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“The
story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people,”
President Bush said at a news conference Wednesday, hours after 37 American
troops died in Iraq. “I understand that. We value life. And we weep and
mourn when soldiers lose their life.”
How long will the U.S. news media continue to indulge that sort of pious
talk from the White House without challenge? The evidence is overwhelming
that the president and his policy team are quite willing to devalue -- in
fact, destroy -- life when it gets in their way. And if they “weep and mourn
when soldiers lose their life,” the grief is rigorously selective.
The day Bush can “weep and mourn” when anti-occupation fighters “lose their
life” in Iraq will be the day he transcends his oily fundamentalism. But no
such day is on the presidential calendar.
Current U.S. foreign policy -- a virulent blend of nationalism, corporate
zeal and religiosity -- views the latest military technology as a sacrament
in Uncle Sam’s hands. So, the American commanders have opted to emphatically
convey their faith in firepower and their contempt for human connection. As
author Dilip Hiro points out, “The Pentagon’s routine use of fighter-bombers
and attack helicopters to strike against the insurgents in urban areas soon
enough defeated its own campaign to win Iraqis’ ‘hearts and minds.’”
Death is nothing to be proud of. But you wouldn’t know that from
Washington’s media spin. With a Jimmy Stewart kind of welling in his eyes,
President Bush loves to talk about ultimate sacrifice when America’s
uniformed killers are killed.
Enemies have many human similarities, and the perverse logic of war demands
that veils of mirrors face outward. Gaining some independent perspective --
and perhaps sanity -- requires stepping outside the laser-like crossfire of
projection.
In wartime, the First Amendment offers profoundly simple remedies. If they
refuse to be enmeshed in what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of
militarism,” journalists can help to provide antidotes to the social
adrenaline of mass killing.
“War is an instrument of policy; it must necessarily bear the character of
policy; it must measure with policy’s measure.” So wrote the Prussian
general Karl von Clausewitz (near the end of his tedious book “On War”).
When the character of policy is death, it should be measured that way. And
-- despite the multitudes of media stories that distract, confuse and
entertain -- death is the gist of war.
And death, whether directly from weapons or from neglect due to squandered
resources, is the central meaning of the additional $80 billion now being
sought by President Bush for the Iraq war. When he said that the election on
Sunday would be “a grand moment in Iraqi history,” Bush was whistling past a
graveyard to be filled with people he never met.
Now the media buzz about the election in Iraq has turned into a siren. The
sincerity and courage of many millions of Iraqi people is beyond dispute; no
one should doubt their willingness to take risks for democracy. But under
the occupation circumstances, the electoral process is highly dubious at
best. Whether in peacetime Florida or wartime Iraq, it’s not too difficult
to steal an election.
One of the uncertainties about this election is the political future of Iyad
Allawi, the U.S.-installed prime minister. Late last spring -- when
the White House suddenly identified him as a great Iraqi leader -- the
mainstream U.S. press did not emphasize the longtime strings connecting the
man to puppeteers in Washington.
The New York Times noted that Allawi “lived abroad for 30 years and is not
well known in Iraq.” Yet there were few media murmurs of dissent while the
Bush administration extolled Allawi as the best leader for an Iraqi
government. In the halls of U.S. power, he was seen as eminently qualified.
A high-profile story in USA Today made a gingerly reference to Allawi’s long
entanglement with the Central Intelligence Agency, describing him as “a
Shiite close to the CIA.”
Days ago, Newsday reporter Mohamad Bazzi raised a key question from Baghdad:
“Will former exiles like Allawi, who have Washington lobbyists and public
relations firms to push their case to U.S. politicians, continue to dominate
Iraq’s government?”
Before long, we may know the answer. But no matter what leaders emerge for
the new government in Baghdad, they’ll need to come to terms with a
president in Washington who seems to view Iraqi deaths as abstractions.
* Related Article:
The Military Death Toll While Enforcing the Occupation of Iraq by Paul
de Rooij. A regularly updated resource with links to many articles, quotes,
and important information missing from mainstream news coverage about the
US-UK casualties in Iraq.
Norman
Solomon
is a syndicated columnist and author of
Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (Context Books,
2003) co-authored by Reese Erlich. His
next book,
War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,
will be published in early summer by Wiley. His columns and other writings
can be found at www.normansolomon.com.
He
can be reached at:
mediabeat@igc.org.
Other Recent Articles
by Norman Solomon
*
A Shaky Media
Taboo -- Withdrawal from Iraq
* Far From
Media Spotlights, the Shadows of “Losers”
* Acts of God,
Acts of Media
* Media Sense
and Sensibilities
* Tailgated
by Media Technology
* The Limits
of “Man Bites Dog” Stories
*
Announcing the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2004
*
Media in the Winter of Our “Disremorse”
*
News Media in the 60th Year of the Nuclear Age
*
A Voluntary Tic in Media Coverage of Iraq
*
A Distant Mirror of Holy War
*
Transforming Four More Years
*
Nader’s Game of “Chicken”
*
The Presidential Pageant: “There He Is, Mr. America...”
*
Two Weeks to Go -- and One President to Oust
*
Preview of the Bush Campaign's Media Endgame
*
Beyond the Debates, a Referendum on an Emperor
*
The Brave Posturing of Armchair Warriors
*
Missing: A Media Focus on the Supreme Court
*
Rove’s Brain and Media Manipulation
*
Beyond Hero Worship
*
How the News Media Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Rumsfeld
*
A Time of Butterflies and Bombers
*
A Global Perspective on Defeating Bush
*
From Attica to Abu Ghraib -- and a Prison Near You
*
Hope Is Not On the Way, But Hopefully Bush Is On the Way Out
*
Macho Politics and Major Consequences
*
Terrorism and the Election: Trial Balloons and Spin
*
The Limits of Media Dream Machines
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