December 22, 2005
Three
days before Christmas, the Bush administration launched a new salvo of
bright spinning lies about the Iraq war. "In an interview with reporters
traveling with him on an Air Force cargo plane to Baghdad," the Associated
Press reported Thursday morning, Donald Rumsfeld "hinted that a
preliminary decision had been made to go below the 138,000 baseline" of
U.S. troops in Iraq.
Throughout 2006,
until Election Day in early November, this kind of story will be a
frequent media refrain as the Bush regime does whatever it can to prevent
a loss of Republican majorities in the House and Senate. By continuing to
fortify large military bases in Iraq -- and by continuing to escalate an
air war there courtesy of U.S. taxpayers but largely outside the U.S.
media frame -- the White House is determined to exploit every weakness and
contradiction of antiwar sentiment inside the United States.
There’s a lot for
the pro-war propagandists to exploit. American opponents of this war often
emphasize the deaths and injuries of U.S. troops and the anguish of loved
ones at home. At the same time, to whatever extent it’s a conscious
strategy or a genuine nationalistic form of narcissism, Americans who
denounce the war commonly seem to be playing to a media gallery that can
easily acknowledge the importance of American lives -- but downplays the
loss of Iraqi lives unless those tragedies can be pinned on enemies of the
U.S. occupation.
What’s on the
horizon for 2006 is that the Bush administration will strive to put any
real or imagined reduction of U.S. occupation troop levels in the media
spotlight. Meanwhile, the Pentagon will use massive air power in Iraq.
It’s a process
already underway, as independent journalist
Dahr Jamail
-- who worked on the ground in Iraq for more than eight months of the U.S.
occupation -- pointed out in a mid-December article titled "An
Increasingly Aerial Occupation." As he put it: "The American media
continues to ignore the increasingly devastating air war being waged in
Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi resistance -- and, as usual,
Iraqi civilians continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of the
bombing."
Yes, we should
demand swift withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But, at this point, to
do so without also demanding an end to
U.S. bombing of Iraq is to fall into a trap laid by the war makers in
Washington. This kind of thing has happened before -- with devastating
results for people trying to survive a Pentagon air war that was receiving
little U.S. media attention.
The Nixon
administration was eager to divert attention from the slaughter in
Southeast Asia to peace talks in Paris -- and to the gradual withdrawal of
U.S. troops from Vietnam over a period of more than three years. In
general the networks were all too willing to oblige.
The negotiations and
withdrawals served as diversions from bloody facts of the continuing war.
The tonnage of U.S. bombing actually increased -- while the networks’
focus moved away from the ongoing bloodshed. At NBC, for instance,
"although combat footage was sent to New York from the Saigon bureau every
day for two months following the [early November 1968 U.S.] decision
[initiating peace negotiations in Paris], it was aired only three times on
the evening news," journalist Edward Jay Epstein noted. "The preceding
year, when there had been almost the same number of American combat deaths
during the same period, combat stories were shown almost every night of
the week."
With the media
wisdom determining that the main Vietnam story had become the
negotiations, NBC News producer Robert Northshield said that "combat
stories seemed like a contradiction and would confuse the audience." Other
networks came to similar conclusions. And the media evasions were to
become more extreme as Washington reduced the number of American troops in
Vietnam.
A typical approach
was embodied in edicts handed down at ABC, where the executive producer of
the evening news, Av Westin, put out a March 1969 memo that explained: "I
have asked our Vietnam staff to alter the focus of their coverage from
combat pieces to interpretive ones, pegged to the eventual pull-out of the
American forces. This point should be stressed for all hands." In a telex
to the network’s Saigon bureau, Westin gave the news of his decree to the
news correspondents: "I think the time has come to shift some of our focus
from the battlefield, or more specifically American military involvement
with the enemy, to themes and stories under the general heading 'We Are on
Our Way Out of Vietnam.’"
For U.S. media, the
Vietnam story had been front-and-center when American soldiers were firmly
deployed there. But as the White House gradually pulled troops from
Vietnam, the media shifted farther away from the actual destruction of
people, villages, farmland and ecosystems -- even while the U.S. air war
and coordinated ground assaults in Southeast Asia persisted at a very high
rate of killing.
During 2006,
reductions of U.S. troop levels in Iraq – accompanied by intensive media
spin about prospects for U.S. military disengagement -- are likely even
while the already-horrific air war escalates. Those who die under U.S.
bombs will rarely make the TV network news or the newspapers back in the
United States.
The Bush
administration is eager to downplay the escalating air war. In 2006, the
antiwar movement must do the opposite.
Norman Solomon is the author of the new book
War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,
which this article is adapted from.
For more information, visit:
www.WarMadeEasy.com.
He can be
reached at: mediabeat@igc.org.
* Read an
Interview with Norman Solomon about War Made Easy by Adrian
Zupp