The Bush administration never hesitated to exploit the general
public’s anxieties that arose after the traumatic events of September 11,
2001.
Testifying on Capitol Hill exactly 53 weeks later, Donald Rumsfeld
did not miss a beat when a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee
questioned the need for the United States to attack Iraq.
Senator Mark Dayton: “What is it compelling us now to make a
precipitous decision and take precipitous actions?”
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: “What’s different? What’s different is
3,000 people were killed.”
As a practical matter, it was almost beside the point that
allegations linking Baghdad with the September 11 attacks lacked credible
evidence. The key factor was political manipulation, not real
documentation.
Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack got enormous media exposure in
late 2002 for his book “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading
Iraq.” Pollack’s book promotion tour often seemed more like a war
promotion tour. During a typical CNN appearance, Pollack explained why he
had come to see a “massive invasion” of Iraq as both desirable and
practical: “The real difference was the change from September 11th. The
sense that after September 11th, the American people were now willing to
make sacrifices to prevent threats from abroad from coming home to visit
us here made it possible to think about a big invasion force.”
Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, with the London-based
Independent newspaper, was on the mark when he wrote: “Iraq had
absolutely nothing to do with 11 September. If the United States invades
Iraq, we should remember that.”
But at psychological levels, the Bush team was able to manipulate
post-9/11 emotions well beyond the phantom of Iraqi involvement in that
crime against humanity. The dramatic changes in political climate after
9/11 included a drastic upward spike in an attitude -- fervently stoked
by the likes of Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the president -- that our
military should be willing to attack potential enemies before they might
try to attack us. Few politicians or pundits were willing to confront the
reality that this was a formula for perpetual war, and for the creation
of vast numbers of new foes who would see a reciprocal logic in embracing
such a credo themselves.
One of the great media cliches of the last two years is that 9/11
“changed everything.” The portentous idea soon became a truism for news
outlets nationwide. But the shock of September 11 could not endure. And
the events of that horrific day -- while abruptly tilting the political
landscape and media discourse -- did not transform the lives of most
Americans. Despite all the genuine anguish and the overwhelming news
coverage, daily life gradually went back to an approximation of normal.
Some changes are obvious. Worries about terrorism have become
routine. Out of necessity, stepped-up security measures are in effect at
airports. Unnecessarily, and ominously, the USA Patriot Act is chipping
away at civil liberties. Yet the basic concerns of September 10, 2001,
remain with us today.
The nation’s current economic picture includes the familiar scourges
of unemployment, job insecurity, eroding pension benefits and a wildly
exorbitant healthcare system that endangers huge numbers of people who
are uninsured or underinsured. Two years after 9/11, the power of money
is undiminished -- notwithstanding every platitude that bounced around
the media echo chamber in the wake of September 11.
During the last months of 2001, many media powerhouses heralded the
arrival of humanistic values for the country. Typically, the December
issue of O -- “The Oprah Magazine” -- was largely devoted to the cover
story “We Are Family.” In the lead-off essay, Oprah Winfrey served up a
heaping portion of sweet pabulum. “Our vision of family has been
expanded,” she wrote. “From the ashes of the World Trade Center, the
Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania arose a new spirit of unity. We
realize that we are all part of the family of America.” Later in the
glossy, ad-filled magazine, the “We Are Family” headline reappeared under
Old Glory and over another message from Oprah, who declared: “America is
a vast and complicated family, but -- as the smoke clears and the dust
settles -- a family nonetheless.”
From the vantage point of the present day, the late-2001 claims
about a new national altruism invite disbelief if not derision. No amount
of media spin about “the family of America” can negate the fact that gaps
between wealth and poverty have never been wider. What kind of affluent
family would leave so many of its members in desperate need?
As measured by poll numbers, President Bush’s fall from popular
grace this year has brought him back to about where he was just before
9/11. That decline runs parallel with slumping myths about the
transcendent aftermath of September 11. Subsequent events have brought
sobering realities into focus.
Recent news about Halliburton and Bechtel cashing in on the
occupation of Iraq is a counterpoint to revelations that the White House
strongly pressured the Environmental Protection Agency in the days after
9/11 to mislead the public about dangers of airborne toxic particles from
World Trade Center debris. The EPA’s Office of the Inspector General
reported last month that “the desire to reopen Wall Street” was a major
factor in the Bush administration’s misleading assurances. Although the
public was told that everything had changed, powerful elites gave the
highest priority to resuming business as usual.
After September 11, while many thousands of people grieved the
sudden loss of their loved ones, a steady downpour of politically driven
sentimentality kept blurring the U.S. media’s window on the world.
Politicians in high office, from President Bush on down, rushed to
identify themselves with the dead and their relatives. Cataclysmic
individual losses were swiftly expropriated for mass dissemination.
In a cauldron of media alchemy, the human suffering of 9/11 became
propaganda gold. Sorrow turned into political capital.
The human process of mourning is intimate and often at a loss for
words; journalists and politicians tend to be neither. Grief borders on
the ineffable. News coverage gravitates toward cliches and facile images.
In tandem with the message that September 11 “changed everything”
came an emboldened insistence on the U.S. prerogative to attack other
countries at will. In a bait-and-switch operation that took hold in
autumn 2001, emblems of 9/11 soon underwent double exposure with
prevailing political agendas.
Displayed by many as an expression of sorrow and solidarity with the
September 11 victims, the American flag was promptly overlaid on the
missiles bound for Afghanistan. In TV studios, like angelic symbols
dancing on the heads of pins, the Stars and Stripes got stuck on the
lapels of many newscasters.
Network correspondents routinely joined in upbeat assessments of the
U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan that took the lives of at least as many
blameless civilians as 9/11 did. Later, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq,
which overthrew a regime in Baghdad with no links to the September 11
hijackings or Al Qaeda, took more civilian lives than 9/11 did. For the
United States, moral reflection could not hold a candle to the righteous
adrenaline of war.
Two years ago, W.H. Auden’s mournful poem “September 1, 1939”
suddenly drew wide media attention. Set amid the “blind skyscrapers” of
Manhattan, where “buildings grope the sky,” the poem seemed to eerily
echo the World Trade Center calamity with words that closed the first
stanza: “The unmentionable odor of death / Offends the September night.”
The concluding lines of the next verse received less notice during
the terrible autumn of 2001. But we now have more reason to consider
their meaning: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
_______________________
Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy
based in San Francisco. He is co-author, with Reese Erlich, of “Target
Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.” For an excerpt of the book,
go to:
www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target
