“Serious people”: remember what happened when we backed “puppet governments”?

Several commentators have been properly taking the big-time pundits and editors to task for treating pro-war and pro-surge think-tankers as “serious” – as opposed to the “soft” people who want to begin ending our occupation of Iraq as soon as possible, who despite being right about virtually everything are nevertheless not allowed to contribute to the dialogue on how we deal with the mess the “serious” people created. Nevertheless, as Walldon shows below, the bully platform extended for the past five years by the national media to the pro-war people never gets yanked, no matter how much they deserve it.

In light of our historical experience with Batista and Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah of Iran and, of course, Viet Nam, how can anyone be considered “serious” who failed to realize that a government created and protected by the United States of America, a Western, predominantly Christian nation that is perceived as the heir to earlier colonial overlords in the region, after a military assault on country that did not invite us, with hundreds of thousands of people dead or injured as unfortunate collateral damage, in a country where almost none of our people speak the language or understand the culture, where there is already universal anger towards us for, in their eyes, unfairly protecting Israel as an interloper that took over Muslim land and displaced millions of Arabs, would not be seen as a legitimate government, and, therefore, that “success” would literally be impossible?

Why does the press refuse, absolutely refuse, to demand to know what Bush, Cheney and their supporters mean by “success,” or to recognize that success absolutely cannot be demonstrated until after our military ceases supporting the government we created? Why are they refusing to ask how this government created and protected by the U.S., especially under the uniquely unfavorable circumstances described above, could possibly not be considered by the people to be an illegitimate puppet government? What part of the term “puppet government” did these people not understand? What versions of history did they read? Shouldn’t anyone who did not understand it – the Pearls, the Adelmans, the Pollocks, the O’Hanlons, the Kagens, just to name a few – be required to forfeit their “serious” label for at least a generation? And shouldn’t anyone who continues to call them “serious” after all this time, and anyone who joins in the conspiracy of silence refusing to ask the central questions, be required to join them in their think-tank sinecures funded by the Scaifes and Coors?