In A Techno Trance

Two months ago, when I wandered through a large market near the center of Baghdad, the day seemed like anyother and no other. A vibrant pulse of humanity throbbed in the shops and on the streets. Meanwhile, a fusewas burning; lit in Washington, it would explode here. 

Now, with American troops near Baghdad, the media fixations are largely tactical. "A week ofairstrikes, including the most concentrated precision hits in U.S. military history, has left tons of rubbleand deep craters at hundreds of government buildings and military facilities around Iraq but has yieldedlittle 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 difficultieshave set off warning bells inside the U.S. media echo chamber. In contrast, humanitarian calamities are oftenrendered as PR problems, whether the subject is the cutoff of water in Basra or the missiles that killnoncombatants in Baghdad: The main concern is apt to be that extensive suffering and death among civilianswould 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 ofWashington and London remain a coalition for the killing of Iraqi people who get in the way of the righteousjuggernaut. Despite the prevalent media fixations, the great moral questions about this war have not beensettled -- on the contrary, they intensify with each passing day -- no matter what gets onto TV screens andfront pages.

When U.S. missiles exploded at Iraqi government broadcast facilities Wednesday morning, it was a move tosilence 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 TonyBlair had managed to do the nearly impossible -- make themselves look even more mendacious than the bloodydictator Saddam Hussein.

On the home front, most U.S. news outlets are worshiping the nation’s high-tech arsenal. It was routinethe other day when the Washington Post printed a large color diagram under the headline "A RuggedBird." Unrelated to ornithology, the diagram annotated key features of the AH-64 Apache -- not a bird buta helicopter that excels as a killing machine.

We’re supposed to adore the Pentagon’s prowess; the deadlier the better. Transfixed with tacticalmaneuvers 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 theUnited States launched the attack, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said that the invasion -- lacking a newSecurity 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 thewar began.

The Post’s editorial quoted the bereaved father as saying that "the word ‘sorrow’ cannot fill mypain." 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 familyhome, tears running down her cheeks."

A week into this war, CNN’s White House correspondent John King was in sync with many other journalistsas he noted criticisms of the administration’s "war strategy." The media anxiety level has beenrising, but the voiced concerns are overwhelmingly about tactics. A military triumph may not be so easy afterall.

Today, I took another look at quotations that I’d jotted at meetings with Iraqi officials during visitsto Baghdad last fall and winter. (The quotes are included in "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’tTell 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 delegationof Americans: "The U.S. administration is now speaking war. We are not going to turn the other cheek. Weare 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 ofthousands 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 Iraqipeople 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 andcivilians.

No matter how long this war takes, it is profoundly wrong. 

Courtesy Znet. An excerpt from "Target Iraq: Whatthe News Media Didn’t Tell You," by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, is posted at: www.contextbooks.com/new.htmltarget