...and the Media are still M.I.A.
punditman says...
Five years of combat, over
1.2 million Iraqi deaths, almost
4,000 American dead and tens of thousands of US wounded -- and still, the Iraq
War's apologists and its media
sycophants still don't get it. Or they refuse to. Instead, they remain so blinded by chesty notions of "American
exceptionalism" and "good intentions" that they still can't see the desert for the shrubs.
Meanwhile, Iraq drowns in an ocean of suffering.
And whose fault could this be? According to the
war's apologists, it lies not only with
Jihadists and suicide bombers (who, it should be stressed, were conspicuously missing in
pre-invasion Iraq), and other insurgents, who for some reason refuse to lay down their arms -- but also with the incompetents responsible for the "poor planning" behind the occupation and the lack of a "effective counter-insurgency strategy." In other words, blame the
bureaucrats for messing up an otherwise "noble project." Missing from this analysis is the vileness of the project itself. Also missing is any hint that those who are directly responsible should be held directly accountable; namely, the Bush administration and others in the "coalition of the willing."
Typical of this mindset are the views expressed in an article by
Pulitzer prize winner, John F. Burns, of the
New York Times, entitled
No end in sight to bleeding in Iraq.
Burns chronicles his and other journalists'
boosterism as the first bombs began to fall on Baghdad five years ago:
On the evening of March 19, 2003, a few Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of targets in the Iraqi capital.We were on the 21st-storey roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein's command complex across the Tigris River.
The first cruise missile struck the vast, bunker-like presidential command complex in what would become, under the U.S. occupation, the Green Zone. Then missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam's tyranny. Iraqis yearning for their liberation called it "the air show.''
Among many on the roof, there was a sense that the suffering of millions of Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending. Those missiles and bombs seemed to be retribution for a ruthless dictator and the wretchedness he had visited on Iraq's people.
I get it. So the sentiment went something like this:
"Yeah, sure, war is hell and all that, but we're embedded with the good guys...now on with the big event"!
Burns sees the whole Iraq debacle primarily in terms of a series of
bureaucratic missteps, from the failure to stop mobs from looting historic sites while US marines stood by and followed their orders to protect only the Oil Ministry, to "the failure to find weapons of mass destruction; the absence of a serious plan for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy until the troop increase last year."
The failure to "find" weapons of mass destruction? Is he suggesting there was something significant to find? Are we to believe he never listened to former UN weapons inspector
Scott Ritter?, who, in the lead up to the ill-fated Iraq invasion, argued that Iraq possessed no significant
weapons of mass destruction?
The lack of an "effective" American counterinsurgency strategy until the troop increase last year? Ah, yes the "surge is working" -- that is if you consider
ethnic cleansing and a
bloody stalemate to be signs of "success."
Burns continues...
There were also instances when America's intentions were betrayed by its troops, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a teenage girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the U.S. military.
Alright, now I am embarrassed for the guy. America's "intentions" (
lilly white of course), were "betrayed" by a few soldiers? What did he expect would happen? I have a sneaky feeling he may have missed a few more "instances," so perhaps he should tune in to
Winter Soldier.
Burns can easily be considered an early cheerleader of the Iraq invasion -- one of those journalists who urged it on, a laptop bombardier, if you will. Here is an excerpt from an October 2007 interview with him in
The Independent:
In the pages of the New York Times he has argued that, even without WMD, "the stronger case [for military intervention] was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbours."
This is liberal interventionism at its worst. Find a dictator with an appalling human rights record (easy enough), and viola!
Causis belli! Invade the country, foist our Western ways on them, toss an election in and install a puppet regime. Aside from myopic idiocy, this sort of media
cheerleading supports the doctrine of "preventive war," which
stands in direct contravention to, and respect for, international law, treaties and institutions.
What's more, Burns sees his home-side rooting as having had no impact:
Although I was writing for an American newspaper with considerable reach and influence in Washington, DC, I didn't see myself as being a player in that process. I felt that that was something that was quite independent, at least in my mind.
Not a player? Just another "guy with an opinion" who called for the invasion of a country of 27 million people? I guess we are not supposed to notice where he works or the power of that soapbox (oddly enough, he is correct, but in hindsight: why should anyone trust the
NY Times anymore, after the
unmasking of Judith Miller as an administration mouthpiece in the lead up to war?).
The
sycophantic mindset
necessitates turning a blind eye to the crime of international aggression while ignoring other
possible motives that the US and Britain might have had. Why Iraq? Why not Burma?
So, if there was no legal basis to invade Iraq, what moral imperative gave Bush the right to invade? Wait...it always comes to me...9-11! Media mealy mouths never fail to remind me of this. Never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with what occurred on that fateful day. But the sycophants ignored this long established fact, and in many cases, actually parroted this Cheney fiction in the lead up to war.
In an world full of honest reporting, the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq would by now be considered, an historic crime of great magnitude. A crime not just against the Iraqi people, who did not threaten anyone, but a crime against humanity and a crime against
the truth. Not so.
You would think that after the release of
a study by The Centre for Public Integrity that shows that at least 935 demonstrably false statements were made on 532 separate occasions by President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, and press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan -- that the media would care to report the truth about
stove-piped intelligence. Not so.
What should be headline news is generally ignored or brushed aside and instead, we are supposed to believe that 935 false statements were the result of "faulty intelligence" -- instead of blatant lying and systematic propaganda.
If the mainstream media had viewed the Iraq War as the supreme crime that it is, then impeachment proceedings against Team Bush would have begun by now. And Team Blair and all other team members in the "coalition of the willing" would be facing similar charges. But not so.
Part of the basis for any such legal action would necessarily involve the idea of deliberate deception. Not
surprisingly,
neo-con apologists have never liked such talk. Back in July, 2003, Norman Specter wrote in the
The Globe and Mail that, "The case for war did not rest on whether he (
Saddam) had X number of biological weapons laboratories or Y amount of nerve agent. It rested on his record and ambitions."
At the time,
Punditman wrote the following:
Well, no actually.
The "case for war", at least according to those who sent soldiers to wage it at their behest, actually rested upon Iraq being an imminent threat to the security of the US, indeed to "the peace of the world," (to pluck just one Orwellian passage from Bush's infinite inventory).
And that "case" was built upon a very specific set of claims, accusations, and assertions concerning Mr. Hussein's apparent possession of "vast quantities" of WMDs and his supposed links to Al Queda. These "facts" we were told, left the United States and Britain no choice but to attack ASAP. The cruelty of Saddam's regime and his previous aggressions and miscalculations notwithstanding were simply ad-on pretexts for regime change, once it became clear that the world wasn't buying the Bush-Blair "case for war."
Finally, you would think--you would hope, by now--that establishment media would at least view the Iraqi catastrophe through the lens of the victims while pointing out the underlying cause of the tragedy. Not so.
In June 2007, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees published a study that estimated that 2.2 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighbouring countries, another 2 million were displaced internally and 40% of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled the country.
Meanwhile, in the seven months preceding the end of May, 2007, a mere 69 Iraqis were given refugee status in the United States.
Good luck to the Iraqi refugee trying to flee to America! And yet his or her plight is the direct result of the violence and chaos brought about by this horrific war--a war initiated by the United States, a war that was unnecessary, unprovoked, and illegal -- and a war that has made conditions much worse in the region and, in many ways, much worse for America itself.
Then again, average Iraqis, and I dare say average Americans, were never the main concern of those who have so callously plotted their destinies, their deaths and their sufferings.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to do their job of masquerading as a functioning "fourth estate" -- as they kiss the king's behind.
