Stardate 20031017.1329

(On Screen via long range sensors): Oh, dear; it seems as if we've won the war but are losing the peace... in Europe, in 1946. Jessica's Well makes a magnificent discovery: an issue of Life Magazine published in January of 1946 which contains articles about how badly things are going in Europe in the aftermath of the war. This was about seven months after V-E day, and about five months after V-J day and the end of the war. That's just about where we are now relative to the end of major combat operations in Iraq, and the article sounds uncannily like much of the negative reporting we're seeing now from Iraq. One could take that article and replace "European" with "Iraqi" and "Nazi" with "Baathist" and "Hitler" with "Saddam" and it would sound like it had come out of the NYTimes in the last week.

Historically speaking, we unequivocally won "the peace" in Europe. The American military occupation of western Europe since WWII gave them the longest unbroken peaceful period since Charlemagne. Post-war reconstruction took a lot of time, but no one can argue with the results. (Unless they have an agenda.) One lesson from this is that it is premature to judge success or failure when you're only a few months into a multi-year process, but that someone's always going to try.

But another lesson is that biased anti-American reporting is nothing new.

Major kudos to "Site Admin" for discovering and posting such a wonderful example of doom-and-gloom reporting which was so spectacularly wrong.