Tomgram

An imperial style all our own

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Flash news of the day, straight off the front page of the New York Times (but without the headline I would have put on it — Weapons of Mass Destruction Missing in Washington):

“The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs.The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems. Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.” (Andrew C. Revkin, Report by the E.P.A. Leaves Out Data on Climate Change)

Quote of the Day (from Ilene R. Prusher, In volatile Iraq U.S. curbs press, Christian Science Monitor):

“Among the scores of new publications that have flooded Iraq’s newsstands, the broadsheet As-Saah is one of the most widely read. In a front-page editorial Wednesday, the paper’s senior editor let readers know what he thought of the country’s liberators: ‘Bremer is a Baathist,’ the headline reads.

“In an interview, editor Ni’ma Abdulrazzaq says the press edict decreed by Bremer lays out restrictions similar to those under Mr. Hussein. Not long ago, an uppity writer could easily be accused of being an agent for America or Israel. ‘Now they put plastic bags on our heads, throw us to the ground, and accuse us of being agents of Saddam Hussein,’ the editorial reads. ‘In other words, if you’re not with America, you’re with Saddam.’

“‘Mr. Bremer, you remind us of Saddam,’ the column continues.’We’ve waited a long time to be free. Now you want us to be slaves.'”

Yesterday, an American soldier was ambushed and killed at a gas station in Baghdad. Today, an American ambulance was ambushed south of Baghdad — possibly the first American death in combat anywhere south of Baghdad in weeks — and another soldier killed. This morning’s staid British Financial Times headlined an article Pentagon admits Iraq guerrilla war and began it this way:

Quote of the Day (from Ilene R. Prusher, In volatile Iraq U.S. curbs press, Christian Science Monitor):

“Among the scores of new publications that have flooded Iraq’s newsstands, the broadsheet As-Saah is one of the most widely read. In a front-page editorial Wednesday, the paper’s senior editor let readers know what he thought of the country’s liberators: ‘Bremer is a Baathist,’ the headline reads.

“In an interview, editor Ni’ma Abdulrazzaq says the press edict decreed by Bremer lays out restrictions similar to those under Mr. Hussein. Not long ago, an uppity writer could easily be accused of being an agent for America or Israel. ‘Now they put plastic bags on our heads, throw us to the ground, and accuse us of being agents of Saddam Hussein,’ the editorial reads. ‘In other words, if you’re not with America, you’re with Saddam.’

“‘Mr. Bremer, you remind us of Saddam,’ the column continues.’We’ve waited a long time to be free. Now you want us to be slaves.'”

Yesterday, an American soldier was ambushed and killed at a gas station in Baghdad. Today, an American ambulance was ambushed south of Baghdad — possibly the first American death in combat anywhere south of Baghdad in weeks — and another soldier killed. This morning’s staid British Financial Times headlined an article Pentagon admits Iraq guerrilla war and began it this way:

“US forces are waging a “guerrilla war” in Iraq where elements of the former regime inflict casualties almost daily, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary said on Wednesday. However his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, said the the American public was prepared to accept the mounting death toll.”

That sums up a good deal of what’s happening in Iraq and in Washington. In Washington, administration hard-liners and neocons of various stripes are all getting ready to “gut it out.” They assume that the American people will continue to ignore news of missing weaponry of mass destruction and possible quagmires in Iraq — at least long enough for them to make it back to the White House in 2004, floating on the hundreds of millions of dollars the president and his entourage are now raising from grateful tax-cut recipients. It’s truly a version of the old Nixonian strategy, which did get Dick N. back to the White House in 1972, seemingly more imperial and imperious than ever, before, of course, Watergate (already significantly known but “ignored” before the election) burst into full bloom and downed him.

As David E. Sanger and Carl Hulse wrote yesterday in the New York Times (Republicans Dismiss Questions Over Strength of Evidence on Banned Weapons in Iraq):

“Despite growing questions about whether the White House exaggerated the evidence about Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons, President Bush and his aides believe that the relief that Americans feel about Mr. Hussein’s fall in Iraq will overwhelm any questions about the case the administration’s built against him, administration officials and Republican strategists say.Yet some Republicans remain worried – in part because they fear that the rising tide of criticism in Britain against Prime Minister Tony Blair could leap the Atlantic. If the British investigation gains steam, they note, the echo in Washington could be significant. ‘After all,’ said one senior diplomat of a coalition country, ‘we were all working off the same shared evidence. If it was wrong for one, it was wrong for all.'”

