US media blitz for war - Big guns of August

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Jordan Times
05/08/2007

By Norman Solomon

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The media manoeuvres of recent days are eerily similar to scams that worked so well for the Bush administration during the agenda setting for the invasion. Vice President Dick Cheney and his top underlings kept leaking disinformation about purported Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda � while The New York Times and other key media outlets breathlessly reported the falsehoods as virtual facts. Then, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and other practitioners of warcraft quickly went in front of TV cameras and microphones to cite the "reporting" in the Times and elsewhere that they had rigged in the first place.

The ink was scarcely dry on the July 30 piece by O'Hanlon and Pollack before the savants were making the rounds of TV studios and other media outlets � doing their best to perpetuate a war that they'd helped to deceive the country into in the first place.

The next day, Cheney picked up the tag-team baton. On CNN's "Larry King Live", he declared that the US military "made significant progress now into the course of the summer. ... don't take it from me. Look at the piece that appeared yesterday in The New York Times, not exactly a friendly publication � but a piece by Mr O'Hanlon and Mr Pollack on the situation in Iraq. They're just back from visiting over there. They both have been strong critics of the war."

On August 1, the US News & World Report website noted: "The news that the US death toll in Iraq for July, at 73, is the lowest in eight months spurred several news organisations to present a somewhat optimistic view of the situation in Iraq. The consensus in the coverage appears to be that things are improving militarily, even as the political side of the equation remains troubling."

Such media coverage is a foreshadowing of what's in store big-time this fall when the propaganda machinery of the warfare state goes into high gear.

The media echo chamber will reverberate with endless claims that the military situation is improving, American casualties will be dropping and Iraqi forces will be shouldering more of the burden.

Arguments over whether US forces can prevail in Iraq bypass a truth that no amount of media spin can change: the US war effort in Iraq has always been illegitimate and fundamentally wrong. Whatever the prospects for America's war there, it shouldn't be fought . . .

article: http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=1093161950

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