But It's In The Mainstream Press

More than some left commentators may like to acknowledge, the claims of the Bush War Party and itswarmongering friends at the Fox News Network regarding "Operation Iraqi Freedom" are significantlycontradicted by findings and commentary in the establishment print media. American antiwar activists andcitizens must by all means press the corporate-state press to tell the whole truth and draw the responsibleconclusions about the horrible injustices and tragedies that are being exacerbated and inflicted in our name.At the same time, we can mine a considerable amount of rich and politically useful informationfrom the mainstream press, reflecting various conflicts and requirements of class, faction and thoughtcontrol.

Acknowledging Iraqi Nationalism

Didn’t buy the war masters’ knee-jerk identification of Iraqi resistance to the American invaders withloyalty to and/or fear of Saddam? Your suspicions were supported by a number of establishment press reportsacknowledging that many Iraqis fighting back are responding to an outraged sense of national pride, not theallure or threats of Saddam’s regime. A front-page story noting that "the Iraqis appear more committed tothe fight than the Pentagon strategists expected" in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal quoted a formerleading US military strategist to interesting effect. "It’s turned out," the strategist observed,"that the Iraqis are going to fight for the motherland."

"A Wider Principle"

Didn’t accept the masters’ claim that the rest of the Arab world would be grateful that America hastaken it upon its (supposedly benevolent) self to remove a threatening tyrant? Your suspicion were born out bylast Wednesday’s WSJ, which included a front-page article titled "On Arab Street, Iraqi Resistance Strikesa Chord." The "sometimes lethal resistance U.S. troops have encountered in places such as the port of UmnQasr and the southern Iraq city of Nasiriyah," the paper reported, has "fueled nationalistic pride andpopular anger" among "Arab populations." It has also "pierced a post-Cold War myth of Americaninvincibility, already dented by the Sept. 11 attacks." Among the expressions of this officially unexpectedArab response, the WSJ reported, are an official Arab League statement condemning US aggression and a growingmovement of Arabs to volunteer for service against America’s King George.

The WSJ provided an especially instructive quote from a Palestinian shopkeeper named Ehap al Ali, who sayshe "would go fight with the Iraqis" if he could. "Saddam isn’t is as bad as the Americans say heis," Ali told the WSJ, "and he isn’t as good as the Iraqi government says he is. But that’s not thepoint. There is a wider principle – we have an obligation to fight against foreigners who invade Arablands." Such sentiment is increasingly widespread around the Middle East.

Politically Skewed War Games

Skeptical about the Bush administration’s claim that victory over Iraq would be quick, easy and glorious– an awesome exercise in the display of overwhelming US power? The establishment press has no choice, ofcourse, but to report that this has not occurred. Still, some of the mainstream coverage and commentary hasshown welcome candor on the extent to which the US disappointment reflects poor planning and on the extent ofthe difficulties facing US troops. Last Friday’s Times gave page-one coverage to the forthright comments ofLt. Gen William Wallace, commander of Army forces in the Persian Gulf. Wallace acknowledged that "the enemywe’re fighting against is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against."

Citing Wallace and other Army sources, the Times went on to notice numerous serious problems beyond theunexpected heroic resistance of Iraqis – travel delays, fierce weather, overextended supply lines,communications breakdowns, and insufficient food supplies for troops. "No matter how politically appealing aquick, decisive victory would be, the simple physics of the battlefield are making that less likely," theTimes concluded.

An opinion-editorial that appeared the next day in the Times even raised the specter of Mogadishu. "Nomatter what kind of power can be rolled into Baghdad," Mark Bowden wrote, "if it faces a hostilepopulation…the scene could turn into a nightmare. Soldiers would be moving in a 360-degree battlefield withobstructed sight lines and impaired radio communications, trying to pick out targets from civilian populationsdetermined to hide, supply and shield the enemy, unable to attack Iraqi firing positions without killingcivilians."

In this as in numerous other mainstream reports and commentaries, Dick Cheney and Richard Perle arerevealed in horrible, narcissistic and blood-soaked splendor. In making their case for the current butchery inIraq, these and other leading proponents of New World Order promised jubilant, welcoming masses and rapid,total victory over territory, hearts and minds.

According to a front-page story in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune, moreover, America’s armed forcesweren’t even allowed to "war-game" against the real "enemy." This interesting article reports thatPaul Van Riper, "a Pentagon consultant considered a top strategist in asymmetric warfare," quit mockpre-war battles because Pentagon planners dismissed the threats he posed in his assigned role as a "roguePersian Gulf dictator." The planners refused to acknowledge the hits he scored by using tactics like suicidebombers and guerilla harassment of US supply convoys.

