Hollywood’s Lost War

NOTE: This is a piece that was originally published a few days ago, but was lost to a server move.

Ross Douthat has a great piece in The Atlantic on how Hollywood is returning to the themes of the 1970s due in large part to the Iraq War:

Nothing in this commentary, however, bears much resemblance to the way American popular culture actually has evolved since 9/11. The latter-day cowboys have conspicuously failed to materialize: in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Tears of the Sun proved to be an outlier; more typical of our cultural moment are the movies that its director and star turned out early last year. In Fuqua’s Shooter, a redneck sniper goes up against a conspiracy that’s headed by a villainous right-wing Montana senator (who happens to be a Dick Cheney look-alike) and aimed at covering up an oil company’s human-rights abuses. In Robert Rodriguez’s B-movie homage, Planet Terror, Willis plays another military man, but this time the plot, such as it is, turns on a zombie-creating nerve agent that may have been tested on Willis and his soldiers, the movie hints, as punishment for their having killed Osama bin Laden when the government wanted him kept alive and at large.

Such self-conscious nods to contemporary controversies should be taken, in part, as proof that our popular culture is more impervious to real-world tragedy than most critics would care to admit. The machine that churns out Hollywood blockbusters grinds on remorselessly, and nothing so minor as a terrorist attack is going to keep the next Pirates of the Caribbean from its date with box-office destiny.

But it wasn’t just the reassertion of America’s usual frivolity that caused the 9/11 moment to be stillborn; it was the swiftness with which the Iraq War replaced the fall of the Twin Towers as this decade’s cultural touchstone. It’s Halliburton, Abu Ghraib, and the missing WMDs that have summoned up a cultural moment in which bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek punch line for a zombie movie and the film industry’s typical take on geopolitics traces all the world’s evils to the machinations of a White Male enemy at home.

Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many on the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era, returning us to the shackles of censorship and conformism, jingoism and Joe McCarthy. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, another decade entirely seems to have slouched round again: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.

We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.

What’s interesting is how all of Hollywood’s attempts to portray the war in Iraq have failed. Redacted was an absolute bomb. Ditto Lions for Lambs. Same for In the Valley of Elah. No doubt Stop Loss, the latest anti-war polemic will do no better. Hollywood is a town where the dollar is king, yet the studios keep churning out the same stories and keep getting the same results.

There’s no shortage of amazing stories coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan—including those that could offer a balance perspective on the horrors of war. Yet Hollywood keeps spitting out predictable, preachy anti-war films in which the military are either sadists or treated as pawns. The idea of actually telling a story without constantly having to insert a political message that has all the subtlety and nuance of a kick to the testicles seems totally alien to Hollywood these days. It’s as though the directors want to take a rhetorical bullhorn and say LOOK! I’M BEING TOTALLY RELEVANT NOW! CAN’T YOU FEEL THE OUTRAGE! Meanwhile, everyone’s gone home and turned on The Office.

What Hollywood doesn’t get is that it’s not that audiences are too stupid to see the greatness of their work, it’s that Hollywood is too sanctimonious to realize that their work isn’t great at all. It’s a sad commentary on Hollywood today that one of the most relevant shows in terms of exploring this war is Battlestar Galactica in which the terrorists are inexplicably attractive, yet evil robot clones. In Galactica the military and the government are not a bunch of moustache-twirling villains, but are portrayed as three-dimensional characters dealing with an impossible situation. (It helps that the showrunning, Ronald D. Moore, actually served in the military and offers a great deal of authenticity.) Hollywood can be relevant, at least in metaphorical form.

The reason why most of the Iraq War movies have failed is that they constantly try to be “message” movies. War is bad. Halliburton is bad. Bush is bad. Cheney is really, really bad. If the American people wanted to hear stories about how incompetent our government is, we’d watch the news. Hollywood keeps coming back to the same old clichés—the sadistic soldier, the heartless military bureaucracy, the “rogue agent.” All of those clichés have been used up more than Britney Spears, and don’t look any better.

