Three days before Christmas, the Bush administration launched a new
salvo of bright spinning lies about the Iraq war. “In an interview
with reporters traveling with him on an Air Force cargo plane to
Baghdad,” the Associated Press reported Thursday morning, Donald
Rumsfeld “hinted that a preliminary decision had been made to go
below the 138,000 baseline” of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Throughout 2006, until Election Day in early November, this kind of
story will be a frequent media refrain as the Bush regime does
whatever it can to prevent a loss of Republican majorities in the
House and Senate. By continuing to fortify large military bases in
Iraq -- and by continuing to escalate an air war there courtesy of
U.S. taxpayers but largely outside the U.S. media frame -- the White
House is determined to exploit every weakness and contradiction of
antiwar sentiment inside the United States.
There’s a lot for the pro-war propagandists to exploit. American
opponents of this war often emphasize the deaths and injuries of U.S.
troops and the anguish of loved ones at home. At the same time, to
whatever extent it’s a conscious strategy or a genuine nationalistic
form of narcissism, Americans who denounce the war commonly seem to
be playing to a media gallery that can easily acknowledge the
importance of American lives -- but downplays the loss of Iraqi lives
unless those tragedies can be pinned on enemies of the U.S.
occupation.
What’s on the horizon for 2006 is that the Bush administration will
strive to put any real or imagined reduction of U.S. occupation troop
levels in the media spotlight. Meanwhile, the Pentagon will use
massive air power in Iraq.
It’s a process already underway, as independent journalist Dahr
Jamail -- who worked on the ground in Iraq for more than eight months
of the U.S. occupation -- pointed out in a mid-December article
titled “An Increasingly Aerial Occupation.” As he put it: “The
American media continues to ignore the increasingly devastating air
war being waged in Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi
resistance -- and, as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear the
largely unreported brunt of the bombing.”
Yes, we should demand swift withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But,
at this point, to do so without also demanding an end to U.S. bombing
of Iraq is to fall into a trap laid by the war makers in Washington.
This kind of thing has happened before -- with devastating results
for people trying to survive a Pentagon air war that was receiving
little U.S. media attention.
The Nixon administration was eager to divert attention from the
slaughter in Southeast Asia to peace talks in Paris -- and to the
gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam over a period of more
than three years. In general the networks were all too willing to
oblige.
The negotiations and withdrawals served as diversions from bloody
facts of the continuing war. The tonnage of U.S. bombing actually
increased -- while the networks’ focus moved away from the ongoing
bloodshed. At NBC, for instance, “although combat footage was sent to
New York from the Saigon bureau every day for two months following
the [early November 1968 U.S.] decision [initiating peace
negotiations in Paris], it was aired only three times on the evening
news,” journalist Edward Jay Epstein noted. “The preceding year, when
there had been almost the same number of American combat deaths
during the same period, combat stories were shown almost every night
of the week.”
With the media wisdom determining that the main Vietnam story had
become the negotiations, NBC News producer Robert Northshield said
that “combat stories seemed like a contradiction and would confuse
the audience.” Other networks came to similar conclusions. And the
media evasions were to become more extreme as Washington reduced the
number of American troops in Vietnam.
A typical approach was embodied in edicts handed down at ABC, where
the executive producer of the evening news, Av Westin, put out a
March 1969 memo that explained: “I have asked our Vietnam staff to
alter the focus of their coverage from combat pieces to interpretive
ones, pegged to the eventual pull-out of the American forces. This
point should be stressed for all hands.” In a telex to the network’s
Saigon bureau, Westin gave the news of his decree to the news
correspondents: “I think the time has come to shift some of our focus
from the battlefield, or more specifically American military
involvement with the enemy, to themes and stories under the general
heading ‘We Are on Our Way Out of Vietnam.’”
For U.S. media, the Vietnam story had been front-and-center when
American soldiers were firmly deployed there. But as the White House
gradually pulled troops from Vietnam, the media shifted farther away
from the actual destruction of people, villages, farmland and
ecosystems -- even while the U.S. air war and coordinated ground
assaults in Southeast Asia persisted at a very high rate of killing.
During 2006, reductions of U.S. troop levels in Iraq -- accompanied
by intensive media spin about prospects for U.S. military
disengagement -- are likely even while the already-horrific air war
escalates. Those who die under U.S. bombs will rarely make the TV
network news or the newspapers back in the United States.
The Bush administration is eager to downplay the escalating air war.
In 2006, the antiwar movement must do the opposite.
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Part of this article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book “War Made
Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For
information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com
