After the indefensible disaster of the Iraq War, we are not as quick to trust politicians when they try to get involved in foreign conflicts.
In 2013, President Obama tried his best to rally our support for war when Syrian President Assad defied Obama’s Line in the Sand. We were just about to go to war against Damascus and possibly Russia when the American people resoundingly and smartly rose up against it.
So… what is a militarist regime to do when its people don’t trust it and are sick of war? Battle secretly, of course!
The US is still actively involved in Libya. Our bombing raids destroyed a stable, anti-Islamist, pro-minority regime and replaced it with chaos, Al-Qaeda, and a return to the slave trade. And we’re still there finding new ways to mess the place up.
Our military has been working hand in hand with Saudi Arabia to decimate Yemen since 2015. It never bothered to tell us why.
There are US boots in Pakistan even though it is not even clear whether the regime in Islamabad is our ally or a pro-Taliban, pro-terrorism arch enemy.
There is an enduring military and CIA presence in Chad, Congo, Ethiopia and Somalia. They figure that you don’t know where those countries are and don’t care how many people we kill there.
Oh, by the way, the military is still meddling in Syria, too, even though we told them not to.
THE story of the Obama years was how the War on Terror went underground. But it wasn’t covered because the Establishment Media is shameless and terrible.
Apparently, that was not always the case.
Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” tells the semi-gripping story of how the feisty editor (Tom Hanks) and the brave publisher (Meryl Streep) of the Washington Post defied the Nixon Administration and published the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
The Pentagon Papers were a secret report by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that explored the consequences of American actions in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
The two most damning aspects of the Pentagon Papers was the revelation that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson actively lied to the American people about what was really happening in Vietnam. And the upsetting fact that the military agreed that the war was unwinnable as early as 1965 but sent two million more men there, anyway.
We are supposed to feel like the Washington Post reporters were brave to publish the Pentagon Papers because the Nixon White House had filed a court injunction trying to criminalize the publication of military secrets.
Spielberg tried to spin this into a life and death battle for the free press. It wasn’t. It was little more than an ill-conceived dirty trick by the White House against hostile newspapers that Nixon feared were working to destroy him. He was dead right, by the way.
The more compelling drama comes from publisher Kay Graham’s difficult decision to betray her close friends Lady Bird Johnson and Robert McNamara by making them look bad in her newspaper.
“The Post” is an awkward failure by an aging director who may be losing his edge for good. Every conclusion that Spielberg makes is either childishly obvious or completely wrong.
His primary argument is that the Pentagon Papers marks the end of the era where newspaper bigwigs befriended and protected politicians.
The last decade proves that this is total hogwash. The press kept silent about the secret wars of the Obama years because it adored the President.
And if American reporters ever decide to shine a spotlight on the lies and abuses of our military and CIA, it will not be because they care about the lives of brown and black people. It will be because they want to destroy a President who refuses to be friends with them.