The Daily Grasshopper

Sunday's New York Times featured an article on the front page entitled "Show of Awe: A Thrill Ride, But No Blood," which focused on media coverage of the opening days of the war on Iraq. It's a pretty interesting article, for those of you out there who like to link to the stuff I put in these essays:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/national/23STAN.html

For those who don't, here's a quote that I hope you'll reflect on as the war continues, from one of America's leading news anchors, Tom Brokaw of NBC:

"Even with this degree of access, television cannot ever adequately convey the sheer brute force of war, the noise and utter violence. It somehow gets filtered through the TV screen, and that's probably just as well."

"Somehow gets filtered"? As if by magic? As though it's not a conscious choice of the producers to keep Americans in the dark about what their guns and tanks and bombers are doing overseas? I guess you don't make it to the rarified heights of broadcast journalism without being able to keep a sort of intellectual separation from the realities of the workplace. Here's a more blunt assessment, this time by the reporter who wrote the article, Alessandra Stanley:

"Viewers saw many touching portraits of hard-working reporters and dedicated young military personnel. They saw and heard the relatives of killed servicemen, some expressing anger, others bereft but proud. They heard anchors urging their correspondents to stay safe, and correspondents wishing soldiers well.

What they generally did not see in the first phase of the invasion of Iraq were very many Iraqis."

On Sunday night, I went to a meeting of local antiwar activists to hear a member of "Veterans for Peace" (http://www.veteransforpeace.org/) talk about his experience with "the sheer brute force of war." He had been a Marine in the Pacific Campaign during World War II. He told us that most Americans hadn't seen the horror of battle close up since the Civil War, which wiped out hundreds of thousands of people right here at home. He said that the news media have downplayed war's horrors, and that Hollywood has taken a significant role in actually glorifying war. I wasn't taking notes so I'll try to paraphrase what he said:

"You see in war movies where soldiers run through a bunch of shell bursts and keep going. That doesn't happen in real wars. Those shells shoot out thousands of shards of hot metal that will rip your intestines out, knock your eyes out, blow your head off. You don't run through a shell burst like that."

He compared the celluloid version of war to a Hollywood actor playing a violin. The soundtrack clearly registers that the violinist is using vibrato, but the actor's hand isn't moving. In other words, anyone who knows anything about it knows that it's fake. My father, who was in Vietnam twice, never went to see movies like "Apocalypse Now" or "Full Metal Jacket," much less movies like "Rambo." He used to tell us, plainly: "I saw the original."

So while a lot of Americans in this country are clamoring for war, many people with actual experience of war warn us that it is not something to be entered into lightly. In fact, they think it should be avoided at all costs. There's a story in the Sunday Times about a vote to make Chechnya part of the Russian Federation, despite the struggle for independence that has been waged there for the past decade or more. War has reduced the survivors to the point where they are no longer demanding their actual freedom, just freedom from the insanity of war:

"But it is the gnarled widow Idrisova, warding off the late-day chill in her garbage-strewn apartment courtyard with her wool head scarf and threadbare sweater, who quite succinctly sums up Chechens' prevailing argument for approving the new constitution.

'Anything but war,' she said. 'I would like to live the rest of my life in peace. I would agree to live on tea and bread. Just anything but war.'...

In Nagornoye, Dagilav Serazhdi, who is 50 and unemployed like most of the town, recalled being arrested 13 months ago and taken to Chernokosovo, a notorious detention camp where he and a fellow jobless farmer were severely beaten before being set free.

Mr. Serazhdi said he had no faith that a new constitution would bring jobs, safety or legitimacy to Chechen society. But on Sunday, he said, he planned to vote for it anyway. 'I would go anywhere if it would stop the lawlessness and genocide of the Chechen people,' he said. 'I'd vote for a pig, if it would bring peace.'"

