|
Oh, The Lies, The Lies . . .
A
BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Gregg
Gordon
It was a scene that could not but remind us of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said -- the toppling of that hollow, sheet-metal statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad. Proof for all the world to see that Americans had "liberated" Iraq. The people were joyful. Let the dancing in the streets begin.
And most of us bought it. Although the crowd actually seemed a little light by joyful liberation standards, it was a war zone after all. Maybe people just weren't getting out yet. Few doubted the sincerity of those assembled as they smashed the brutal dictator's head with their shoes.
But in subsequent days, more glimpses of this scene have been published. Photos of the square from a longer distance than the live TV coverage show a crowd not just small, but pitiably small -- a knot of people in a vast traffic circle cordoned off by American armored vehicles. This crowd would not have made for a respectable bierstube in Germany, much less brought down the Berlin Wall.
Another photo showed, among the screamers and chanters, a man who bore a striking resemblance to a figure photographed just a few days earlier in the entourage of Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted bank swindler and fugitive from neighboring Jordan who is Rumsfeld's choice for Hussein's successor.
How did he get there? And who brought him? And with how many others? Could it be that the appropriate analogy was not the fall of the Berlin Wall but rather the organized thuggery of Republican Congressional aides flown into Florida to "spontaneously" disrupt the Miami-Dade recount after the 2000 election? Perhaps this had not been a spontaneous demonstration at all, but a simple photo-op, perfectly timed so Today and Good Morning America could send us to work with a cheerful and chipper smile, a staged and choreographed made-for-TV event about as spontaneous as the opening of Al Capone's vault. The only thing missing was Geraldo.
But no matter. The image of the falling statue had already achieved icon status, the premier lie in the cascade of lies which became this war. It made great TV, as MSNBC recognized by quickly splicing it in to a one of the patriotic trailers for its news coverage -- the first in a montage of inspiring images culminating with a smiling Iraqi saying, "Thank you, Bush," the loot he was hauling off carefully cropped from the picture. Joseph Goebbels' unique contribution to his chosen field as Nazi Germany's malicious genius of propaganda was the Big Lie -- the idea that when you lie, lie so outrageously that people can scarcely believe anyone would make such a thing up.
But the PR firm-trained warriors of the Pentagon and White House have come up with their own twist, specially suited for the insatiable appetite of the 24-7 news cycle. It's not the size of the lies that counts, but their number. Tell so many lies, and tell them so relentlessly, that any skeptics will simply be overwhelmed. They cannot refute them all, and those that they can will receive little attention. New, more current lies will by then have superseded the old ones, which if not entirely forgotten, will have already been internalized into the desired general impression that We are Good, and Things are Going Well.
On the second day of the war, my hometown newspaper featured an enormous headline claiming that 8,000 Iraqis had surrendered. Good news, I thought, and waited for the pictures. But none came, and indeed, within a few days the Iraqi unit reported to have surrendered suddenly seemed to be fighting rather fiercely in Basra. The newspaper never ran a correction -- it is embarrassing to have to retract the day's main headline -- but from then on I treated any administration statements, especially those vaguely attributed to "military" or "intelligence" sources, as propaganda pure and simple. Why expect otherwise? If, as The New York Times says, world public opinion is now the "other" superpower, psy-ops at the least are called for. The Bush Doctrine is clear. We will suffer no rivals.
So through the uprising in Basra, the woman hung from a lamppost for waving at American soldiers, the civilians forced into service as human shields, the thousands of Iraqi soldiers killed in the Army's first night drive-thru into Baghdad, I didn't believe a word of it and waited for confirmation. In the weeks since, nothing has surfaced to support any of these stories, and to the extent reporters have sought to investigate them, the claims have been positively refuted by witnesses. All of them were lies.
But again, no matter. Once scattered, these lies flourish like weeds, and our mainstream press adds the fertilizer. Guerilla-style fighters became "terrorists" and "death squads" (as if the American military was causing neither terror nor death). Precision-guided bombs were sparing civilians (let no cognitive dissonance arise from those bombs that landed precisely in Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, nor from the obvious fact of thousands of dead and maimed civilians). Humanitarian aid is on the way (although Umm Qasr, a small town just a few hundred meters from the Kuwaiti border, still lacked water and electricity weeks after its "liberation"). Unpleasant facts, when acknowledged at all, must not be allowed to obscure the greater Truth, which has already been ordained. We are Good, and All is Going Well.
Of course, lies on this scale require a cooperative press. While the American military quickly secured the Oil Ministry upon its arrival in Baghdad, it left the national museum and library completely unguarded, allowing irreplaceable treasures of Mesopotamian and Islamic history to be stolen, broken, and burned. Archives which survived pillaging by Mongol hordes in the 13th Century were lost in the American invasion in 21st -- a cultural catastrophe to rank with the sack of Rome. But while Rumsfeld scoffed about "vases" and one talking head mourned the "PR debacle," and most accepted the explanation that these things just happen in war, one truth had emerged that was indisputable: The Bush Administration places a higher value on 20 years worth of oil than on 7,000 years of human civilization.
Then in Mosul, Marines fired into an angry crowd, with reports of 10 dead, 100 wounded. Similar incidents in history -- the Boston Massacre and Kent State, Bloody Sunday in Tsarist Russia -- became events of seismic political importance with a fraction of those casualties. Yet that night, as I channel-surfed the major network newscasts, not one even mentioned Mosul. By the next day the story had caused enough of a stir internationally that it could not be completely ignored, but even then it was suitable for broadcast only under the military cover that the Marines had been fired on by snipers first. Iraqi witnesses interviewed mainly by the foreign press uniformly said the Marines had been the targets of stones, not bullets, but they were not presented on American screens. And even taking the military's version at face value, no one questioned whether the appropriate response to a couple of snipers is to fire into a crowd.
Now, Kurds and Arabs eye each other warily in the north (and sometimes more than eye), various factions of Shi'ites commandeer whole cities in the south, foreign and domestic jihadists are sprinkled across the land, thieves rule the night, and nationwide a population grows angrier by the day as they gaze on the wreckage of their cruelly uprooted lives. Disparate Iraqis unite only to demonstrate against the American occupation, and our punditry speculates how the President will use the political capital reaped by this " victory."
With such ominous signs, one would think we will soon reach a point when the lies can no longer be sustained. One would think Marines could face only so many angry demonstrators before the language of liberation sounds silly. One would think there is a limit to the amount of ethnic bloodshed that can fit under the rubric of "democracy."
And one would think that as the Iraqis decide, as one way or another they must, to write their own definition of liberation rather than the one the Bush Administration has scripted for them -- well, it is hard to put a happy face on dead American teenagers caught in the crossfire, even for our dangerously pliant and unskeptical media.
One would think. One would think.
But then again, We are Good, and All is Going Well.
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
Articles in the BuzzFlash Contributor section are posted as-is. Given the timeliness of some Contributor articles, BuzzFlash cannot verify or guarantee the accuracy of every word. We strive to correct inaccuracies when they are brought to our attention.
