Norman Solomon: The Fake Optimism of Washington's Warriors

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The Fake Optimism of Washington's Warriors
By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 13 July 2005

In front of TV cameras, Pentagon officials do their best to make war sound wise and noble. Most of all, they lie.

Sometimes they do it with bold assertions, other times with intentionally tangled syntax. But those who give the orders that consign young soldiers to participation in horror must assure the folks back home that all the carnage is under control. The officials strive to project an aura of calm about the unspeakable; they mumble clichés about grief that cannot touch it.

For the most powerful war-makers in Washington, the most dangerous potential enemies are the citizens of the United States who might insist on an end to taxpayer subsidies for mass slaughter. To forestall such a calamity, officials proclaim endlessly that the war's worst days have passed and the future looks increasingly bright for the ravaged land and for the freedom-loving invaders whose invasion has ravaged it.

And so, on Tuesday night, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff glibly responded to questions from Jim Lehrer on the PBS "NewsHour." And while the historic disrepute of the phrase "light at the end of the tunnel" precluded using it in the interview, Gen. Richard Myers was close to chirpy. Along the way, he tried to make the war in Iraq sound like an uplifting exercise in civic engagement, inevitably headed toward triumph.

The general was tap dancing in the footsteps of many who came before him - during another long war based on deception and the assumption that the USA must keep killing in order to be credible on the world stage. When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited Vietnam for the first time, he came back and told the press that he'd seen "nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future." McNamara made that statement in May 1962.

More than four years later, in October 1966, McNamara held a news conference at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from a trip to Vietnam. Again he spoke with enthusiasm about the progress he'd seen there. But former Pentagon aide Daniel Ellsberg has recounted that McNamara made that presentation to the press "minutes after telling me that everything was much worse than the year before."

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/071305A.shtml