http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/23512The Silence of the Bombs
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2007-06-11 12:14. Media
By Norman Solomon
Three years have passed since most Americans came to the conclusion
that the Iraq war was a "mistake." Reporting the results of a Gallup poll
in June 2004, USA Today declared: "It is the first time since Vietnam that
a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a
mistake." And public opinion continued to move in an antiwar direction.
But such trends easily coexist with a war effort becoming even more
horrific.
snip//
These days, there's a lot of talk about seeking a political solution
in Iraq -- but the Bush administration and the military leaders who answer
to the commander in chief are fundamentally engaged in a very different
sort of project. Looking ahead, from the White House, the key goal is to
seem to be winding down the U.S. war effort while
actually reconfiguring massive violence to make it more effective.
snip//
Meanwhile, the Iraqis killed by Americans don't become much of an
issue in the realms of U.S. media and politics. News coverage
provides the latest tallies of Iraqis who die from "sectarian
violence" and "terrorist attacks," but the reportage rarely discusses how
the U.S. occupation has been an ascending catalyst for that
carnage. It's even more rare for the coverage to focus on the
magnitude of Iraqi deaths that are direct results of American
firepower.
In the United States, many advocates of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq
have focused on what the war has been doing to Americans. This
approach may seem like political pragmatism and tactical wisdom, but in
the long run it's likely to play into the hands of White House
strategists who will try to regain domestic political ground by
reducing American losses while boosting the use of high-tech weaponry
against Iraqi people.
snip//
The combination of deceptive officials in the U.S. government and an
evasive U.S. press has been a disaster for the flow of information to the
American public. "With the military unwilling to tell the truth -- or say
anything at all, in most cases -- and unable to provide the stability
necessary for
to operate, it falls to the
mainstream media, even at this late stage of the
conflict, to begin ferreting out substantive information on the air war,"
Turse points out. "It seems, however, that until reporters
begin bypassing official U.S. military pronouncements and locating Iraqi
sources, we will remain largely in the dark with little
knowledge of what can only be described as the secret U.S. air war in Iraq."
As the summer of 2007 gets underway, the demand to "bring the troops
home" is necessary but insufficient. The numbers of Americans
fighting and dying in Iraq are not a reliable measure of U.S.
culpability in the continuing slaughter.
_________________________________________
The new documentary film "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death," based on Norman Solomon's book of the same title,
is being released directly to DVD in mid-June. For information about the
full-length movie, produced by the Media Education Foundation and narrated
by Sean Penn, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org
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