I smelled a rat when I was watching the breathless CNN reporting the morning of "Operation Swarmer." CNN analyst General George Harrison (ret.), had nothing more to go on than a photo of a line of helicopters but he managed to riff that this operation was a great sign that Iraqi soldiers (two and a half years after starting to train them) are finally ready to do the heavy lifting. It seemed on the tip of his lips to say, "They're standing up so, don't worry America, very soon we'll be standing down." How would he know anything about the percentage of Iraqi to American troops on those choppers? I wonder if he and other ex-military ever get briefed by the Pentagon before the news outlets because they know that CNN and Fox will come a-calling and they want to make sure that everyone parrots the party line.
As Time is reporting now, Operation Swarmer was nothing more than an expensive photo op, an over-hyped training exercise. It seems obvious that it was timed more for political cover here at home than in a serious effort to win a now unwinnable war.
I was a kid during Vietnam but remember the inflated body counts and all the other tricks our government used to dupe the media into reporting that we were winning that war. It took years for the media to wise up. Wolf Blitzer is a lot older than me. How can he keep falling for their crap?