In bed with the US Army

As the Wikileaks document-dump week ends, perhaps the real significance of what happened lay not in the specific revelations in those 92,000 pieces of raw data from American frustration-ville in Afghanistan, 2004-2009 (much of which would have been no news to anyone reading TomDispatch all these years). It may simply be that, for the second time in a month -- the first being the McChrystal firing/Petraeus hiring -- the war that time forgot has burst onto the front pages of American newspapers and made it to the top of the TV news as a runaway story. Given an increasingly unpopular war, the headlines spell bad news for Washington. Pakistani double-crosses, Taliban surges, Afghan corruption, the woeful state of the American-trained Afghan army and police, and -- a subject far less emphasized in U.S. than British coverage -- the unreported killing or wounding of large numbers of civilians by U.S. forces (as well as cover-ups of the same) are not what the Obama administration would have chosen for the week's war news. The U.S. war effort was already visibly stumbling and desperately in need of continuing anonymity, so all-consuming news, including reports on spiking American and NATO deaths, certainly wasn't on the Obama wish list. And it's not just the public either. As reporter Jim Lobe notes, the Wikileaks story "can only add to the pessimism that has spread from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the heart of the foreign policy establishment, and even to a growing number of Republicans."