Tom Brokaw should know better
The irresponsibility of the media continue. Is the national memory too short to remember that the media was used subsequent to 9/11 to sell an unnecessary catastrophic war? Tom Brokaw is a well respected journalist that has usually been fairly analytical. It is for that reason that the following is so shocking.
“I don’t want this broadcast to end without all of us dealing with the new reality,” Tom Brokaw said. “We are at war. This has changed. Paris has changed the place of America in this war against ISIS. And it is now a war. And it is not going to be a ground war with the United States sending twenty to forty thousand troops up against ISIS. It’s very complicated. We are going to have a greater presence in Iraq to protect the Iraqi government so it doesn’t fall. And then we have the same kind of division that we had in the past. We are going to have more special forces in Iraq to go against ISIS. We are going to have to control the air space. There is no question about that. We are not going to get a lot of help from our European allies this time. It’s not like Bush and Baker when they went to Iraq one.”
Helene Cooper sort of intimated Brokaw’s tunnel vision though she continued to use the war moniker. She pointed out the fact that terrorist groups do not only encompass ISIS but Al Qaeda elsewhere.
One should note that President Obama made a prescient statement that neocons and American journalists fail to understand. The President pointed out the irrationality of fighting ISIS in one place. What happens when a terrorist attack has its genesis in a country that isn’t Iraq or Syria. Does the U.S. go on a perpetual war against every country in which an attack is planned?
Kathleen Parker had a rare moment of brilliance.
“We are almost damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” Parker said. “Because when we talk about trying to prevent radicalization, how do you do that when you are viewed as an invasive force and you are killing more and more people.”
Tom Brokaw’s words to many have value. His comments on Meet the Press were irresponsible and devoid of any real analysis. Brokaw’s hysteria is not becoming of a journalist who is advising the populous at large. It is the hysteria that leads those who would misinform easy access to a populous ready to absorb easy solutions.
In a time where Republican presidential candidates are stoking war, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and racist fears, a journalist of Tom Brokaw’s stature should know better. Today he came across as a stooge of the defense industrial complex at best, or a willfully ignorant journalist.