The War Movie That Nobody’s Making

If anyone wants to make a truly great war movie, here’s what they need to do. Don’t try to give us a “message.” Don’t try to push an agenda. Just tell a story. You know, the thing that Hollywood is supposed to do well? You don’t have to create some scathing indictment of war—if you just show war it indicts itself. Saving Private Ryan is one of the greatest war movies ever made because it never flinches from showing the horrors of war. It’s not a “pro-war” movie, nor is it an “anti-war” movie. It’s just a movie about war. You don’t need to create the character of Col. Evil McHitler who secretly sells the organs of Iraqi children to Halliburton to be used to grease oil drills to expose the horrors of war. War is itself horrible, and by creating all these silly little contrivances Hollywood doesn’t add to their message, they detract from it.

The best films coming out of the Iraq War are documentaries. Gunner Palace is one of the best movies about this war, not because the filmmakers went in to push an agenda, but because they just turned the cameras on and let things happen. The real-life soldiers in Gunner Palace are more fascinating than the cardboard-cutouts in movies like Jarhead. The situations they face don’t require elaborate and silly conspiracy theories. Instead, they’re in the middle of an unfamiliar country filled with unfamiliar people. The lines between friend and foe are frequently blurred. There’s an amazing effective scene in Gunner Palace in which the unit arrests the Iraqi man that had been working with them as a translator for months. They arrest him for working with the same insurgents that were trying to kill them. Nothing in any Hollywood war film in the last few years is as powerful as the sense of betrayal and confusion that those real-world soldiers displayed. There are thousands of stories like that happening in Iraq—yet instead of letting those stories be told, Hollywood just generates more crude propaganda.

Douthat’s lengthy piece goes much deeper into the return of the culture of the 1970s in Hollywood, including how it’s effected more than just war movies. Still, we don’t need films that hearken back to the 70s any more than we need a return to avacado-green appliances and orange shag carpet. What we need are movies that are relevant to today. The reason why Hollywood’s effort to make war movies have led to box office death is that they keep missing the real stories. In trying to damn war in general and this war in particular they keep undermining themselves by replacing the complex horrors of war with crude stereotypes. It’s like trying to say that Nightmare on Elm Street is a deep exploration of Sigmund Freud.

Just because the war in Iraq is unpopular doesn’t mean it’s not worth exploring through film—and exploring well. Hollywood’s attempts at “relevance” are ham-handed and self-defeating. Hollywood is supposed to be good at telling stories. Yet they are nowhere near as good as the men and women who have served in Iraq in understanding what this war is really about. For all Hollywood’s obsession with their own “bravery” none are so bold as to let the truly brave tell their own stories. Hollywood isn’t brave enough to create a movie told from the Iraqi perspective that depicts the systematic brutalization of the Hussein regime followed by the uncertainty and chaos. For all Hollywood’s bravery, few in Hollywood are so brave as to make a movie in which al-Qaeda is the enemies. It’s safe to indict your own government. We live in a free society. A film that indicts al-Qaeda could get you killed. So much for bravery. Instead, Hollywood gives us a steady diet of polemics that are designed to make sure we all think the right way about this war. Instead, they should simply show the reality and let us decide for ourselves.

There are a million stories coming from Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time that Hollywood told their stories, not the ones that our insulated Hollywood elites think will get them pats on the back from their own ilk. This war is becoming a “lost war,” and that does no service to the men and women who put their lives on the line for a conflict few of us can even begin to understand.

The Battle For Basra

The Iraqi Army is engaged in a major action against Shi’ite militias in the southern Iraqi city of Basra as radical “cleric” Moqtada al-Sadr is calling for “civil disobedience” against the Iraqi government:

The clashes came as Sadr’s movement mounted a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in many parts of eastern and central Baghdad, demanding the release of Sadr’s followers from detention centers and an end to Iraqi government raids. Sadrist leaders ordered stores to be shut down and taxi and bus drivers to stop operating. Television footage Tuesday showed neighborhoods turned into virtual ghost towns, their usually busy streets all but empty.