Unfortunately for them, I believe, this administration, now entering gut-it-out mode, is likely to face a slowly rising tide of elite criticism here. Only yesterday, in a curious breach of inside-the-beltway protocol, former CIA director Stansfield Turner criticized the Bush-men, even if in extremely delicate terms. (“There is no question in my mind [that policymakers] distorted the situation, either because they had bad intelligence or because they misinterpreted it.”) And it can only get worse. After all, as with the environmental report mentioned above, the Bush administration mode of operating is clear enough. Things are excised. Things are missing. Information is suppressed. People are misinformed. Lies are told. This is undoubtedly true across the board. The question is when and where the unraveling will begin. But more important, the administration is now tied umbilically to Iraq in a way likely to grow ever more uncomfortable until to mix a few metaphors and recall a Watergate moment, they are left dangling in the air. (This is why, when there are so many important issues, from global warming to North Korea, I’ve stuck so close to this matter lately. It is likely to go to the heart of American politics in the long run.)

In the wake of yesterday’s demonstrations in Baghdad by unpaid, disbanded soldiers of the former regime in which two were killed by edgy U.S. troops (even in Central Baghdad, still not armed with normal, if brutal, police crowd-control devices), it’s worth considering, for instance, our viceroy in Baghdad, Paul Bremer’s recent moves and his situation. Here for instance is a paragraph from Baghdad: A Race Against the Clock, a recent report from the International Crisis Group found at the always interesting Global Beat website:

“Even senior American civilians in Baghdad express consternation at the near-total absence of advance preparations for dealing with post-war needs. They are among the first to acknowledge that they are virtually cut off from the society they have been charged with helping back to its feet. Concerned about their personal safety, permitted to move about the city only with a military escort, preoccupied with turf battles, and largely unknowing of Iraq and Iraqis, they venture from the grounds of the former Saddam Hussein palace that is their main headquarters only infrequently and have minimal interaction with the population. This disconnect is compounded by the delay in restoring broadcasting facilities that has deprived the administration of the ability to communicate its plans and even its achievements to ordinary Iraqis.”

Now, a military of perhaps 400,000 has been declared off the books (while press censorship is installed and elections, even local ones, are called off). The proconsul of our already tattered Raj has stated that he expects the new Iraqi Army of the future to be one-tenth the size of the old one, an act for which under other circumstances he should be roundly applauded. When it comes to rearming the world, less is always better (though let’s note that the well-respected Stockholm International Peace Institute has just released a report indicating that American military spending is back to Cold War levels and Paul Wolfowitz said yesterday that the administration soon might have to ask for supplementary money from Congress for the occupation.) But let’s think for a minute what it actually means to rebuild a military of perhaps 40,000 men in a fractious and distinctly over-armed region. It means, simply enough, the American occupation forces are not planning to go anywhere for a long, long, long time. (There has, I might note, been remarkably little reporting on the bases we are building in Iraq that are meant to keep us there as the Iraqi Armed Forces for untold eons to come.)

But this in itself creates uncomfortable problems for an overstretched imperial force. So the Bush guys are now scrambling to create a “coalition” of forces in Iraq, as many as 30,000 of them to relieve some American troops, and hoping to bring in units from places as disparate and often desperate as Honduras, the Ukraine, and Poland. Let’s remember that the “American” war in Vietnam was not just fought by American troops. Imperial governments have ways to get help from allies and satrapies. We paid the South Korean government, for instance, to send thousands of South Koran troops to Vietnam. We’re seeing versions of this again, but of other sorts of pressures brought to bear as well. Check out, for instance, Sudha Ramachandran’s India dithers over Iraq dilemma, in the Asia Times, a complex account of Indian thinking about becoming a regional hegemon in its own right and so agreeing to station troops in Iraq. His conclusion: “India’s foot-dragging on the decision of deployment is said to be annoying the US, which is used to developing countries making u-turns in their foreign policies at its bidding.”

