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War: Obsessed With Tactics and Terminology
by
Norman Solomon
March
27, 2003
Two
months ago, when I wandered through a large market near the center of Baghdad,
the day seemed like any other and no other. A vibrant pulse of humanity
throbbed in the shops and on the streets. Meanwhile, a fuse was burning; lit in
Washington, it would explode here.
Now,
with American troops near Baghdad, the media fixations are largely tactical.
"A week of airstrikes, including the most concentrated precision hits in
U.S. military history, has left tons of rubble and deep craters at hundreds of
government buildings and military facilities around Iraq but has yielded little
sign of a weakening in the regime’s will to resist," the Washington Post
reported on March 26.
Shrewd
tactics and superlative technology were supposed to do the grisly trick. But
military difficulties have set off warning bells inside the U.S. media echo
chamber. In contrast, humanitarian calamities are often rendered as PR
problems, whether the subject is the cutoff of water in Basra or the missiles
that kill noncombatants in Baghdad: The main concern is apt to be that extensive
suffering and death among civilians would make the "coalition of the
willing" look bad.
But
in spite of all the public-relations efforts on behalf of this invasion, the
military forces of Washington and London remain a coalition for the killing of
Iraqi people who get in the way of the righteous juggernaut. Despite the prevalent
media fixations, the great moral questions about this war have not been settled
-- on the contrary, they intensify with each passing day -- no matter what gets
onto TV screens and front pages.
When
U.S. missiles exploded at Iraqi government broadcast facilities Wednesday
morning, it was a move to silence a regime that had been gaining ground in the
propaganda struggle. Throughout the months of faux "diplomacy" and
the first days of invading Iraq, the governments led by George W. Bush and Tony
Blair had managed to do the nearly impossible -- make themselves look even more
mendacious than the bloody dictator Saddam Hussein.
On
the home front, most U.S. news outlets are worshiping the nation’s high-tech
arsenal. It was routine the other day when the Washington Post printed a large
color diagram under the headline "A Rugged Bird." Unrelated to
ornithology, the diagram annotated key features of the AH-64 Apache -- not a bird
but a helicopter that excels as a killing machine.
We’re
supposed to adore the Pentagon’s prowess; the deadlier the better. Transfixed
with tactical maneuvers and overall strategies inside Iraq, media outlets
rarely mention that this entire war by the U.S. government and its British
accomplice is a flagrant violation of international law. Only days before the
United States launched the attack, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said that
the invasion -- lacking a new Security Council resolution to authorize it –
would violate the U.N. Charter.
In
the capital city of the world’s only superpower, the Post is cheering on the
slaughter. "Ultimately the monument that matters will be victory and a
sustained commitment to a rebuilt Iraq," the newspaper concluded. Its
assessment came in an editorial that mentioned the pain -- but not the anger --
of family members grieving the loss of Kendall D. Waters-Bey, a Marine from
Baltimore who died soon after the war began.
The
Post’s editorial quoted the bereaved father as saying that "the word
‘sorrow’ cannot fill my pain." But the editorial did not include a word of
the response from the dead man’s oldest sister, Michelle Waters, who faulted
the U.S. government for starting the war and said: "It’s all for nothing.
That war could have been prevented. Now, we’re out of a brother. Bush is not
out of a brother. We are."
The
Baltimore Sun reported that Michelle Waters spoke those words "in the
living room of the family home, tears running down her cheeks."
A
week into this war, CNN’s White House correspondent John King was in sync with
many other journalists as he noted criticisms of the administration’s "war
strategy." The media anxiety level has been rising, but the voiced
concerns are overwhelmingly about tactics. A military triumph may not be so
easy after all.
Today,
I took another look at quotations that I’d jotted at meetings with Iraqi
officials during visits to Baghdad last fall and winter. (The quotes are
included in "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You," a
book I co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich.)
In
mid-September, the elderly speaker of Iraq’s national assembly, Saadoun
Hammadi, told our delegation of Americans: "The U.S. administration is now
speaking war. We are not going to turn the other cheek. We are going to fight.
Not only our armed forces will fight. Our people will fight."
Three
months later, at a Dec. 14 meeting, Iraq’s deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz
said: "Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, including
Americans -- because if they want to take over oil in Iraq, they have to fight
for it, not by missiles and by airplanes ... they have to bring troops and
fight the Iraqi people and the Iraqi army. And that will be costly."
The
fuse lit in Washington is now burning in Baghdad. Our tax dollars are
incinerating Iraqi troops and civilians.
No
matter how long this war takes, it is profoundly wrong.
Norman Solomon is Executive
Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org) and a
syndicated columnist. His latest book is Target Iraq: What the News Media
Didn’t Tell You (Context Books, 2003) with Reese Erlich. For an excerpt and
other information, go to: www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target.
Email: mediabeat@igc.org