Fake News Unsurprisingly Got Trump-Syria Story Completely Wrong

By US Politics and News Last updated Oct 23, 2019

Paul Craig Roberts recently retold a hilarious story of his days as a rookie war reporter and his first encounter with the fake news media.

As a wet-behind-the-ears journalist, he was sent to cover the Iran-Iraq War in the early 1980s. It was intimidating for him because not only was he traveling into a war zone, but he was on a bus with veteran reporters from some of the largest news outlets in the world: The BBC, the US networks and so forth.

One of the first things Roberts noticed on the bus was that every veteran war journalist was carrying a can of diesel.

Roberts says he felt guilty, because it made logical sense: If the bus breaks down far from a gas station, everyone would chip in to ensure that everyone got back home safely. He vowed that from then on, he’d start carrying a can of diesel everywhere.

But then the bus stopped miles from the front lines, near a group of rusted-out tanks and armored personnel carriers. These were vehicles that had been destroyed in a much-earlier conflict.

Much to Roberts’ surprise, the veteran war reporters from the big networks proceeded to pour their cans of diesel on the busted tanks and then light them on fire. The reporters then recorded their “war stories” for Western viewers in front of the burning tanks.

The naïve Roberts later asked some of the reporters why they kept ducking while they were talking about the imaginary battle they were reporting on. They explained to him that the sounds of gunfire would be added in before the footage aired on TV.

Then all the reporters got back on the bus and went back to their safe hotel, far from the front lines.

It was fake news from top to bottom. And it’s been going on for a lot longer than Donald Trump has been in office.

Roberts’ hilarious tales of his early days as a war reporter are no different than the recent scam that ABC News tried to pull on Americans.

The “news” station edited together two separate video clips of a nighttime machine gun demonstration in Kentucky – and reported in a serious voice that it was footage of Turkey slaughtering the Kurds in Syria because Trump pulled US troops out of that nation.

On the morning of October 17, BBC News reported that Turkish leader Recep Erdogan had thrown President Trump’s letter about Syria in a garbage can.

Erdogan didn’t care what Trump said. Now that the American troops were out of the way, Erdogan was giving himself a green light to slaughter those meddlesome Kurds just like he’d always wanted to!

It was going to be a bloodbath and, according to the BBC and every other news outlet, it was all President Trump’s fault.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) put on his wimpiest constipation-face and marched directly to the Senate floor to denounce President Trump’s disastrous troop pullout. It was really dramatic.

Shoulders hunched, hands clenched together prayerfully, Romney whined: “What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a bloodstain in the annals of American history.”

Utah’s sad excuse for a US Senator apparently forgot the time in 2007 when he stated that “Kurdish nationalism could destabilize the border with Turkey.”

In the early afternoon of October 17, just a few hours after the media reported that Erdogan had thrown Trump’s letter in the garbage, Trump announced that a cease-fire was in effect. There was no blood being spilled on the Turkish-Syrian border for the first time since 2011.

By threatening Turkey with tariffs – instead of troops – President Trump had secured a tentative peace along the border.

Whether that peace will hold long enough for Russia and Iran to broker a peace deal between the Kurds, Syria and Turkey remains to be seen. But in the meantime, no American troops will have to die in the crossfire of a fight that is none of America’s business.

Once again, President Trump’s instincts were absolutely correct. And every single one of his opponents lied to the American people and was wrong about the outcome.

I know there have been a lot of moments like that during the Trump presidency, but we shouldn’t forget this one. While everyone else was calling for an orgy of blood, Donald Trump negotiated a tentative peace deal along the Turkey-Syria border for the first time in 8 years.

Mitt Romney and the media will never give him credit for it, but the rest of us should.