Spinning the Past, Threatening the Future March 31, 2004

ZNet Commentary
Spinning the Past, Threatening the Future March 31, 2004
By Norman Solomon

Political aphorisms don’t get any more cogent: "Who controls the past
controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell’s famous observation goes a long way toward explaining why --
a full year after the invasion of Iraq -- the media battles over prewar lies
are so ferocious in the United States. Top administration officials are
going all out to airbrush yesterday’s deceptions on behalf of today’s. And
tomorrow’s.

The future they want most to control starts on Election Day. And with
scarcely seven months to go in the presidential campaign, the past that Bush
officials are most eager to obscure is their own record. In late 2002 and
early last year, whenever the drive to war hit a bump, they maneuvered
carefully to keep the war caravan moving steadily forward.

There was no doubt, they were a hard-driving bunch. The most powerful squad
of the Bush foreign-policy team ran on the fuel of certitude at such a
prodigious rate that even their momentum had momentum -- maybe, in part,
because their lives’ trajectories seemed to demand it. War had been declared
first within themselves.

Perhaps such steeliness has been almost boilerplate in history; excuses for
aggressive war have never been hard to come by. In this case, no amount of
geopolitical analysis -- from media pundits, academics and other
commentators -- could really do more to shed light than the lightbulb
comprehension that these people in charge had from the outset made the
determination that war it would be.

So, every attempt at civic engagement and demonstrations against the war
scenario was, in effect, trying to impede "leaders" who had already gone
around the bend. A very big bend. One of the American mass media taboos was
to seriously suggest the possibility that the lot of them -- Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Rice and, yes, Powell -- were, in their pursuit of war on Iraq,
significantly deranged.

Working back from their conclusion of war’s necessity, top Bush
administration officials -- with assistance from many reporters and pundits
-- were reading the calendar backwards, hellbent on getting the invasion
underway well before the extreme heat of summer.

There was also political weather to be navigated. Though much more
susceptible to manipulation than the four seasons, the electoral storms
would be starting for the 2004 presidential contest, and a secured victory
over Iraq well in advance seemed advisable.

The peace-seeking pretense was dripping with charade in the months before
the invasion. Journalists kept writing and talking about the chances of war
as though President Bush hadn’t already made up his mind to order it. Yet
what Bush said in public was exactly opposite to reality -- a "one-eighty."
When he talked about preferring to find an acceptable alternative to war, he
was determined to bypass and destroy every alternative to war.

Rational arguments would not work to forestall the presidential order to
unleash the Pentagon. Despite the obstacles, which included vital activism
and protests for peace, the chief executive easily got to have his war --
the best kind, to be fought and endured only by others.

Eighteen months ago, looking out at Baghdad from an upper story of a hotel,
I thought of something Albert Camus once wrote. "And henceforth, the only
honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that
words are more powerful than munitions." Later, any and all words were to be
vastly outmatched by the big guns trained on Iraq.

One afternoon, 14 months ago, inside a little shop in Baghdad’s crowded
souk, a young boy sat behind an old desk, brown eyes wide, quietly watching
his father unfurl carpets for potential customers, and I wondered: "Will my
country’s missiles kill you?"

Key questions of the past are also crucial for the future. For instance, can
the United States credibly wage a "war on terrorism" by engaging in warfare
that terrorizes civilians?

Close to 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died because of the war during the past
year.

Does the mix of mendacity and deadly violence from the Oval Office really
strike against terrorism, or does it fuel terrorist cycles?

And, in the realm of news media, how many journalists are willing and able
to go beyond reliance on official sources enough to bring us truth about
lies that result in death?
__________________________________
Norman Solomon is co-author, with Reese Erlich, of "Target Iraq: What the
News Media Didn’t Tell You."

Background link: http://www.accuracy.org/war-releases.htm


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