Apparently the White House is pissed off that NBC News "deceptively edited" an interview with Bush talking about the whole appeasement nonsense. So Republican political operative and White House consigliere Ed Gillespie, fires off a letter to NBC News prez Steve Capus demanding that NBC run the whole interview, absent the edits. Whatever. So run the interview.
But this part of Gillespie's letter is unreal. He's pissed off that NBC said Iraq was in a state of civil war, way back in 2006:
On November 27, 2006, NBC News made a decision to no longer just cover the news in Iraq, but to make an analytical and editorial judgment that Iraq was in a civil war. As you know, both the United States government and the Government of Iraq disputed your account at that time. As Matt Lauer said that morning on The Today Show: "We should mention, we didn't just wake up on a Monday morning and say, 'Let's call this a civil war.' This took careful deliberation.'"
I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a "civil war." Is it still NBC News's carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?
Okay, first of all, this is coming from the folks who denied there was an insurgency in Iraq from 2003 to some time around 2004, between the Fallujah battles. But to claim that Iraq was not in a civil war during 2006, are you kidding!? And to demand a retraction? According to the Pentagon's own numbers, some 3,000 Iraqi civilians were being killed every month during the height of the fighting in 2006! Not a civil war, what the hell was that?
Here's how General Petraeus described the situation in Iraq in his April 8 testimony (courtesy of Real Clear Politics) before Congress: "[C]ivilian deaths have decreased over the past year to a level not seen since the February 2006 Samarra mosque bombing that set off the cycle of sectarian violence that tore the very fabric of Iraqi society in 2006 and early 2007."
Of course who would ever call a "cycle of sectarian violence that tore" Iraqi society a civil war? Obviously Petraeus himself wasn't allowed to say civil war, because earlier in his testimony he said Iraq had stood on the "brink" of civil war during 2006-2007. Instead he uses a White House approved euphemism for describing the sectarian fighting in Iraq.
In September, I described the fundamental nature of the conflict in Iraq as a competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources. This competition continues, influenced heavily by outside actors. And its resolution remains the key to producing long- term stability in Iraq. Various elements push Iraq's ethno-sectarian competition toward violence. Terrorists, insurgents, militia extremists and criminal gangs pose significant threats.
That's right, it's an "ethnic sectarian competition." No civil war here people, move along.
Comments