In a statement, Sadr called upon Iraqis to stage sit-ins and threatened a nationwide “civil revolt” if U.S. and Iraqi forces continue attacking and arresting his followers.

The actions were the latest sign that the ceasefire imposed by Sadr on his Mahdi Army militia is under strain.

Al-Sadr is worried: he renewed his “cease fire” recently, but now the radicals are losing confidence in his leadership. Over the period of the cease fire, several splinter groups decided to ignore his orders and launched attacks against the Iraqis and the coalition. Now it appears that al-Sadr is trying to placate those who want more action. There’s a huge risk in that: al-Sadr risks losing popular support by undermining the security gains of the last year and risks the dismantling of his organization at the hands of the Iraqi Police and Army.

That’s precisely what needs to happen. Moqtada al-Sadr has been a thorn in the side of Iraqi peace for far too long. Having the Iraqi government take him down, rather than the coalition, is the best option in terms of minimizing the fallout. Al-Sadr’s actions have indicated that he wants to be a terrorist rather than a politician, and he should be treated accordingly.

If Moqtada al-Sadr were such a great leader beloved by the Iraqis, he wouldn’t need to be hiding in Iran. The fact that al-Sadr seems unwilling or unable to show his face in Iraq is itself suggestive of his lack of power. His rise to power was based on the threat of Sunni militants—with al-Qaeda in Iraq being rolled back more and more each day, there’s little need for his “services.”

With luck, this will be the ignominious end of Moqtada al-Sadr—a marginalized figure being groomed for Iran for a position he’ll never be able to take. His Mahdi Army crushed, his followers disenchanted, his movement disbanded, al-Sadr will be unable to threaten Iraq’s peace and stability again. It is important that the young Iraqi state crush this rebellion—as important as George Washington putting down the Whiskey Rebellion was in our early history. The state must have the monopoly of violence to legitimize itself, and al-Sadr’s attempt at rebellion will ensure that the Iraqi government establishes quite clearly that it will defend itself from attack by undemocratic forces.

Safety And Numbers

A recent study conducted by the BBC has shown that Iraqis are feeling increasingly secure as the level of violence in Iraq drops. What’s interesting to note is the disparity between people who feel safe in their own homes, yet still think the rest of the country is unsafe. The same factors that explain why many Americans feel secure in their own finances yet thing think that the country as a whole is in recession apply to the Iraq data. People tend to only have limited and largely anecdotal contacts with places outside their own perception—so what they think of the outside world is shaped by the media. And the media runs on the maxim “if it bleeds, it leads.”

Looking at the survey data, it does look as though the security situation in Iraq is finally calming down. That doesn’t mean that there will not be sporadic acts of violence—as long as the opportunity costs are so low, groups like al-Qaeda will continue to launch a low-level campaign of intimidation. However, it’s a numbers game. Al-Qaeda has to launch enough attacks to keep the Iraqi populace in fear. The Iraqis are continuing to supply intelligence to the Iraqi police and military as well as the coalition. More terrorists get caught, which leads to more captures, until entire cells are compromised.

The situation in Iraq will be one long rollback, but that which was supposedly impossible has already been done—Iraq’s slide into anarchy has been halted. The security situation has begun to stabilize. Political progress has been made on key issues like oil and de-Ba’athification. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is losing, and losing decisively.

The war in Iraq was pronounced to be all but lost only one year ago—and now the situation is looking anything but lost. In war as in life, fortune favors the bold, and the boldness of men like Col. H.R. McMaster and Gen. David Petraeus have ensured that the situation in Iraq is vastly improved from where it was just one year ago.

Spinning The Iraq/Al-Qaeda Links

The major news networks are running a story that claims that the Pentagon has released a study that says that Iraq and al-Qaeda were not linked before the fall of the Hussein regime. As Andrew McCarthy finds, the report actually says the direct opposite of what the media claims it says. For example, he notes the abstract to the report:

Captured Iraqi documents have uncovered evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist and Islamic terrorist organizations. While these documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al Qaeda as long as Saddam could have these terrorist-operatives monitored closely. Because Saddam’s security organizations and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a “de facto” link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime. (Emphasis mine.)

