Beltway Press: the “4th Column” to the American people

Glenn Greenwald has posted a probably prescient and infuriating analysis explaining step-by-step how the so-called watershed month of September, when supporters of the Iraq War supposedly will finally have to put up or shut up, will be a total fizzle, with opponents of the war turned to ineffective jelly. The all-wise General Petraeus, the one who “wrote the book” on counter-insurgency, will come in and say “progress is being made.” Please, a show of hands: How many here think a general is going to come in and say, “We’re failing”?

Everyone with a vested interest in continuing the war, especially including the kept DC press, will chime right in. As Greenwald points out, Joe Klein of Time is already laying the groundwork from anonymous sources who say we are making progress already. Pay no attention to the spike in American military deaths to about 100 per month or more, or the fact that the last few months have been the worst since the war started. That’s just being picky. We are supposed to support the troops by not caring how many die or are wounded.

During the Spanish Civil War, a general marching four army “columns” into Madrid coined the term “5th Column” to describe friendly collaborators throughout the city. In modern usage, the perspective has reversed and it has basically come to mean “traitors,” like “Quislings” after the Norwegian collaborator with the Nazis.

It was Edmund Burke, as reported by Thomas Carlyle – lord, can Wikipedia and Google make you sound like a genius! – who supposedly dubbed the press group sitting in Parliament the “4th Estate,” in relation to the three “estates” (nobility, clergy, commoners) in the French Estates-General or “parliament.”

So doesn’t that make a large portion of the DC press corps, desperate to preserve their own credibility and stature at the expense of the country and the soldiers placed in a no-win situation, the “4th Column”?