If nothing else, Bill Moyers demonstrated to America, last week on PBS, that "we" weren't "all wrong." In fact, he proved that two weren't wrong. (We should probably clarify that, he proved two men weren't wrong.) Such are the Days of Lowered Expectations we live in that some drop to the ground and utter, "Praise be."
So if you caught the Wednesday special, what did you learn? That gas bags come with only two settings: self-stroke and silence. Those who were wrong largely ignored the special and those who weren't wrong (largely because they said nothing -- except to brag, in October 2002, about a $355.5 billion defense bill) rushed in to offer laughable lessons in journalism. (Remember, good journalism starts with you!) If you think about it, the self-strokers were publicly wrong and the silent now get to pretend like they were right so any 'transformation' is actually just a coin toss.
In the Moyers special, though some missed it judging by their gas baggery, the big lesson wasn't "no one wants to be wrong," it was, forget wrong, no one wants to be ahead of pack. No one wants to stick their necks out. If that lesson is familiar, it's because you've heard it many times before. (Seymour Hersh -- who wasn't wrong -- has often spoken of this fear among many journalists.) So two hours of television told you that the press got it wrong . . . four years after.
The press helped sell the illegal war. When do we get to explore why the illegal war was sold in the first place?
There are a number of hypothesis: oil, drive up the approval numbers leading into the 2002 election, etc.
The White House elected to break international law by declaring pre-emptive war on another country. Iraq happened to be the target but, at another time, it could have been someone else.
As with Vietnam and many others, these "grave threats" really aren't, are they?
Before Bill Clinton pulled the inspectors out of Iraq in 1998, there wasn't any evidence of WMDs in Iraq. In Egypt, February 2001, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell stated:
We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq...
What really changed?
Nothing. Nothing obviously by the fact that no WMDs were ever found in Iraq. Nothing obviously by the revelations in the Downing Street Memos that intelligence was being fixed. So, really, what was the illegal war about?
For years, the right-wing has worked themselves into a tizzy over the so-called "Vietnam syndrome." The term more accurately would read "America wakes up to reality." Following the debacle of Vietnam, Americans weren't as quick to trust the US government's reasons for war or that it would tell the truth. The Pentagon Papers was only one thing that exposed the lies of about Vietnam. Along with the various lies exposed was the reality of Vietnam which Americans witnessed after US forces left. Did it flip an entire region? Did that then flip all the surrounding regions? Was the US the last non-communist country standing?
No. And, twenty to thirty years on down the line, people will realize how desperate John McCain's lies were that it's fight them (terrorists) there or fight them here.
Senator Crazy preaches his own version of the domino theory.
But Vietnam drove home the message governments lie. And, as Howard Zinn has often noted, people don't want war, rulers want war. So the people have to be mobilized and tricked into war. That's what the right-wing (and some supposedly on the left -- lump 'em all together as War Hawks) have been fighting since the writing on the wall became visible about Vietnam. They've practiced revisionism like it was a religion, spending decades lying that Vietnam was "winnable," lies that only the ones wanting war (and more deaths) cared about the people dying, lies that the military was forced to fight with "one hand tied behind their backs" . . . All these silly, little lies in an attempt to alter history.
When you get caught up in those silly little lies, in correcting them, it's really easy to miss the bigger point: the United States never have had any business being in Vietnam.
If that seems familiar it's because the United States does not have any business being in Iraq.
But the US military is in Iraq and why?
Cindy Sheehan asked for a second meeting with the Bully Boy in 2005 but apparently napping left him little time for anything else. The question she wanted to ask was what "noble cause" did her son Casey die for?
Bully Boy had called the illegal war "a noble cause." The press didn't leap to question that, it took a grieving mother to challenge the lie.
Now maybe Bill Moyers can do a special looking into that?
The lessons of Vietnam for the American people were (a) that it wasn't worth it, (b) that governments lie and (c) the United States is not, to steal from Phil Ochs, the "Cops of the World."
