War Made Invisible – How America Hides the Human Toll or Its Military Machine
Recent Articles:
- The Winner at the DNC’s Latest Meeting? Israel, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
- Why are Democratic leaders still ignoring voters on Israel?
- While Distancing from AIPAC, Most 2028 Democratic Hopefuls Are Still Embracing Israel
- DNC Approach to Israel Is Political Malpractice and Moral Failure
- Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues
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Blaming the Antiwar Messengers
The surge of antiwar voices in U.S. media this month has coincided with new lows in public approval for what pollsters call President Bush’s “handling” of the Iraq war. After more than two years of a military occupation that was supposed to be a breeze after a cakewalk into Baghdad, the war has become a clear PR loser. But an unpopular war can continue for a long time — and one big reason is that the military-industrial-media complex often finds ways to blunt the effectiveness of its most prominent opponents.
Right now, the pro-war propaganda arsenal of the world’s only superpower is drawing a bead on Cindy Sheehan, who now symbolizes the USA’s antiwar grief. She is a moving target, very difficult to hit. But right-wing media sharpshooters are sure to keep trying.
The Bush administration’s top officials must be counting the days until the end of the presidential vacation brings to a close the Crawford standoff between Camp Casey and Camp Carnage. But media assaults on Cindy Sheehan are just in early stages.
Read the full column.
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Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over
On Sunday, the New York Times published a piece by Frank Rich under the headline “Someone Tell the President the War Is Over.” The article was a flurry of well-placed jabs about the Bush administration’s lies and miscalculations for the Iraq war. But the essay was also a big straw in liberal wind now blowing toward dangerous conclusions.
Comparing today’s war-related poll numbers for George W. Bush with those for President Lyndon B. Johnson, the columnist writes…Read the full column.
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Cindy Sheehan’s Message Repudiates George Bush — and Howard Dean
In 1972, after many years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote: “In that time, I have seen it first as a problem; then as a stalemate; then as a crime.”
That aptly describes three key American perspectives now brought to bear on U.S. involvement in Iraq.
The moral clarity and political impacts of Cindy Sheehan’s vigil in Crawford are greatly enhanced by a position that she is taking: U.S. troops should not be in Iraq…
Read the full column.
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Rage Against the Killing of the Light
Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in U.S. history when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly patting death on its head.
Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet — most of all — war is about death and suffering. War makers thrive on abstractions. Their media successes depend on evasion.President Bush has tried to keep the loved ones of America’s war dead at middle distance, bathed in soft fuzzy light: close enough to exploit for media purposes, distant enough to insulate the commander in chief’s persona from the intrusion of wartime mourning in America.
What’s going on this week, outside the perimeter of the ranch-style White House in Crawford, is some reclamation of reality in public life. Cindy Sheehan has disrupted the media-scripted shadow play of falsity…
Read the full column.
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Big Star-Spangled Lies for War
A lot of people want to believe that the current war on Iraq is some kind of aberration — a radical departure from the previous baseline of U.S. foreign policy. That’s a comforting illusion.
Yes, the current administration in Washington is notable for the extreme mendacity and calculated idiocy of its claims. But — decade after decade — the propaganda fuel for one U.S. war after another has flowed from a standard set of lies.
Read the full piece adapated from War Made Easy.
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Radio… and a review
Norman Solomon was on KQED’s Forum and the Joy Cardin Show (audio is online for both).
War Made Easy was reviewed by David Swanson.
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The Incredible Blight of TV Punditry
When super-pundit Robert Novak stormed off the set of a live CNN show Thursday — just after uttering what the New York Times delicately calls “a profanity” — it was an unusual episode of TV punditry. With rare exceptions, the slick commentators of televisionland keep their cool. But we’d be much better off if they all disappeared.
Novak’s unscripted exit from the telecast may have been a preemptive strike — a kind of semiconscious work stoppage — to avoid squirming under the hot lights. “The moderator of the program, Ed Henry, later said on the air that he had warned Mr. Novak that he planned to ask him ‘about the CIA leak case,’” the Times reports. As a bottom-feeding big fish in the pond of political journalism, Novak wants control over the sunlight in his face…
Read the full column. -
Media Flagstones Along a Path to War on Iran
On Tuesday, big alarm bells went off in the national media echo chamber, and major U.S. news outlets showed that they knew the drill. Iran’s nuclear activities were pernicious, most of all, because people in high places in Washington said so.
It didn’t seem to matter much that just that morning the Washington Post reported: “A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years, according to government sources with firsthand knowledge of the new analysis. The carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House.”
By evening — hours after the Iranian government said it would no longer suspend activities related to enriching uranium — American news outlets were making grave pronouncements…
Read the full column.
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Operation Withdrawal Scam
A few days ago, the White House launched a new phase of its propaganda siege for the Iraq war.
The opening salvo came on July 27, when the commander of American forces in Iraq said that continuation of recent trends would make possible “some fairly substantial reductions” of U.S. troop levels in the spring and summer of 2006….
Gen. Casey’s statement, which made big news, was the start of a media offensive likely to last for the next 15 months, until the congressional elections. We might call it Operation Withdrawal Scam…
Read the full column.
Also see Norman Solomon’s Ask This on Nieman Watchdog.
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‘This Guy is a Modern-Day Hitler’
Evil that warrants the large-scale killing of war needs a face. But that face cannot belong to some amorphous mass of an enemy population; in fact, it’s a ritual for the president to offer assurances that civilians who may be caught in the crossfire are not among the Pentagon’s targets. The bull’s-eye must be painted on someone who links the nascent war to an indisputably justified one of the past.
For this purpose, Hitler’s name has been pressed into service, intermittently, for decades. Pointed mentions of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust open floodgates of emotion, connecting a present-day foe with a regime that slaughtered millions of people near the fulcrum of the twentieth century. What helps to do the trick is the message that while horrors of the past cannot be changed, they can be prevented in the near future.
At a press conference on July 28, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke…
Read the full excerpt from War Made Easy.