Norman Solomon: The Silence of the Bombs

[babylonsister]

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/23512

The Silence of the Bombs
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2007-06-11 12:14. Media

By Norman Solomon

Three years have passed since most Americans came to the conclusion
that the Iraq war was a "mistake." Reporting the results of a Gallup poll
in June 2004, USA Today declared: "It is the first time since Vietnam that
a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a
mistake." And public opinion continued to move in an antiwar direction.
But such trends easily coexist with a war effort becoming even more
horrific.

snip//

These days, there's a lot of talk about seeking a political solution
in Iraq -- but the Bush administration and the military leaders who answer
to the commander in chief are fundamentally engaged in a very different
sort of project. Looking ahead, from the White House, the key goal is to
seem to be winding down the U.S. war effort while
actually reconfiguring massive violence to make it more effective.

snip//

Meanwhile, the Iraqis killed by Americans don't become much of an
issue in the realms of U.S. media and politics. News coverage
provides the latest tallies of Iraqis who die from "sectarian
violence" and "terrorist attacks," but the reportage rarely discusses how
the U.S. occupation has been an ascending catalyst for that
carnage. It's even more rare for the coverage to focus on the
magnitude of Iraqi deaths that are direct results of American
firepower.

In the United States, many advocates of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq
have focused on what the war has been doing to Americans. This
approach may seem like political pragmatism and tactical wisdom, but in
the long run it's likely to play into the hands of White House
strategists who will try to regain domestic political ground by
reducing American losses while boosting the use of high-tech weaponry
against Iraqi people.

snip//

The combination of deceptive officials in the U.S. government and an
evasive U.S. press has been a disaster for the flow of information to the
American public. "With the military unwilling to tell the truth -- or say
anything at all, in most cases -- and unable to provide the stability
necessary for to operate, it falls to the
mainstream media, even at this late stage of the
conflict, to begin ferreting out substantive information on the air war,"
Turse points out. "It seems, however, that until reporters
begin bypassing official U.S. military pronouncements and locating Iraqi
sources, we will remain largely in the dark with little
knowledge of what can only be described as the secret U.S. air war in Iraq."

As the summer of 2007 gets underway, the demand to "bring the troops
home" is necessary but insufficient. The numbers of Americans
fighting and dying in Iraq are not a reliable measure of U.S.
culpability in the continuing slaughter.

_________________________________________

The new documentary film "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death," based on Norman Solomon's book of the same title,
is being released directly to DVD in mid-June. For information about the
full-length movie, produced by the Media Education Foundation and narrated
by Sean Penn, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org
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[Briar]

1. Thank goodness

someone is saying this. I am sick with shame at what "we" are doing to Iraqis and ignoring.

"The available evidence is strong that the U.S. air war is escalating
– with a surge of resulting casualties among Iraqi civilians. Their suffering and their deaths get very little coverage in the U.S. news media. “Since the Bush administration’s invasion, the American air war has been given remarkably short shrift in the media,” Turse writes. And he cites “indications that the air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children.”

[laststeamtrain]

2. Sorry I missed recommending this . Kick, anyway. n/t

[PATRICK]

3. We only make headway

against the evil by the level of their outreaching, failures and incompetence. People on every front are pushed like cattle in a stampede and reacting about as powerfully. To use one analogy which is actually part and parcel of the entire situation, every dissent and opposition to Bush is bent, diverted, collaborating with the flow of destruction as in for example...election "reform". There has been a massive revelation and occurrence of directed, blatant and horrendous vote suppression, gimmicky fraud on every conceivable level, fraudulent even in its theory and the manufacturers themselves of voting machines. "Fighting" means a pathetic paper trail on the touchscreen bandits? Trying to legislate the waters of corruption behind porous dams enforced by crooks elected by the system and legitimate officials repressed by the same?

Had Bush been successful by some miracle of luck and theoretical competence unimpeded, Iraq protests would have been more pathetic, but perhaps stripped back to the fundamental core of the crime itself. Today the crime issue rarely dents the public mood of plain old dissatisfaction and gut instinct. It is not allowed to. The massive diversion of humanity away from truth might be a common flaw in the species or the times, but it is directed by men riding the horses withe guns, men who are not likely doing anything except directing the herd off the cliff if things don't "settle down".

