A Look Back At How The 'Liberal Media' Covered The 'Mission Accomplished' Day 8 Years Ago
From A USA Today piece back then: "This was a war worth fighting. It ended quickly with few civilian casualties and with little damage to Iraq's cities, towns or infrastructure. It ended without the Arab world rising up against us, as the war's critics feared, without the quagmire they predicted, without the heavy losses in house-to-house fighting they warned us to expect. It was conducted with immense skill and selfless courage by men and women who will remain until Iraqis are safe, and who will return home as heroes."
During that month eight years ago, I was just being named this newspaper's business editor and was writing a weekly column focused on race and other complex relationships, not politics. Had I been writing columns as I do now, I probably would have been part of the liberal media fawning over the triumph of a conservative president, too, at least in some way. I believed in the weapons of mass destruction theory, as well as removing dictators when we can to free millions of people. The failure to find WMDs caused me to vote for a third-party candidate in 2004 (I voted for Bush in 2000) and to question every military venture since.
In 2004, I wrote this about the Iraq war: Never Stop Asking Why