WMD Still AWOL

Questioning the pivotal war-justificatory notion that Saddam possesses huge and threatening stockpiles ofmajor, state-of-the-art chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and the potential to developnuclear weapons? A story titled "Troops Haven’t Found Chemical Arms" in last Thursday’s WSJ offeredsome reasons for healthy skepticism. It quoted retired Army colonel David Franz, who said that he was "notcounting on the" US military’s ability to uncover biological agents being used or developed by Iraq’sregime. The paper also noted that US soldiers recently "found nothing suspicious" in a chemical plantoutside Najaf "that US intelligence agencies had thought for years was manufacturing chemical weapons."The nuclear question doesn’t even merit coverage.

"Sorry, but the Chick was in the Way"

Worried about the ethical blank check given to US military forces by blindly approving "Support OurTroops" (at all costs) sentiment? Concerned that supporting soldiers to carry out orders to slaughter mightnot be the best way to foster basic mental health among military personnel who will become returning veteransin our midst? Your concerns are born out by two front-page articles that appeared in last Saturday’s NewYork Times. The first article is titled "Either Take a Shot or Take a Chance." It quotes Marine"sharpshooter" Eric Schrumpf to chilling effect. "We had a great day," Schrumpf told Times reporterDexter Filkins. "We killed a lot of people." According to Filkins, Schrumpf "recalled one such incident,in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near theIraqi solider go down. ‘I’m sorry' he [Schrumpf] said. ‘But the chick was in the way.’"

The second article was titled "Haunting Thoughts After a Fierce Battle." It related the moral crisisSgt. Mark N. Redmond faced after killing untold numbers of Iraqi fighters heroically resisting the invasion oftheir homeland by superior American forces. "I mean, I have my wife and kids to go back home to," Redmondtold Times reporter Steven Lee Myers. "I don’t want them to think I’m a killer." Redmond "didnot," Myers noted, "want to dwell on the details of the deaths his weapons caused."

The article concludes with the comments of Army chaplain Mark B. Nordtsrom, who happens to belong to abranch of the Mennonites with a pacifist theology. Noting that American troops had "killed thousands" inthe "last few days," this "pacifist" comforter of troops charged with murder observes that "nothingprepares you to kill another human being. Nothing prepares you to use a machine to cut someone in two."(Well, we can think of a few "things" that do, including the US Army and Marines…). "It bothers" USsoldiers, Nordstrom told Myers, "to take life, especially that close." It is apparently easier on the soulto kill from 30,000 feet or from a distant air-conditioned missile targeting office. "They want to talk tome so that they know that I know they are not awful human beings."

Social service agencies and law enforcement back home, get ready. And remember America, your president, asreported in the mainstream press, is proposing to significantly cut veterans’ benefits.

"You Realize It Was Real"

Concerned about the moral implications of modern satellite-guided "war," where masses are dispatched tothe grisly hereafter at the tap of a computer key by indifferent technical personnel in distant antisepticcommand centers. Your anxiety finds justification in a front-page WSJ story that appeared last Thursday. Itrelated the comments of an officer in a Hawaii-based US Navy Strike Center, where "planners stare atscreens, outwardly oblivious to the havoc they were wreaking far away." "It was surreal," the officertold WSJ reporter David S. Cloud, speaking of his experience during the initial cruise missile strike on March21st. "It was no different than exercises we’ve practiced again and again…Hours later you take a stepback and see the video and see the hits coming in Baghdad and you realize it was real." Take note, Americanmental health practitioners.

No Vile Self Interest?

Skeptical of official White House claims that Operation Dominate Iraq is unrelated to something as petty aseconomic self-interest on the part of key US policymakers and the massive corporations they represent? Yoursuspicion that some of the warlords might be acting on what Adam Smith called "the vile maxim of themasters" – everything for me and nothing for anyone else – will find reinforcement in the March 24thissue of the elitist New Yorker. New Yorker writer Seymour Hersch, no radical, detailed Perle’s vestedinterest in the terrorism that can be expected in the wake of current US assaults on the Arab world, very muchin line with the hopes of Osama bin-Laden. Perle, it turns out, is a managing partner in Trireme Enterprises,a venture-capital company that invests in technology, goods and services of value to "homeland security anddefense" around the world. Its projected clients include Saudi Arabia, a leading bin-Laden target.

A story that appeared in last Thursday’s WSJ under the title "Perle’s Conflict Issue is Shared byOther Defense Board members" will further reinforce your suspicions. It shows that numerous members of theDefense Policy Board, a key Pentagon advisory body that has that has argued effectively for war on Iraq, workfor corporations poised to make considerable sums in the areas of homeland security and "nationaldefense." Well before the beginning of the war, moreover, the WSJ reported that a small number ofpolitically connected American firms (including Cheney’s own Haliburton) were situated to make hundreds ofbillions off the task of rebuilding the very Iraqi infrastructure the White House and Pentagon were planningto bomb. A rather instrumentalist new wrinkle on the economic theory of "creative destruction."

