Bullock's Gold Standard

John Pilger was on Alternative Radio recently. The substance of the talk is printed on Znet. In this talk he castigates British media (the BBC in this case) regarding the war in Iraq:

"BBC news routinely describes the invasion as a miscalculation. Not Illegal, not unprovoked, not based on lies, but a miscalculation.

The words "mistake" and "blunder" are common BBC news currency, along with "failure"—which at least suggests that if the deliberate, calculated, unprovoked, illegal assault on defenseless Iraq had succeeded, that would have been just fine."

NPR's Tom Bullock offers a perfect example of this rationalization/glorification of the underlying premises of the US project in Iraq. Commenting on his first weeks in Iraq "just after the invasion" of 2003 Bullock states, "It was just after the invasion, and this was the golden era — or at least that's how it seems now. We worked our butts off. But looking back now, what I remember most is how we spent our down time." He then goes on to talk about strolling about Baghdad, buying pizza, getting a hair cut, listening to music, etc. He tells us "That world was brilliant, brief, and, is no more."

Well, it may have been for some. But to describe the aftermath of a country pummeled by ten years of airstrikes and inhumane sanctions and a terribly lethal invasion in which huge numbers of cluster bombs were used as "a golden era" and a world that was "brilliant" and "brief" is telling to say the least.