The years following the withdrawal from Vietnam have been about gearing the public up for more war. The US publicly engaged in mini-wars such as Grenada (a press concoction if ever there was one) leading up to the "big one," the first Gulf War where Poppy Bush was smart enough to get in and get out quickly before the fatalities mounted and the public turned on that war. The Clinton administration was also eager to prove something.
That was helped by the fact that Bill Clinton did not serve in Vietnam and wanted to act as if that was something to be ashamed of. Bill Clinton actively worked to avoid serving in an illegal war and he wanted to shy from that. Doing so put him off kilter for both terms whenever the issue of sending US troops into combat arose. For those who've forgotten, Colin Powell (who helped sell the current illegal war) had to explain to then US Secretary of State Mad Maddie Albright that the US military was not a set of toys for her to play with. Mad Maddie was eager to prove her bonafides . . . with the blood of others.
The Iraq war didn't just happen. Plans for war with Iraq existed in the Clinton administration. It was about gearing the public up for war and that's why, immediately after 9-11, as Richard Clarke pointed out in Against All Enemies, the call came from the White House to tie it all into Iraq.
And why not? James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet demonstrates how the so-called syndrome effected those serving in Bully Boy's cabinet. As Norman Solomon observed:
Often discussed by news media, the "Vietnam syndrome" usually has a negative connotation, implying knee-jerk opposition to military involvement. Yet public backing for a war has much to do with duration and justification. A year after the invasion of Iraq began, Noam Chomsky observed: "Polls have demonstrated time and time again that Americans are willing to accept a high death toll -- although they don't like it, they're willing to accept it -- if they think it's a just cause. There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication. And in this case too if they thought it was a just cause, the 500 or so [American] deaths would be mourned, but not considered a dominant reason for not continuing. No, the problem is the justice of the cause."
Now it was Cokie Roberts, and not anyone in the administration, who uttered the now infamous "None that matter." Roberts isn't just a gas bag with ever increasing jowls, she's also the daughter of two members of Congress. Though she likes to pretend to be speaking "as a mother," the reality is she sees herself as laying down the Beltway line. (In her dreams.)
From Amy Goodman and David Goodman's Exception to the Rulers, page 207:
So the mainstream media dutifully reported that there was no objection to war. And we`re not just talking Fox News. On April 8, 2001, on NPR's Morning Edition, Cokie Roberts was asked if there were any dissenters in Congress. Quote, "None that matter," unquote, she replied.
Off with their heads, cried Evil Queen Cokie. And in that attitude, you can see the attitude at play in those bemoaning the so-called syndrome: "They don't really matter." ("They" being the people, the citizens.)
It's why the non-reporter Michael Gordon (New York Times) can say, smirk-faced, that he doesn't have a "dog in this fight" regarding the illegal war. Now, at an earlier time in the illegal war, when it was time to applaud the bombing of a TV station and flags were all the TV screens,
he had a dog in the fight. But that changed. How come?
The charitable ones might offer that Gordo grasped that he himself was, in fact, a dog and that a dog can't own another dog. But Gordo had a dog in the fight early on and he's still got one in it today. What does Gordo obsess over, this man whose 'reporting' lied to a nation?
He obsesses over strategy. Now you might think a reporter who got it so wrong would be unable to sleep until he got it right, until he figured out how he'd been duped, how many had been duped. But Gordo's not a real reporter. He's someone whose career has been built upon the non-Careless Whisper, someone who's very eagerly jotted down what he was told and never strayed from the official line. (Which is why he was used to beat the war drums on Iran.) Gordo, like many others, wants to talk strategies.
He can go on and on about where he thinks the administration screwed up. Funny though, his starting point is always well after the illegal war began. He's not alone in that.
The War Pornographers focus on the strategy because it distracts from the whys of war. It accepts the premise that the illegal war is valid and merely wants to debate how it should have been fought -- never if it should have been fought.
As it became obvious that the US was losing (there's no "win" there), strategy talks started popping up all over, in print, over the airwaves and the real reason for that is because, with the war not turning out to be a cakewalk, someone has to reassure the American people that the problem with the illegal war wasn't the war itself but how it was fought.
