CRIMES OF THE CENTURY
We've been too tied up lately to respond to a very tragic anniversary with some commentary, the 10 year anniversary of the illegal, and immoral US invasion and occupation of the country of Iraq. A country which in no way was threatening this one, and which was not involved in any way with the 9/11/2001 tragedy in New York. Our favourite commentary we've seen about this anniversary came from Dahr Jamail, an investigative reporter who has traveled extensively throughout Iraq before, during, and after the Iraq invasion. Iraq is in shambles, and will take decades to recover, if ever. Since chemical and radioactive pollution from the use of "Depleted Uranium" and other weaponry by the US military has poisoned it's environment, and is causing horrible birth defects and diseases in many areas. 
We've written several articles here since our founding about what happened in Iraq, and the real reasons why the US undertook this invasion. Rather than go through all this material again, here they are. Especially important is the interview with the internationally-recognised author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins.
Here is his response during that interview to our question about the reason Iraq was invaded.
APR: That was
going to be one of my questions, is that there are a number of theories out
there as to what actually happened in Iraq that caused this country to invade
it. One of them was that he [Saddam Hussein] was manipulating the oil market,
creating instability in it, making Saudi Arabia unhappy, and other countries
too, as well as the oil companies. And the other one was that the
“neo-conservatives”, the other theory, was that they wanted to make Iraq a
free-market paradise in the Middle East with no oversight or regulations, and to
actually use it as a model, for what they wanted to do with other countries. Is
that what you see as being responsible for what happened in Iraq?
JP: Well, I think all of that’s the case.
And I talk in Confessions of an Economic Hitman about this amazing
deal we put together in Saudi Arabia. We had this oil embargo levied against the
United States by OPEC and as a result I was sent over to Saudi Arabia to make
sure that would never happen again. We knew we had to bring Saudi around because
it was the largest producer of oil, and really controlled OPEC. We struck this
deal with the house of Saud, the royal family, whereby they agreed not to
increase the price of oil any higher than the price our oil companies wanted it,
and they agreed to keep the oil flowing, and they also agreed to only sell oil
for dollars, which put the dollar in a much stronger position. And a number of
other things, and we [the U.S.] agreed in turn to protect the house of Saud and
keep it in power. After that, we [the U.S.] decided we should do the same thing
with Sadaam Hussein, Iraq was the next largest producer of oil. But he wouldn’t
buy into it. And there were others, two more of course, but that was the big
one, why we first sent the troops in, because we couldn’t take him out, the
Jackals couldn’t take him out, he was too careful, security was high, he had a
lot of look-alike doubles which made it difficult. And then after his military
was destroyed by the first Bush administration, we figured he be sufficiently
chastised that he’d now come around. He didn’t, so the second Bush
administration really sent in the forces and took him out of course, as we all
know. Those are all factors, another important one though is that the U.S.
industrial complex likes wars, because it makes a lot of money off wars. Vietnam
was long gone, we’d been looking for another war for awhile. It’s interesting that in the
film South of the Border, in an interview with Kirchner, the former president of
Argentina, he tells Oliver Stone, that Bush Jr. admitted to him that the U.S.
economy is based on war.
In addition, Naomi Klein's analysis in what many consider (as do we) to be one of the most important political/economic exposes written in the past several decades, her Shock Doctrine, sheds more light on the matter. Which we described in our article, Capitalism's Dirty Wars/Secrets.
THERE IS NO TRUTH...
In an earlier article, we had mentioned a saying my Russian language professor at UC Davis shared with the class in 1982, about the old Communist Party news organs in the USSR. Which was "Pravda ne Pravda y Izvestia ne Izvestia", or literally, "there is no truth in Truth, and no news in News." Meaning that the bulk of the population knew that the official government news sources in the USSR couldn't be trusted, were full of lies/propaganda.
The same is true in the US and in many other so-called western Democracies. And no better illustration serves to point this out, than the corporate media's behaviour during the run-up and then prosecution of the illegal/immoral Iraq invasion.
This article from the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) group revisits that.
The Media Didn't Fail on Iraq; Iraq Just Showed We Have a Failed Media
By 18 Comments
Paul Farhi
On Iraq, Journalists Didn't Fail. They Just Didn’t Succeed.
"Thousands of news stories and columns published before the war described and debated the administration’s plans and statements, and not all of them were supportive," he says. I suppose the North Korean media might fail by that standard, but few others.
"It wasn't impossible for skeptics of the war to connect the dots," writes Fahri. It was not actually like the dystopian novel 1984, where every scrap of contrary information went down the Memory Hole!
You know what, Paul Farhi? Skeptics are aware that it was possible to "connect the dots," because they did so, in real time–citing the same exceptional journalists whom you now cite to prove that the media as a whole were doing their job.
But the real job of the media is not to sprinkle 1 percent truth amidst 99 percent bullshit, so that diligent researchers can search it out like Easter eggs. The job of the media is to present information so that when when its audience consumes it in the usual manner, that audience can get some sense of what reality is like. By this basic standard, the corporate media failed.
Farhi trots out journalists' old, tired excuses for this failure: Condoleezza Rice's talk of mushroom clouds and Colin Powell's entirely dubious claims about WMDs "turned everyone irrational," says the Post's Walter Pincus. "The consensus was universal,” says the L.A. Times' Doyle McManus. Even if such claims were true, which they patently aren't, what else would you call a media system that responds to a crisis with irrational groupthink but a failure?
