When the French government suggested a diplomatic initiative that
might interfere with the White House agenda for war, the president
responded by saying that the proposed scenario would “ratify terror.” The
date was July 24, 1964, the president was Lyndon Johnson and the war was in
Vietnam.
Four decades later, the anti-terror rationale is not just another
argument for revving up the U.S. war machinery. Fighting “terror” is now
the central rationale for war.
“The contrast couldn’t be clearer between the intentions and the
hearts of those who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and
those who kill, those who’ve got such evil in their hearts that they will
take the lives of innocent folks,” President Bush said Thursday after the
London bombings. “The war on terror goes on.”
A key requirement of this righteous war is that all inconvenient
history must be deemed irrelevant. “By accepting the facile cliche that the
battle under way against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily
branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to
acknowledge our own culpability,” journalist Chris Hedges has observed. “We
ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to
their rage and despair.”
In the aftermath of 9/11, writer Joan Didion critiqued “the wearying
enthusiasm for excoriating anyone who suggested that it could be useful to
bring at least a minimal degree of historical reference to bear on the
event.” Overwhelmingly, politicians and pundits were quick to get in a
groove of condemning any sensible assertions “that events have histories,
political life has consequences, and the people who led this country and
the people who wrote and spoke about the way this country was led were
guilty of trying to infantilize its citizens if they continued to pretend
otherwise.”
Voices of reason, even when they’ve come from within the country’s
military establishment, have been shunted aside. In late November 2002, a
retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, told C-SPAN viewers: “Terrorism is
not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible
to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that
war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism. And it does whip up fear.
Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of
parliament have closed a few.”
Two years after 9/11, Norman Mailer asked: “What does it profit us if
we gain extreme security and lose our democracy? Not everyone in Iraq,
after all, was getting their hands and/or their ears cut off by Saddam
Hussein. In the middle of that society were hordes of Iraqis who had all
the security they needed even if there was no freedom other than the
full-fledged liberty offered by dictators to be free to speak with
hyperbolic hosannas for the leader. So, yes, there are more important
things to safeguard than security and one of them is to protect the
much-beleaguered integrity of our democracy. The final question in these
matters suggests itself. Can leaders who lie as a way of life protect any
way of life?”
The president who lied his way into an invasion of Iraq is now
exploiting Thursday’s atrocities in London to justify U.S. policies that
are bringing daily atrocities to Iraq. Bush is intent on sending a message
to “the terrorists” by continuing the Pentagon’s war effort.
The idea of communicating by killing is very familiar. There’s nothing
new about claiming to send a righteous message with bullets and bombs.
In his book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” former war
correspondent Chris Hedges writes that he saw such transmissions up close:
“Corpses in wartime often deliver messages. The death squads in El Salvador
dumped three bodies in the parking lot of the Camino Real Hotel in San
Salvador, where the journalists were based, early one morning. Death
threats against us were stuffed in the mouths of the bodies.” Hedges adds:
“And, on a larger scale, Washington uses murder and corpses to transmit its
wrath. We delivered such incendiary messages in Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, and
Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden has learned to speak the language of modern
industrial warfare.”
And Hedges notes: “It was Robert McNamara, the American Secretary of
Defense in the summer of 1965, who defined the bombing raids that would
eventually leave hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon dead as
a means of communication to the Communist regime in Hanoi.”
Forty years later, with a “war on terrorism” serving as the central
theme of pro-war propaganda, the United States and its military allies are
routinely sending lethal messages. It should not surprise us when such
messages are returned to sender.
_______________________________
This article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book “War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Book excerpts are posted
at:
www.WarMadeEasy.com
