What caused the rioting in Afghanistan? The article that Newsweek has now retracted? That’s what Rove and Co. want you to believe:
It’s a shame that Newsweek went ahead and ruined our nation’s image abroad. Everything was going so swell until it published fifty-eight words in a sidebar. Fifty-eight words that set the Middle East aflame.
My ass. Just few days ago, the senior commander in Afghanistan told General Myers that he didn’t think the article was the cause of the rioting:
“He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine,” General Myers said.
Somehow, I doubt that the senior commander is going to be singing that particular tune again.
I’m not going to defend Newsweek’s reporting, or lack thereof. But it’s obvious that wingnuts now have a convenient place to shift the blame for their own foreign policy failures. If the neocons hadn’t fucked up so royally in the Middle East, if the U.S. still had credibility on the world stage, fifty-eight words in the sidebar of a weekly news magazine with declining circulation numbers wouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as riots. If the U.S. hadn’t already flushed the Koran down the toilet in a figurative sense, no one would have believed that it would do so in a literal sense.
But just sit back and watch: the right will bring up this story again and again, arguing that Newsweek is to blame for everything that goes wrong in the future in the Middle East. And in the face of right-wing carping, the press will continue to ignore the real story.
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