Midway through this month, a Wall Street Journal headline captured
the flimflam spirit that infuses so much of what passes for mass
communications these days: “Despite Slump, Students Flock to Ad
Schools.” Many young people can recognize a growth industry, and the
business of large-scale deception is booming.
But if Madison Avenue makes us think of subliminal twists and
brazen lies, then Pennsylvania Avenue should bring to mind a similar
process of creating and perpetuating brand loyalty.
“The Defense Department” is far from truth in labeling. But no
player in Washington would suggest renaming it “the War Department,”
any more than execs in charge of marketing Camels, Salems and Marlboros
would advocate re-branding them with names like Cancer Sticks, Coffin
Nails and Killer Leaf.
As the department head, Donald Rumsfeld has gone through media ups
and downs. Two years ago, he was riding high. Lately, his stock has
dropped. Like every person, he’s expendable. Individuals are the
easiest brand names to retire.
For wars, brand loyalty is crucial. By the time most people think
critically, tragedies are history. And unlike a defective product (or a
California governor), wars are not subject to recall.
A successful branding operation preceded the launch of war on Iraq
seven months ago. Despite what we might call extensive consumer
resistance in the United States, the Bush administration pulled out all
the stops to persuade the U.S. public. The war sold politically because
enough people failed to see through the mendacity. They bought a bogus
story line as truth.
Now, long after the Bush team’s pre-war lies served their
purposes, the dead are dead. While no recall can retroactively cancel
the war, no remorse can be heard from the perpetrators of the lies and
the carnage. And vehicles for war keep gunning their engines without a
single repentant glance into rearview mirrors from those in the driver
seats.
It would be unduly charitable to describe U.S. foreign policy --
and the prevalent American media coverage of it -- as hit and run. Some
events do occur by chance or happenstance, but the baseline of
governmental policy and media spin is far from accidental.
Washington’s policies toward the Middle East may or may not be
inept, but overall they’re purposeful. American control over Iraq’s
massive oil reserves is one key goal; others include geopolitical
leverage and military domination of the region. Meanwhile, the Bush
administration’s rhetoric about human rights is akin to an upbeat photo
for a full-page cigarette ad.
The tasks of news media ought to include demanding moral
accountability in every direction. We should want that from all
journalists -- American or Arab or any other -- in connection with the
slaughter of innocents, whether by Hamas or the Israeli government,
whether by Al Qaeda or “the Defense Department.”
Appropriate scrutiny would extend to matters of cultural
arrogance, which inevitably takes the form of grievous assault. On this
score, the United States is terribly culpable.
Consider this report that the British daily newspaper The
Independent published in mid-October: “U.S. soldiers driving
bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient
groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq
as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not
give information about guerrillas attacking U.S. troops.” Now,
suddenly, “the stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from
the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya,
a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad.”
Even the finest and fattest U.S. papers seem to have scant room
for remorse about the human toll of Washington’s foreign policy. Along
the way, the chronic “brand loyalty” that has endlessly reinforced
support for Israel continues to blur coverage.
As a matter of routine, Israel destroys precious olive trees and
homes that belong to Palestinians in the occupied territories. On Oct.
13, Amnesty International issued a statement saying that it “condemns
in the strongest terms the large-scale destruction by the Israeli army
of Palestinian homes in a refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip town
of Rafah, which made homeless hundreds of people, including many
children and elderly people.”
There was nothing ambiguous about Amnesty International’s
assessment: “The repeated practice by the Israeli army of deliberate
and wanton destruction of homes and civilian property is a grave
violation of international human rights and humanitarian law, notably
of Articles 33 and 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and constitutes
a war crime.”
Such war crimes are integral to Israel’s occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza. Now, collective punishment and other war crimes are also
integral to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But in the United States --
where taxpayers subsidize those methodical crimes -- brand loyalties
are still too strong, and remorse is still too weak.
___________________________________
Norman Solomon is co-author of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t
Tell You.” For an excerpt and other information, go to:
www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target