So, you have the mainstream media saying that the Pentagon’s report says that there was absolutely no link, yet the abstract to the report quite explicitly saying that there is a link.

We’ve known for some time that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden didn’t call each other every day, and they certainly weren’t each other’s BFF, to borrow a phrase. However, what the Pentagon report says is exactly what the argument has been all along: the Iraqi regime did have ties to terrorists, and those terrorists included members of al-Qaeda. They were willing to work together despite their differences, and it was more than plausible that had Saddam Hussein broken free of the sanctions he very well could have passed the results of a renewed WMD program to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and still maintain plausible deniability.

The media is spinning this report, and they’re not being even the least bit subtle about it. They’re hoping that people don’t bother reading it, don’t bother understanding it, and don’t question their narrative. If ever there was an example of agenda-based and shamelessly partisan journalism, this would be it.

In the old days, the media narrative would go unquestioned, but in a era of citizen journalism it’s a lot harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes—and apparently the media hasn’t learned that lesson quite yet.

Building A Government From The Ground Up

Bill Ardolino takes a deep look inside the tumultuous politics of Iraq in The Long War Journal. He gives a level of analysis we never see in the mainstream media, delving deeply into the structure of the Iraqi government and examining what is working and what is not:

While divisive politics and naked sectarian interest receive most of the blame for Iraq’s political inertia, government inefficiency, corruption, and administrative inexperience arguably pose larger problems.

“We think our system is bureaucratic … their system is even more bureaucratic. It tends to be a paper-based system. … They tend to require lots of signatures from different technocrats along the way. They tend not to delegate much,” said Brigadier General Terry Wolff, the Special Assistant to the President and the Senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Policy Implementation on the National Security Council.

As an example, a paper-based system of requisitions adds layers of difficulty for various provincial police headquarters getting equipment from the Ministry of the Interior. Thus, both Western observers and police officers in a Sunni province like Anbar might view equipment shortages as the product of sectarian hostility by the Shia-dominated federal government, when much of the delay is really administrative.

Iraq’s problems are becoming less visible, but the Iraqi government still has a long way to develop. The Iraqis are returning to the model they know, which is the corruption and centralization of the Ba’athist regime. It will take some time for their to be the political transitions necessary for Iraq to have a truly stable government. That will mean clearing out corruption in the various ministries and streamlining bureaucratic processes. It will also require the Iraqis to have a view of government that promotes democratic accountability rather than the centralization of the Ba’athist era.

Those are all multi-generational changes. The Iraqis have not had anything even close to democratic government in at least a generation. The transition from dictatorship to democracy is never easy, and it cannot be accomplished in the space of a mere 5 years. The Iraqis are making some progress, but that progress is slow. What matters is not that the Iraqi people have a fully functional government quickly, but that they carefully start building the legal, political and administrative foundations for good government.

Ardolino’s look inside the Iraqi government gives us an idea of what’s going right and what is going wrong. In order to understand what’s going on in Iraq, we can’t merely rely on the crude stereotypes in the mainstream media. Iraq is far more diverse, far more vibrant, and far more complex than the caricature presented by the media. This unique look inside the Iraqi government gives us a perspective we might otherwise never gets, and will give future researchers and political scientists an opportunity to see the process of democratic development in a way we’ve never been able to see before.

UPDATE: It’s Bill Ardolino, not Bill Roggio. Mea maxima culpa.

State Of The Union Preview

Via National Review is this preview of tonight’s State of the Union address. Captain Ed will be liveblogging the speech at Captain’s Quarters. I’ll be in class tonight and will have to catch the speech in reruns.

It is interesting that Bush is finally going for earmark reform, but in a way that punts the reforms into next year when Bush won’t have to deal with it. It’s a case of “better late than never” but it’s hardly an act of political courage for the President to finally jump on the reform bandwagon without actually doing anything to stem the tide of pork this year.