We live in a world of utter, enforced madness, of directed, suppressed, idiotically manipulated information and social forces. Because we are humans, most people can sense and discover a lot of this, and pick away at this or that or start wading through the disillusionment and dystopia that began as the modern awakening to the modern world- just before things got immeasurably worse. Thomas Hartmann actually said one salient simple, embarrassing fact that needs repeating without being afraid of one being labeled as a "left wing kook". There is a very small finite number of oligarchs and corporations and their supportive pols, thugs and voices who are trying so badly and bloodily to direct this mess away from any semblance of "herd awareness" and democracy. The onion can be peeled back to less than a thousand big shots, corporate entities, some few tens of thousands of upper crust functionaries and overlords. And for those people the entire menace and hope of human destiny is supposed to dance like puppets on tangled strings with all the truly wise, talented, tech and science masters, pools of endeavor utterly stripped of a chance to lead or save humanity at the very first step of even TRYING to make this world survive, work or progress to match runaway progression of unraveling ecology and unsustainable civilization.

The Dems were criticized for failure of confrontation and leadership. It is a universal frustration. Hell, even the Bushies are frustrated by their own failures. No one can get a handle on it while the hands least desirable or competent in any sense or any moral judgment are glued maniacally on the deference to power and privilege that has usurped and ruined every institution and endeavor of global humanity. I am sure that many leading Dems, like the paper trail advocates, like many other dissenters and activists, are just trying to get a foothold for transition, for a modest turning back of the clock of "our" own. Transitional "reformers" are no longer able to cope with the evils and harms done, the concrete gutting of faith in civilization and human decision making, the search for a new balance of delusion, leaving the madmen who have slaked long and deep on profiteering and world power untouched and always in business. Their fantasies have diseased the world and if the irony of decent, legitimate, smart people is to restore a miserably revealed fantasy with an even more pathetic one we will have imitated the neocons on the balance beam of insanity. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum indeed. The large black wings have cast their shadow over this predictable comedy already. But we live in a dream world where any of us can be bombed, shot, poisoned by earth, air, water, and food and disease, stripped of rights, whipped to war, forced to fight knowledge itself, to be suckers whose ignorance and anger can be played, to be reduced to alienated wise fools who can be ignored or ganged up on according to the whim and fears of the idiotic puppet masters. All their functionaries, deluded into thinking they have some real function in civilization other than simply being tools for the masters, have been easily led into total incompetence, failures, arrogant torching of their own life's work and meaning- into actual red-handed fools in every sense of the word.

What we all want is too little. What justice is needed is barely able to raise its hand for a query. What picture we see is mercifully small in tiny temporary, deteriorating Edens and Baghdads waiting for the bombs. What we would settle for is extremely dangerous, a myth destroyed by a counter myth that has fallen for some soft Manicheism, dualism, yin yang up the wing wang, between the gods of greed and empire and the subsistence morality of decent life and delegated responsibility where no one knows, everyone pretends and none can live. There is no bi-partisanship or gridlock in the battle for human survival or good versus evil. Just one dumbfounded surrender to the safety of the night, thinking the beasts are all outside the fire instead of sharing the fire, hogging the fire, endangering, abusing and using the fire to destroy us totally from within. Right versus left is merely one sign of that divided soul, not in the massive numbers of good versus evil- those monarchs of hate are too few, but the sum total that adds mysteriously up to so little when manufacturing meaningless numbers connoting wealth
flaunts its madness against the common weakness.

Change is coming on a scale for which human history and existence has no model or precursor. So is death which does have very rigid models and infinite examples. Human society can change the first, theoretically, but the prognosis looks not very likely. To have a turning point one must turn, not just be aware. And do it correctly since there is no time left generous to mistakes. Not surprisingly, the resistance to awareness itself or doing ANYTHING about the simplest or partial needs is meeting with large inertial resistance and very particular repression by the tyranny running rampant.