From tonight's 60 Minutes. I know, I know... Andy Rooney's an idiot... Who cares what he says... CBS is a liberal tool of the Democratic Party... Et cetera. Anyway, here it is. Andy Rooney: An Especially Bad War NEW YORK, April 6, 2003 The only real good news will be when this terrible time in American history is over. (CBS) A weekly commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've lived a long while now and I don't remember any more unpleasant times than these. I'm not even interested in reading the sports pages. I hate everything about this war except that we're winning it. You can't even be critical, either, without sounding unpatriotic. It's why Peter Arnett got fired by NBC for speaking on Iraqi television. I'm patriotic but I wish our government would stop treating this war as if they had to sell it to us with slick advertising slogans. The White House Web site puts out a bulletin about the war with this headline: OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. Come on, all we want is the news, not a sales pitch. They called our bombing campaign against Baghdad "Shock and Awe." After the UN refused to approve the war, our government put together a list of countries it said supported us. They called it a "coalition of the willing." The generals don't talk about American soldiers. It's always "coalition forces." It's as if there were no Americans there. Reporters have been sucked into it, too. The word makes it sound as though we're just a few countries short of having the whole world on our side, and that isn't true. Most of the world is against us. The Administration says 49 countries are part of the coalition. I see that Eritrea, Uganda and Iceland are on our side. The fact is, though, we're in this thing with the British, who have 45,000 soldiers there, and the Australians, who have 2,000. That's it. The other 46 wish us well or let us fly bombers over their country. Big deal. We've practically bribed some of them. We offered Turkey $15 billion to let our troops go through there but they refused. President Bush won't be sending the president of Turkey anything for his birthday this year. There aren't any good wars, but this one is especially bad. We want to win it quickly without more death but we're grown-up people, too. The President, Rumsfeld and the generals ought to stop treating us like children. Tell us the truth. We can take it even when it's bad. And the only real good news will be when this terrible time in American history is over.
Agreed. An understatement. This is different from every war we have ever been in exactly how? Every military operation has an op name. They're just made public now. OK...I'll admit. That's lame. It sounds more like a WWE tag team. That's what it is. It is a coalition, and it is comprised of willing nations. Would it have been better to call it Ruben sandwich? Had the UN gone in they would have been talking about UN troops. In Kosovo all they talked about were UN peacekeepers. Same thing, without the corporate sponsor. It is a big deal. Recall when we bombed Lybia. The French would not allow us to utilize their airspace. We lost a pilot because of that. I'll never forget watching the news that night. Big shock that it was the freaking French. But I digress...it is a HUGE deal when a nation allows you access to their airspace. They tried that during Vietnam. If anybody will recall, that didn't turn out so well. Bottom line: A fairly good article. He made some decent points. There are some things where it looked like he was searching for something to complain about though.
Actually, they didnt try that during the Vietnam war. I mean for how many years did they tell the American people they were "winning" this war, and that the people were right behind them. Also if you look at the "estimated death tolls" you will find that the government claimed to have killed over 1.5 million "charlie" I doubt that is remotly accurate. politicians lie, what makes us think its going to change during a time of war. History is written by the victors. Just keep that in mind, next time you recive info from the gov. They want to come away from this looking as good as possible. I understand why, but i also understand that I am not going to get the whole story.