Saddam’s Final Miscalculation

One of the rationales for the war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was someone with a history of major strategic miscalculation. He failed to assess what Iran would do after his attacks on Iran, sparking the Iran/Iraq War. He miscalculated the international response to his invasion of Kuwait. Now the world is learning of Saddam’s final miscalculation. After the capture of Saddam Hussein, FBI Agent George Piro was assigned to the interrogation of the former dictator. What he learned is now being shared with the public, and it demonstrates exactly where the deception was on the presence of WMDs in Iraq:

“And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?” Pelley asks.

“He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s. And those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq,” Piro says.

“So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?” Pelley asks.

“It was very important for him to project that because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq,” Piro says.

Before his wars with America, Saddam had fought a ruinous eight year war with Iran and it was Iran he still feared the most.

“He believed that he couldn’t survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?” Pelley asks.

“Absolutely,” Piro says.

This has always been the most consistent and logical explanation—far more so than the conspiracy stories about the White House inventing the existence of Iraqi WMDs. Saddam Hussein lied to the world, his own people were probably lying to him and the West had no way of piercing Saddam’s inner circle in order to learn the truth. Saddam, despite having had the ability to prevent the war, chose to retain his strategic position with Iran. This miscalculation of American intent was fatal. The CIA, having plenty of evidence (however tenuous) that Iraq had WMDs believed that they had, in the words of Director George Tenet, a “slam dunk” case for the presence of Iraqi arms.

Saddam Hussein wanted the world to believe that he had weapons of mass destruction and was just crazy enough to potentially use them. He deliberately flooded intelligence channels with misinformation to keep up that ruse. It’s also quite likely that Saddam’s regime was lying to its own commanders, several of whom believed that WMDs were to be used in the fight against the US and the other coalition members. Iraqi troops were even given antidotes to chemical weapons agents which may never have existed. The web of deception was all designed to intimidate foreign powers from attacking Iraq. However, Saddam believed that the US would launch token air strikes, not take down his regime.

The real story of the war in Iraq isn’t one in which the US fabricated a causus belli but one in which Saddam Hussein was called on his own bluff. He managed to fool the Americans, the Germans, the British, the Egyptians, the French, the Iranians, the Russians and the United Nations into believing that he had an arsenal of deadly chemical and biological agents.

We may never know the full story of what really went on in the minds of Saddam Hussein and his inner circle, but these new revelations suggest that the common narrative of this war is wrong. There was a leader who lied himself into war—but that leader was Saddam Hussein.

Doing What They Do Best

David Weigel notes how the anti-war left is “moving on” after failing to “stop the war”:

If you’d said in January 2007 that Congress would fully fund the Iraq War, that there would be no timelines, and that a pro-war group fronted by Ari Fleischer would humiliate MoveOn… well, you’d be smarter than me.

It’s interesting to see that the surrender caucus has basically surrendered themselves. All the talk about how they were going to “end the war” ended up hitting the brick wall of reality. The Democrats didn’t have the votes, and the idea that there was a massive groundswell of opposition to the war never materialized. The reason behind that is rather simple: this war doesn’t effect most of us. This is not Vietnam. There’s no draft, the people fighting in Iraq are people who signed up to be in the military, not conscripts. Iraq is a theoretical issue for 90% of this country. They may not like the war, but it’s not something that directly effects them.

The other problem is that the anti-war left overplayed its hand. They immediately pronounced the surge to be a failure: which left them looking like idiots when the surge actually worked. To use a poker metaphor, the Democrats went all in thinking that they had a good hand—but when the flop actually came down, they ended up losing. Now the Democrats are in the unnecessary position of having to backtrack on their own rhetoric. It just proves the point that many of us have been making for years now: the Democratic Party is invested in failure in Iraq, and victory in Iraq is a loss for them. At some level, that comes down as unseemly, even for those who oppose the war.