Wondering if the world’s millions of antiwar protestors might be on to something more than a just acatchy phrase when they chant "No Blood for Oil?" Evidence that they are was presented last Fall byreporters for the online version of MSNBC. In an article titled "Iraqi Oil, American Bonanza," MSNBCquoted industry analysts who "say that it’s unlikely that American firms will be left empty-handed if theU.S. follows through on military action." There is not room here to recount the large number of mainstreamstories that have detailed the considerable and diverse ways that American oil and other corporations canexpect to benefit from the projection of US power in the Middle East.

Military Globalism vs. Recovery in an Age of Economic Multilateralism

Don’t buy the administration’s rosy forecasts of a strong recovery once the war is (not-so quickly)concluded? Your skepticism was supported by an opinion-editorial published in last Monday’s New York Timesby James Grant, editor of the respectable Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. According to Grant, no radical,"the war didn’t cause America’s financial and economic problems. But it’s not so far-fetched to assumeit may soon worsen them." Grant’s pessimism rests on the simple observation that the costs of the war aregoing to be met by the printing of more dollars leading to inflation and the cheapening of American currency.That cheapening is going to reduce America’s ability to finance its massive foreign current account deficit– the US imported $500 billion more than it exported in 2002 – with dollars. "Up until now," he notes,"the rest of the world – America’s creditors – has more than happy to exchange its merchandise for ourcurrency, a currency they have coveted both as a medium of exchange and a store of value." This will changewith the officially mandated superabundance of dollars required to pay for this and "future…wars,pacifications and occupations" (Grant), something that will deepen related underlying US economic problemsof excess capacity and stagnant stock shares.

An interesting line comes in Grant’s sixteenth paragraph, where he argues that "unilateralism inmilitary affairs may be necessary and expedient. But the relationship of a debtor nation to its creditors isnecessarily multilateral. This is especially true in the case of a debtor nation that prints the money withwhich to service its debts." Hmm…maybe the Europeans aren’t as irrelevant as Bush and Rumsfeld want usto believe. One can find numerous similar negative economic judgements in the mainstream press (especially TheFinancial Times), suggesting a conflict between the global militarism of the White House and the"rational" economic globalism of cooler headed American and world-systemic corporate minds.

"Budgetary Shock and Awe"

Wondering about the domestic social-democratic opportunity costs of the extravagantly expensive war ofoccupation the Bushies are determined to pursue as countless American communities slip further into povertyand isolation? Wondering about the true "patriotic" priorities of a government that spends hundreds ofbillions of dollars on foreign conquest while slashing taxes for the super-rich and claiming to lack the moneyto adequately fund education, provide universal health coverage, and adequately match unemployment benefits tothe numbers out of work? Questioning the sincerity of the White House officials and Congressional allies whopontificate on behalf of "shared wartime sacrifice" by all Americans?

Your concerns were seconded by a strident, outraged New York Times editorial that appeared last Tuesdayunder the title "Budgetary Shock and Awe." "The country," noted the Times’ editors, "is facingplenty of financial problems: the economy, the cost of the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. Stunningly,Congress is prepared to make things worse, far worse with more than $500 billion in tax cuts for the upper 1percent of taxpayers. To finance these spoils for the wealthiest Americans, House leaders…plan deep cuts of$475 billion in vital programs for the bottom 99 percent. These direct hits will range from Medicaid to childcare, education to food stamps, environment protection to emergency doles for the poor."

No, It’s Not a Left Press

What’s going on here? Is the American print media acting in accordance with a liberal and even "left"bias, as posited by crackpot "media critics" working for various assorted radical-right lunatic asylumslike the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute? Hardly: the majority of opinion-editorialsin the mainstream press have been pro-war in the months leading up to the unjust and unnecessary invasion ofIraq. It remains taboo in that press to honestly acknowledge the underlying crypto-fascist immorality andindeed insanity of the war and the doctrines that inform US policy. Strong moral criticism of domestic policyis permissible but such criticism of related, deadly foreign policies is not. The criticism of war conductremains essentially practical, not moral in nature: it’s about whether and how the military campaign is"working" and not about whether it’s right or wrong. It is unthinkable, of course, for a mainstreamreporter to acknowledge the heroic nature of the resistance being carried out by many Iraqi fighters.

The few horrific actions of US forces that are acknowledged appear as tragic, inevitable anomalies,inherent in the fateful logic of war, whereby "shit happens" and "The Wheel in the Sky Keeps onTurning." As presented, they appear largely devoid of connection to any living human agents that might betraced to the White House, where top officials have emerged as certifiable war criminals by any reasonableworld standard. Stories that might seem to question the administration and Pentagon often seem lost in abigger sea of war stories that do no such thing. The massive coverage (it practically takes hours to wadethrough it all now) is loaded with respectfully treated rationalizations and disinformation from the dominantideological authorities.

It is left to the reader to make the broader horrific moral implications of unpleasant items like the storyof the sniper who shrugged off his murder of an Iraqi "chick." A morally responsible journal might havetitled that story, "Mennonite-"Pacifist" Army Chaplain Helps Soldiers Feel Better About Murders They AreOrdered to Commit by George W. Bush."