The New York Times would like one to believe that they made a mistake in believing the lies which the US government and the Iraqi exile Chalabi told them as justifications for an invasion of Iraq. They have even issued an apology for their seeming gullibility. The US government would like the American people to believe that the torture in Iraq was a mistake, and they will clean house and it will never happen again. General Zinni has said that the Iraq war was a mistake. Robert McNamara wrote that the Vietnam war was also a mistake, although the United States has never admitted it was an immoral war and apologized for the deaths of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians.

Mistakes, mistakes and even more mistakes! One could easily come to the conclusion that the US government is run by a cabal of fools, except for the fact that US policy has been enormously successful in rolling back socialism across the world and expanding US corporate control over the labor power and natural resources of the planet. Notice that mistakes are admitted only after an invasion has begun or something embarrassing happens which influences public opinion. It is very easy to admit mistakes when US policy objectives have been achieved or are in the process of being achieved. It diverts people's attention away from investigating whether there might be a root cause of all these so-called mistakes, like the capitalist economic system itself, for instance.

Torture is not a mistake. It is a counterinsurgency tactic which has been used by the United States in Latin America and other places in the world for decades. Torture techniques have been taught to the police and militaries of other countries by the CIA and the School of the Americas. Torture equipment has been provided by US companies. Methods of torture far more hideous in nature than anything revealed in Iraq have been used. Children have been tortured in front of parents or other relatives, prisoners locked in padded cells and sirens turned on, electric shock applied to the genitals, men with their penises tied so they couldn't urinate, babies found dead with their fingernails pulled out, and I could go on, but I think you get the picture of the savagery of this torture. Michael Parenti has a chapter in his book The Sword and the Dollar giving the eyewitness testimony to much of this torture.

The New York Times and the rest of the corporate media did not make a mistake when they accepted the lies of the Bush administration justifying the Iraq war. Previously, the Times and the US corporate media accepted the lies for the Vietnam war, the lies for the wars in Central America, the lies for the invasion of Panama, the lies for the first Persian Gulf war, the lies for the bombing of Yugoslavia and so on. They will undoubtedly accept the lies for the next US war of aggression. That is their job to blindly accept the lies of the US government. They are a propaganda organ of the US ruling class and their servants in the government.

To think otherwise, one has to believe the theory that the corporate media are incapable of learning from all their past "mistakes" and that implies that they are exceedingly stupid. I guarantee that the editors of the New York Times and the media corporate executives are very intelligent people. They are propagandists to be sure, but intelligent propagandists.

The New York Times probably felt compelled to apologize because the lies of the Bush administration have been so blatant and so glaring in contrast to reality that they have become obvious to the average American. Of course, to believe this apology, one has to accept the idea that some obscure Iraqi exile named Chalabi was more influential on the editorial policy of the New York Times than the capitalists who own the newspaper and advertise in its pages. I guess this illustrates the very low opinion the New York Times has of the ability of the average American citizen to think critically about issues. The editors of the New York Times certainly would never allow themselves to be influenced on the antiwar side by printing article after article by Noam Chomsky or another astute antiwar activist. However, they want one to believe it was just naive and a blunder on their part to advance the arguments of Ahmed Chalabi in favor of a US invasion of Iraq. Baloney!

In summary, all the things that are claimed to be mistakes are often not so in reality. US policies like control of oil resources, elimination of competing economic systems like socialism and diminishing the power of any competing nation-states are not mistakes, but objectives consistent with increasing the power and profits of American corporations. The US government does make mistakes in tactics, as in underestimating the force required to attain certain objectives, or has failures like the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. However, it has been remarkably successful in pursuing its objective of world domination on behalf of large US corporate interests.