It's a distraction and an avoidance. And we're reminded of really bad radio, a public radio program, where a host let a guest state that the US needed to be in Iraq for two years before withdrawing because it would take that long. What would take that long?
The host didn't ask. Maybe he thought he was broadcasting (even more) archived tapes and was snoozing?
Just as we're not supposed to be the discuss the reasons for the war itself, we're not supposed to discuss the what the administration is doing in Iraq.
The host should have asked the guest, "What needs to be accomplished before the US can pull out in your two-year schedule?"
The guest, hopefully, would have had a real answer to that question. But we're having a hard time thinking what it could be?
The reality is that two more years means two more years of killing. The reality is that Iraqis want the US out. Reality is that US forces breed tensions. Reality is that the puppet government has targeted Iraqis. From Tom Hayden:
The time has come to understand the new de facto US policy in Iraq: to support, fund, arm and train a sectarian Shi'a-Kurdish state, one engaged in ethnic cleansing, mass detention and murder of Sunni Arabs.
If this description seems harsh, it is only because our minds are crowded with false or outdated paradigms. First was the dream of Baghdad as an exemplary democratic domino. Then the idea of a unitary neo-liberal state with proportional representation and revenue-sharing among Shi'a, Kurds and Sunnis. All along, the US has described itself as a neutral arbiter among warring factions, a promoter of the rule of law and human rights in the Iraqi jungle.
Even as former US ambassador Khalilzad left Baghdad, he was struggling to clinch deals over oil revenue-sharing, reversal of de-Baathification laws, and inclusion of Sunni interests in constitutional reform and local governance. The Shi'a, muttering that Khalilzad was a Sunni apologist, seemed uninterested in anything but window-dressing reforms.
Whether by accident or design, the reality since 2006 is that the Shi'a, with Kurdish approval, are carrying out a sectarian war against the Sunni population with American dollars and trainers.
Support, fund, train. Get it? We'd add that the US also looks the other way while the killings go on. Two more years of that accomplishes exactly what? Killing off the last Sunnis who don't flee?
Poppy Bush's Gulf War was supposed to send the message that war was good and lift it up high on the list of options. Bully Boy's 'cakewalk' was supposed to continue the (perceived by some) success of Afghanistan. Now people rush in to talk strategies and insist that the US remain in Iraq and it usually has little to do with much more than a fear, on the part of War Hawks, of, "How will we ever overcome this?!?!?"
Phyllis Bennis and Robert Jensen (CounterPunch) address this issue that so many others want to ignore:
That first step is, of course, crucial. When 78 percent of the Iraqi people oppose the presence of U.S. troops and 61 percent support attacks on those troops, it's clear that our presence in the country is causing -- not preventing -- much of the violence. Pulling out U.S. troops (including the 100,000-plus mercenaries who back the U.S. military) won't eliminate all Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence, but it will remove the reason many Iraqis are fighting. That would take away the protective umbrella that the widely supported anti-occupation violence currently gives the real terrorists -- those engaged in killing civilians for political or sectarian reasons. Once U.S. forces are gone and the reason for the legitimate resistance to foreign occupation is eliminated, the ugly terrorist violence will be exposed for what it is and it will be possible for Iraqis themselves to isolate the terrorists and eliminate them as a fighting force.
As they also note:
But what comes after a U.S. withdrawal? We clearly owe the Iraqi people massive reparations for the devastation our illegal invasion has brought. Only in the United States is that illegality questioned; in the rest of the world it's understood. Equally obvious around the world is that the decision to launch an aggressive war was rooted in the desire to expand U.S. military power in the strategically crucial oil-rich region, and that as a result the war fails every test of moral legitimacy.
But we're apparently not going to be able to have that discussion. BE HONEST*, why is that?
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"BE HONEST," for two readers who have wondered, is a quote from a silly who couldn't talk Iraq all through 2006 but, in 2007, wanted to give it a single paragraph and suggest that the peace movement was being dishonest about what things would be like when the US military pulled out of Iraq.