It’s one thing to be against a war, and another to hope that the other side wins. The BBC has crossed the line frequently enough, with their gloating over the deaths of American soldiers, their insistence that Saddam Hussein not be referred to as a “dictator,” their misstatements of fact, and on and on.
Just recently they ran a piece on Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s visit to Iraq that showed a photo of Spanish troops with the subhead “Many in Spain feel the country’s troops should not be in Iraq.” That’s hardly news and could have been written about the U.S., the U.K., Poland, etc; it’s a not very subtle propaganda ploy to imply that the Spanish government is a U.S. puppet. Then they conclude the piece with news of attacks on former Ba’athist officials, which they wrongly attribute to “U.S. forces,” when it seems that they were carried out by Shiite militiamen seeking revenge for the mass murder and suppression. According to the BBC, “But it is not the first time they have been attacked in error by U.S. forces. Ten members of the Iraqi security force were recently killed by American troops in Falluja.” How many deliberately placed errors were in that “report”? It’s almost as clear a piece of pro-Ba’athist propaganda as their attribution — with full quotation marks — of a claim that “peace” had been declared in Iraq to President Bush. That false claim was later quietly excised from the text — without acknowledgement — after enough people had complained about it. (I was among them.)