The uproar over Bob Woodward’s new book has intensified the media focus on a basic controversy that’s summed up this way: Is Iraq a quagmire?

Like many other debates that flourish in American mass media, the standard answers on both sides are wrong — because the question bypasses human realities.

Most obviously, Iraq is not a swamp; it’s a place where real people live and die. They are not metaphors, and neither is their country. Iraqi people exist quite apart from the roles imputed to them by politicians and journalists in Washington.

But “quagmire” serves as a kind of mental framework for where most U.S. media coverage has remained.

Forget the American Century. This is the American Narcissism…

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The Sept. 25 edition of Time magazine illustrates how the U.S. news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran. The headline over the cover-story interview with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is "A Date With a Dangerous Mind." The big-type subhead calls him "the man whose swagger is stirring fears of war with the U.S.," and the second paragraph concludes: "Though pictures of the Iranian president often show him flashing a peace sign, his actions could well be leading the world closer to war."

When the USA’s biggest newsweekly devotes five pages to scoping out a U.S. air war against Iran, as Time did in the same issue, it’s yet another sign that the wheels of our nation’s war-spin machine are turning faster toward yet another unprovoked attack on another country.

Ahmadinejad has risen to the top of Washington’s — and American media’s — enemies list. Within the last 20 years, that list has included Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, with each subjected to extensive vilification before the Pentagon launched a large-scale military attack.

Whenever the president of the United States decides to initiate or intensify a media blitz against a foreign leader, mainstream U.S. news outlets have dependably stepped up the decibels and hysteria. But the administration can also call off the dogs of war by going silent about the evils of some foreign tyrant.

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This is the time of year when media campaigns for the latest digital
products are apt to go into overdrive. Schools are back in session, and the
holiday sales blitz is getting underway. For the latest computerized
gizmos, that means an escalating media drive — revving up news coverage,
PR hype and advertisements. Often it’s hard to tell the difference between
the three.

At the risk of sounding like a techno-scrooge, I take a dim view of
media excitement about the very latest in digital gadgets. No doubt the new
versions of laptops or handhelds offer many virtues. But umpteen gigabytes
can never make up for a media culture and a political environment largely
out of touch with human empathy.

The new mega-gig innovations are marketed as awesome pluses without
downsides. But one big problem is that we’re encouraged to believe in
purchasing our way into solutions. Huge expectations for satisfaction from
the multimedia Internet — and rampant enthusiasm for faster and more
compact technologies with the latest dazzling features — routinely get us
into thinking like consumers with the speed of a broadband download.

Rarely mentioned is the economic stratification that the digital
wonderland both reflects and exacerbates. While computer prices have come
down in recent years, the overall costs of partaking in the online world
are another matter.

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The USA’s mass media constantly tell us how Americans see the "war on terror." But the same outlets rarely tell us much about how the rest of the world sees it.

Five years after 9/11, the gap between perceptions is enormous. Countless polls confirm the overall chasm. Yet, day to day, the media messages that surround us in the United States simply recycle American views for American viewers, listeners and readers.

But there are exceptions. A recent one aired on "PRI’s The World," a co-production of Public Radio International, WGBH in Boston and the BBC World Service. "We decided to check in with people in different parts of the globe to get their perspectives on the White House’s war on terror," the anchor said on the Sept. 5 broadcast.

And for the next six minutes, the American audience got an earful — from four speakers who were not just expressing their own views. Crucially, they were summing up the dominant outlooks in huge regions of the planet.

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This month began with 140,000 American troops in Iraq — 13,000 more than in late July.

Almost 30 months have passed since Time magazine’s mid-April 2004 cover story, “No Easy Options,” reported that “foreign policy luminaries from both parties say a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would cripple American credibility, doom reform in the Arab world and turn Iraq into a playground for terrorists and the armies of neighboring states like Iran and Syria.”

Back then, according to the USA’s largest-circulation newsmagazine, “the most” that the president could hope for was that “some kind of elected Iraqi government will eventually emerge from the wreckage, at which point the U.S. could conceivably reduce the number of its troops significantly. But getting there requires a commitment of at least several more months of American blood and treasure.”

As I noted in my book War Made Easy, which came off the press nearly 18 months ago, “Hedge words were plentiful: ‘the most’ that could be hoped for was that ‘some kind’ of elected Iraqi government would ‘eventually emerge,’ at which time the United States ‘could conceivably’ manage to ‘reduce’ its troop level in Iraq ‘significantly,’ although even that vague hope necessitated a commitment of ‘at least several more months’ of Americans killing and dying. But in several more months, predictably, there would still be no end in sight — just another blank check for more ‘blood and treasure,’ on the installment plan.”

President Bush keeps demanding those blank checks, and Congress keeps cutting them. What Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism” provides ample justifications. For Bush, one of them involves couching the choices ahead in military terms — to be best judged by military leaders. This is, in essence, an effort to short-circuit democracy…

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When Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, invited President Bush to engage in a “direct television debate” a few days ago, the White House predictably responded by calling the offer “a diversion.” But even though this debate will never happen, it’s worth contemplating.

Both presidents are propaganda junkies — or, more precisely, propaganda pushers — so any such debate would overdose the audience with self-righteous arrogance. The two presidents are too much alike.

Each man, in his own way, is a fundamentalist: so sure of his own moral superiority that he’s willing to push his country into a military confrontation. This assessment may be a bit unfair to Ahmadinejad, who hasn’t yet lied his nation into war; the American president is far more experienced in that department…

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Nearly five years into the "war on terror," it’s still at the core of American media and politics.

    Yeah, I’ve seen the recent polls showing a drop in public support for President Bush’s "war on terror" claims. And I’ve read a spate of commentaries this month celebrating Bush’s current lack of political traction on the terrorism issue, like the New York Times piece by Frank Rich last Sunday triumphantly proclaiming that "the era of Americans’ fearing fear itself is over."

    That’s a comforting thought, hovering somewhere between complacent and delusional.

    Reflexive fear may be on vacation, but it hasn’t quit. The "war on terror" motif is fraying – but it remains close at hand as a mighty pretext for present and future warfare…

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The leading pro-war Democrat in the Senate is hoping for a landslide in the New York primary next month. And unless progressives quickly mobilize to dent her vote total, she’s likely to get it.

Hillary Clinton, of course, intends to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. But first there’s her quest to win big for reelection. If antiwar voters cut into Clinton’s percentage in the primary on Sept. 12, despite overwhelming media visibility and a massive campaign war chest, her momentum would take a hit.

After Sen. Joe Lieberman lost to antiwar challenger Ned Lamont in Connecticut’s Democratic primary last week, I thought some more about the fast-approaching Senate race in New York, where anti-war candidate Jonathan Tasini (www.tasinifornewyork.org) will be on the ballot next to Clinton…

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