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Friend,
Over the last two weeks, the corporate media’s take on Afghanistan has gone something like this:
Afghanistan was a good and necessary war at the outset. If we’d only planned a little better and stayed a little longer, we wouldn’t have any of these problems we see now.
But in large part, the corporate media is as much to blame as anyone for marching the U.S. into the war and allowing its obvious failures to go unaddressed for nearly two decades.
The sad reality—which Common Dreams readers have known since 2001—is that the U.S. war in Afghanistan was never desirable or just—and it was never going to be “winnable.” It was always an exercise in American imperialism and what we see today is the entirely predictable outcome of 20 years of occupation, misguided nationalism, and corporate greed.
This is what happens when a bipartisan pro-war consensus joins with a complicit corporate media to sell a war to the American people on false premises. And it’s a prime example of why independent, progressive journalism is so essential.
Common Dreams has challenged the pro-war narrative from the start. We lifted up voices opposed to the war before it started and have spent nearly two decades exposing the death and destruction that proved sadly inevitable.
Here’s the point: Without independent media, who will expose the folly of the next war? Without outlets like Common Dreams, where will you turn when the cable networks and editorial pages of the major newspapers try to sell the next batch of lies?
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