A comforting streak of fatalism runs through Farhi's piece. The idea that "a more confrontational press could have stopped the march into Iraq" is "wishful thinking," he writes; it implies that "the media could single-handedly override the president’s influence and that of other leaders." Former Post executive editor Leonard "Downie believes that no amount of media skepticism would have stopped the administration. 'We were going to war,' he said."
You may have thought that corporate media outlets that are read, watched and listened to by cumulatively tens of millions of people are powerful shapers of public opinion–turns out no. How comforting the belief in the media's powerlessness must be to people who would otherwise fear they shared responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
But Farhi does not just dispute that journalists have the power to change history; he has doubts about the ability of journalists to do journalism. Quoting Pincus again: "If there's disagreement inside the government about what's true and what isn't, how the hell can the press determine what's true?"
It's the kind of statement that makes me wonder why the Washington Post doesn't close up shop and recommend that people log in instead to the White House blog. If journalists can't tell truth from falsehood, or at least move us closer in that direction, what are they doing besides reformatting press releases?
Colin Powell at the UN
But it's really not impossible to distinguish credible from incredible claims. During his press-addling WMD performance, Colin Powell declared:
It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX…. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law.
Or take Pincus' piece from March 16, 2003, "U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms," the most on-point of the Post pieces cited by Farhi to make his case that the Post's pre-war performance "doesn't sound like failure." Even this piece didn't come out and say that anyone thought there were no WMDs to be found–only that "U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden." And because the truth, as Churchill put it, must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies, Pincus provided the administration's comeback:
Although senior intelligence officials said they are convinced Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, they feel they will not be able to prove it until after an invasion, when U.S. military forces and weapons analysts would have unrestricted access. These officials said the administration is withholding some of the best intelligence on suspected Iraqi weapons–uncertain as it is–from UN weapons inspectors in anticipation of war.Right, the Bush administration could have pointed out where those weapons were hidden–if they had wanted to. Would you trust a reporter who swallowed this explanation to watch your car?
And here's what passes for dissenting opinion in what may be the Post's single best example of not failing to be properly skeptical of administration WMD claims:
Some officials charge the administration is not interested in helping the inspectors discover weapons because a discovery could bolster supporters in the UN Security Council of continued inspections and undermine the administration's case for war.Farhi also has an argument about how reporters were hemmed in by journalistic standards–a version of his colleague David Ignatius' line (4/27/04) that "the media were victims of their own professionalism" (Extra!, 11-12/04). Here's Farhi:
Congress's unwillingness to stand up to the president was critical…. There were no hearings that could have featured skeptical government experts disputing the official line….You'll notice the common thread here: A lack of "government experts," "authoritative sources" (like Al Gore!) or on-the-record secret agents. Journalists wanted to write fair, balanced journalism–but they just couldn't find enough people in the government who would tell them that the government was lying.
Administration officials hogged media attention with scary, on-the-record statements. On the other side, there were few authoritative sources countering them. Even Al Gore believed that Iraq had WMDs….
Pincus and other reporters found people in the intelligence community who questioned the administration's case. But those with the most knowledge about classified material were unwilling to be identified publicly. And while anonymous sources are fine for suggesting the presence of smoke, they don't cinch the case for fire.
Some of the millions of people who weren't worth listening to about the Iraq War. (CC Photo: JL McVay)
Meanwhile, there were millions of people marching in the streets, holding vigils, signing petitions, calling and writing their representatives–all in an effort to stop the war. These people had leaders, journalists, experts they relied on–the very people who had been "connecting the dots" left by Farhi's non-failing media.
Did media give a platform to these folks–who, aside from representing a significant segment of public opinion, had the not-inconsiderable virtue of being right? No, they deliberately turned their back on them. Out of 393 sources who discussed the prospect of war on the ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS evening news shows from January 30 until February 12, 2003, according to a FAIR study (3/18/03), "only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups."
"If you want to say the press failed, you have to ask, what was the press supposed to do?" the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib told Farhi. Well, it was supposed to provide the accurate information and the space for public debate that democracy requires. But by the account of Farhi and his sources, corporate media never had any intention of doing either of these things. It's hard to say that the press failed at something it never tried to do in the first place.
P.S.: Farhi's piece ran while the Washington Post killed a far more critical piece on Iraq and the media it asked Greg Mitchell to write. Apparently the Post thought his piece didn't offer many "broader analytical points or insights." Still, Farhi positions himself as a brave contrarian standing up against media self-flagellation. Whatever gets you through the night.
Thus, in spite of millions of people world-wide demonstrating against the run-up for the lie-based Iraq invasion, the Cheney/Bush administration proceeded full-speed ahead with it's prosecution. Aided by a compliant and eager US corporate media, as FAIR's article showed.
Your lead editor and my mother, who has been a political activist for most of her adult life, participated in anti-war marches in Portland, OR in the years 2003-2005.
Each time, tens of thousands of people flooded the downtown streets of the city, in a procession several kilometres long. Which was barely reported on by the local and national corporate media in Portland, and the other cities nationally where these demonstrations occurred.
We like to think though, that some day those responsible for the Iraq tragedy will be held accountable. Isn't it ironic that ex Vice President Cheney had to have a heart transplant last year to remain alive? We'll leave you to speculate on the philosophical/spiritual implications of that.
This is why we don't use the corporate media for our news-gathering, but many of the alternative links which we provide here for you. It is important though to keep current with it, just so we know how events are being distorted through corporate lenses. We hope you will do similarly, for if you really want to know the truth behind what is driving current events, you won't get it from the corporate media. Cheers.