I don’t think Iraq will be a major political issue. Al-Qaeda is unable to mount a convincing counteroffensive. Each day they wait they lose more, so if they had the capability of punching back it seems likely they’d have done it by now. Unless there’s a mass-casualty event, the American people have accepted Iraq as part of life. It doesn’t effect them, and it doesn’t fire people up who aren’t already anti-war.

That won’t stop the Democrats from using Iraq as a campaign issue, and Democrats respond strongly to it. However, it’s not the major issue that it was in 2004 and 2006 (and it wasn’t even the key issue in 2006). The Democrats bought into their own rhetoric: they assumed they won because of a groundswell of opposition to the war rather than the lack of leadership among the Republicans. They overplayed their hand, and now they’ve been forced to surrendering on surrender.

Invested In Failure

The Washington Post has a pointed op-ed asking why the Democrats cannot acknowledge that the “surge” actually worked:

A reasonable response to these facts might involve an acknowledgment of the remarkable military progress, coupled with a reminder that the final goal of the surge set out by President Bush — political accords among Iraq’s competing factions — has not been reached. (That happens to be our reaction to a campaign that we greeted with skepticism a year ago.) It also would involve a willingness by the candidates to reconsider their long-standing plans to carry out a rapid withdrawal of remaining U.S. forces in Iraq as soon as they become president — a step that would almost certainly reverse the progress that has been made.

What Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Iraqi political failures — coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false. Mr. Obama led the way, claiming that Sunni tribes in Anbar province joined forces with U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in response to the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections — a far-fetched assertion for which he offered no evidence.

It’s simple: the Democrats cannot countenance the idea that Iraq is not failing, and that the surge worked. Just one year ago they were all saying that there was no end to the violence in Iraq. Now they have to face up to the fact that nearly every single dire prediction they made was false. None of them have the intellectual courage to admit that they were wrong. To do so would irretrievably endanger support from the vociferously anti-war base of the Democratic Party today.

As typical, political rhetoric and political reality are on opposite ends. The surge worked because it involved a significant change of tactics, using the successful model of Tal Afar on a national scale. The goal of the surge was never to make Iraq into another Switzerland. It’s hypocritical of the Democrats to simultaneously argue that it’s impossible to create democratic reforms through military force, then argue that the only way that the surge can be successful is to do exactly that. The purpose of the surge was always singular: to end Iraq’s spiral into anarchy and create the conditions upon which democratic development can occur. It’s up to the Iraqi people to take the next steps, and it will take some time before that happens. In the meantime, the level of violence has dropped precipitously and the qualitative measures of life in Iraq are becoming better than they were before the war—for example, electricity production is above where it was when Saddam was in power.

The Democrats don’t want to acknowledge these facts because they’re still wedded to a political narrative of defeat. For all their talk about being “agents of change” the Democrats apparently can’t drift too far from their political script on Iraq even when it makes them look desperately out of touch.

The Lancet Study: A Case Of Fraud

National Journal has an in-depth report on why the much-vaunted study by The Lancet claiming 600,000 civilian casualties in Iraq was a work of scientific fraud and not a legitimate study. Almost immediately after it was public statisticians and other examiners found that the study was statistically invalid. Now there’s evidence that it was an attempt by none other than George Soros to manipulate public opinion with faked statistics on the war:

Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

The Lancet studies were so obviously politically timed and so obviously distorted that they should never have been published—yet what can only be described as a cabal of left-wing activists managed to get a reputable scientific journal to be party to outright academic fraud. Now, once even more careful analysis has been compiled, there is little left with which to defend the Lancet studies. The data was either collected inaccurately or not even collected at all. The methodology was designed to create a specific result, not accurately report the data. The funding came exclusively from groups with a partisan axe to grind. Everything was done in such a way as to generate a hit piece rather than a real study.

The Lancet studies were frauds, pure and simple. Their data is worthless, their conclusions the result of conscious bias and they were designed for political effect. This is another example of how a certain group of radical ideologues have hijacked institutions to serve as propaganda organs, and an example of why people simply cannot trust the mainstream media to give them the straight story anymore.