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Ostriches....and dopes!

The debate about the Iraq War continues to rage, but Mike Carleton in his weekly column in the SMH pointedly reminds us about the ostriches - and dopes, many of whom inhabit the Murdoch press - who saw and still see all good in the Iraq fiasco and tragedy:

"On the subject of ostrich heads stuck firmly in the sand, will the self-styled culture warriors of our right-wing punditocracy ever acknowledge how disastrously wrong they were about the Iraq war?

It's all on the record. "As we approach war with Iraq, it's becoming obvious that George W. Bush is really a modern Winston Churchill," gushed Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, back in January 2003.

By April that year, just weeks after the American and coalition invasion, he and his fellow armchair strategists had the war done and won.

"All of the media analysts and many of the military analysts should hang their heads in shame," Sheridan wrote in the Oz. "Everything they told us was wrong. [Donald] Rumsfeld's historic project - transforming the US military into a lighter, faster, more precise and much more mobile beast - has had a huge boost."

Melbourne's village idiot, Andrew Bolt, a Herald Sun columnist, was also in triumphalist mode, almost capering in the streets. "No victory has been more complete and few can have promised so much good," he trumpeted to his readers.

On April 13, 2003, Gerard Henderson announced it was "time to junk the Vietnam association. In recent months, quite a few critics of George W. Bush's policy in the Gulf have warned that the United States could get bogged down in a Middle East quagmire similar to that which the US faced during the Vietnam War … Such an analysis demonstrates a misunderstanding of both the US commitment in Vietnam and contemporary America."

As late as February 2005, The Daily Telegraph's pompous bloviator-in-chief, Piers Akerman, was still hard at it: "Recollect our own quagmirists, those in the media who saw parallels with Vietnam?" he blathered. "Those puling broadcasters who all but wished defeat upon those who took the fight to Saddam when the UN Security Council dingoed its own resolutions? The determined turnout in Iraq is a vindication of the true global visionaries."

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