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we reward the kind of incompetence and/or lying as that described below in the essay by Robert Parry?
Gates Agrees, Bush's Wars Were Nuts
By Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com, February 27, 2011
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets that you’d have to be crazy to commit U.S. troops to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, media commentators quickly detected a slap at his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw those conflicts.
But what about everyone else in the U.S. power structure who went along with those insane and bloody wars? Shouldn’t such people – whether they acted out of ideology or opportunism – be kept away from levers of authority that might get others killed?
For instance, what about the top editors at the Washington Post, the New York Times and a host of other establishment publications and TV outlets who hopped on the pro-war bandwagon and mocked anyone who suggested that negotiations or some less violent means might be preferable?
If even a long-time war hawk like Gates recognizes the obvious – that committing U.S. land forces to such conflicts is nuts – then what’s to be said about the Post’s editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt or the Times’ executive editor Bill Keller or a host of other senior media executives and pundits who endorsed the wars and have suffered no dents in their shiny careers?
These hot-shots got the biggest stories of their lives dead wrong – and countless thousands have paid with their lives, not to mention the $1 trillion-plus drain on the U.S. Treasury – yet they float along as if nothing happened. Amazingly, Keller even got a promotion to the top editorial job at the Times after he was bamboozled by President George W. Bush’s bogus case for invading Iraq. ... continued
