an aging Ray Charles to
play old standards, and for President Bush to ask
for God’s blessings for the souls of two American
reporters who died covering his war. Once again,
he was playing preacher, not president. He cited
approvingly the late NBC reporter David
Bloom’s last email speaking of his love of wife,
children and Jesus. The President was giving not
a speech as much as a benediction.
The press is there year after year, it is said, as
a sign of respect for the office of the President.
Reporters like to see themselves as having an
adversarial relationship with the officialdom
they cover, but except for a few stalwarts like
Helen Thomas and perhaps Dana Milbank of the
Washington Post, they seem more like adulators
than journalists.
In this year of triumph, Bush spoke of the great
successes of the war, and praised embedded
reporters. He spoke of toppling the tyrant and
used other applause lines that worked so well in
his many speeches at military bases.
To my surprise, this audience of professional
skeptics gave him a big hand, as if victory in Iraq
had been assured.
Yes, the smoke is clearing, the looting is subsiding
and the President is declaring an end to
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the military phase of the invasion. But was there
“Victory in Iraq”? And if, so for whom?
As American newscasters gloated when each
former regime member was snagged, described
by his place in the Pentagon’s deck of cards –
“We got the ace of spades, heh-heh” – it seemed
as though the rout was complete.
Saddam is out of commission. But, is he alive
or dead? Tariq Aziz says he is still alive. But it
doesn’t seem to matter as much as it once did.
Our Republican Guard has defeated theirs.
Iraq is in ruins. The infrastructure is busted up
pretty good, along with the country’s stability,
economy and former sense of enforced unity
under Saddam. Now the country is fractured into
political factions, many demanding that the U.S.
get out.
Is this Iraqi freedom?
If the Afghanistan experience is any guide,
reconstruction and order will be a long time
coming. On April 26, the day that The New York
Times reported the Pentagon was sending a
“team of exiles to help run Iraq,” The Times’s
Carlotta Gall reported from Kabul, “In a very
real sense, the war here has not ended.” She is
one of the few U.S. journalists still in the Afghan
capital.
According to media monitor Andrew Tyndall,
the Afghanistan story, in network parlance, has
all but “gone away.” He reports, “The war in
Afghanistan received 306 minutes of coverage on
the newscasts in November 2001, but that
dropped to 28 minutes by February 2002, and last
month it was one minute.”
The Bush Administration had also deemed
that Afghan war a victory, and much of the press
concurred, even though Osama bin Laden and
Mullah Omar were never found. Terrorists