In some ways, it may be deceptive even to think of Vietnam analogies re: Iraq. The fact is that imperial countries have their styles of being and acting. Ours came out clearly in Vietnam. (Defeats will do that.) And that style is simply reasserting itself in Iraq. The question, in oppositional terms, is will it reassert itself domestically? I noted today, for instance, that the LA Times lead editorial called strongly for open Congressional hearings on whether the administration “misrepresented intelligence about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction” before the war. (Open Iraq Hearings Crucial) “Bush officials,” it concludes, “may hope they can ward off such sessions, stalling in the hope that U.S. forces do find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

Here’s a subject to track then. Impeachment. I’ve been tracking it at the distant fringes of debate and oppositional discussion for months and this is the first time I mention it directly because it’s the first moment the subject raises its head anywhere faintly near the mainstream. As Norman Solomon, author of the recent book Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You and FAIR’s Media Beat columnist, writes in a piece soon to be posted there:

“Early summer has brought a flurry of public discussion about a
topic previously confined to political margins — the possibility of
impeaching President George W. Bush. The idea is still far from the
national media echo chamber, but some rumblings are now audible as
people begin to think about the almost unthinkable.”

Solomon himself thinks this a far-fetched possibility in the world as we know it today, but keep your eye out. None of this will go away soon, because Iraq is here more or less to stay. It’s “ours,” and this administration may live to regret that fact.

Below the first column I’ve seen that raises the issue of impeachment in a major paper — Bob Scheer in the LA Times; also a strong “quagmire” piece by Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson on the price of war and another by Seumas Milne of the Guardian. Finally, a piece by Ira Chernus, professor of religion, at the CommonDreams website that amused me. It’s a thought experiment in imagining the American media’s version of the news as a work of “total fiction.” Tom

High Crimes, Misdemeanors
If Bush lied about Iraq he’s ‘cooked,’ Watergate veteran John Dean says
By Robert Scheer
The Los Angeles Times
June 17, 2003

What did the president know and when did he know it?

The answer to that question forced the resignation of Richard Nixon as he was about to be impeached.

Now, with President Bush facing that same question, congressional Republicans have circled the wagons to prevent a public hearing on whether intelligence was distorted by the White House to convince us of the need for war. Why? Because public hearings could lead to public demands for impeachment. Sound far-fetched? Not when you consider the gravity of the charge.

To read more Scheer click here

What are Americans dying for now?
By Derrick Z. Jackson
The Boston Globe
June 18, 2003

Oil is to die for. More to the point, oil is precious enough for the government to send off your children, your husbands, your wives, your partners, your brothers, and your sisters to die for. That is a rapidly escalating conclusion as American soldiers continue to die at the rate of one a day in Iraq without destruction have been found. What we do have are sniper shootings, grenade attacks, and the deaths of nearly 50 US soldiers 48 days after Bush said major combat operations were over in Iraq.

On May 1, Bush said, ”We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.”

To read more Jackson click here

The right to resist
By Seumas Milne
The Guardian
June 19, 2003

It would have been hard to predict in advance that the US and British occupation of Iraq could go so spectacularly wrong so quickly. The words of the historian Tacitus about the Roman invasion of Scotland in the first century AD might just as well have been written about our latter-day Rome’s latest imperial adventure: “They create a wasteland and they call it peace.”

More than two months after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraq is sinking deeper into chaos and insecurity, as US forces lash out at the Iraqi resistance, which is now killing an average of one American soldier a day. Another was shot dead in Baghdad yesterday, while US troops killed more protesters – as they have repeatedly done since the massacres of demonstrators in Mosul and Falluja in April.

To read more Milne click here

Mainstream News Makes More Sense As Shakespearean Drama
By Ira Chernus
CommonDreams
June 18, 2003

Here is an experiment you can try at home. For one full week, take in as much world news as you can from mainstream news sources. But imagine at every moment that you are in a theater, watching a play of pure fiction. Immerse yourself in international news from the TV networks, NPR, Time, Newsweek, and every newspaper you can get. But imagine that it’s all a single drama, all scripted by the same team, all acted out by fictional characters.

I bet that by the end of a week, the news will begin to make a lot more sense to you. You won’t be bothered by all the falsifications and contradictions that bug you so much now. You’ll see how it all makes sense, how it all fits together so perfectly. You’ll see why journalists call their product a news “story.”
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He can be contacted at [email protected]

To read more Chernus click here