4 Years Later: Media owes apologies to American anti-war voices

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"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego
that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to
take that wager?"

(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)



"It won't take weeks. You know that, professor. Our military machine
will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there's no question that it
will."

(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)



"Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State
Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb
and the desperate could ignore it."

(Cal Thomas, 2/12/03)


"We're all neo-cons now."

(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)



"Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today." (MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)



"What's [Howard Dean] going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war
went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose
their--Isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?"

(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)



"I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks."

(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)



"Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this
guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and
so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is
going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."

(Fox News Channel's Dick Morris, 4/9/03)

"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's
most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.... I just
wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to
say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe the White House
will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war....


"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N.
weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr.
Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, 'The United
States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs,
defeated.' Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail,
again.


"Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle,
Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward
tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting
what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant,
they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these
self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it.
After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing."

(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)

"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a
coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment
and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is
hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."

(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03) 

"Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"

(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)

"Well, the hot story of the week is victory.... The Tommy Franks-Don
Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war
with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths.... There
is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated
so far.... The final word on this is, hooray."

(Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)


"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom
that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively
bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly
shattered skeptics' complaints."

(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/13/03)


"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."

(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)


"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"

(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03) 

"Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different
from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially
over and domestic issues are regaining attention."

(NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)


"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as
president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a
complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those
guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's
president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like
having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."


(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)

"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what
begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's
unrivaled power and how best to use it."

(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)

"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."

(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03) 

"Sean Penn is at it again. The Hollywood star takes out a full-page ad out in the New York Times bashing George Bush. Apparently he still hasn't figured out we won the war."

(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 5/30/03)