The full story is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/international/europe/23CHEC.html

These are all important things to recall when we reflect upon the men (and woman) who have sent young Americans to go to the Persian Gulf die and to kill Iraqi soldiers and, undoubtedly, civilians. Their names are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, Feith, Libby, Perle, Rice... Few of them have ever served their country in uniform. Bush himself has said that he "understands the risks" of committing troops. And I believe him - despite all the other lies he's told. He understood the risks so well that he skipped Vietnam altogether by serving in the Texas Air National Guard.

A lot of these names also show up in the documents and policies put out by the Project for a New American Century, which the New York Times finally got around to writing about on Sunday. That's right, once the war - which had been openly fantasized about for more than a decade by several key members of Bush's administration - was already underway, they felt it was safe to write a story that included this information:

"The origins of the current war are, in fact, rooted in a series of policy pronouncements by these and other conservative intellectuals that date from the early 1990's, after the end of the cold war and the inconclusive end of the gulf war in 1991, which left Mr. Hussein in power.

These conservative policy makers and intellectuals nurtured their views and kept alive the cause of deposing President Hussein during the mid- and late 1990's through scholarly conferences, foreign policy magazines and forums at research institutions. Then, when many of them returned to power in the administration of George W. Bush, their views ended up dominating the administration's policy, defining an important shift in United States foreign policy thinking."

The whole article, "Pre-emption: Idea With a Lineage Whose Time Has Come," can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/international/worldspecial/23PREE.html

Of course, the Times did offhandedly mention PNAC in a story in the Arts section about William Kristol a week and a half ago or so, which I wrote about at the time. If you didn't get to read that one, it's here:

http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/031103pnac.html

Oh, yeah, and there's another story that the Times finally got around to writing about on Sunday. It was buried pretty far back in the "A Nation at War" section, on page B10. The article, "C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure In Preparing Iraqi Reports," talks about how the evidence the Bush amdinistration used to claim Iraq was pursuing nuclear arms was based on forged documents. These allegations have been known in the dissident press for weeks. Maybe if the Times had thought to investigate these stories before the outbreak of war, they wouldn't HAVE their "A Nation at War" section. Who knows?

The Times article on the fabricated evidence of Iraqi nukes is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/international/worldspecial/23CIA.html

Here's the important part:

"The recent disclosure that reports claiming Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger were based partly on forged documents has renewed complaints among analysts at the C.I.A. about the way intelligence related to Iraq has been handled, several intelligence officials said.

Analysts at the agency said they had felt pressured to make their intelligence reports on Iraq conform to Bush administration policies.

For months, a few C.I.A. analysts have privately expressed concerns to colleagues and Congressional officials that they have faced pressure in writing intelligence reports to emphasize links between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda."

Remember that our President repeatedly claimed that Iraq's attempts to develop "weapons of mass destruction" was central to his argument for attacking Iraq in the face of widespread global opposition. Sounds like the Turks weren't the only ones getting the full-court press from the Bush gang.

There's also an article in the "Money & Business" section of the Sunday Times entitled "Who Will Put Iraq Back Together?" The roster of names that answer that question should be familiar to anyone who has been regularly reading these essays, but I'll give you the quote from the article just in case:

"The companies that have been invited to bid on the work include some of the nation's largest and most politically connected construction businesses. Among them are Halliburton, where Vice President Dick Cheney served as chief executive from 1995 until mid-2000; the Bechtel Group, whose ranks have included several Republican cabinet alumni; and Fluor, which has ties to several former top government intelligence and Pentagon procurement officials."

The whole article is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/business/23REBU.html

There's a great quote from Andrew Natsios, the director of United States Agency for International Development (USAID):

"The private contracting companies, all the consulting firms are going to tell us it's going to take $50 trillion to rebuild Iraq. We'll make Iraq look like Park Avenue based on this amount of money. These are absurd estimates."

Natsios, a former state rep. from Holliston, Mass., who rode former governor (and now U.S. ambassador to Canada) Paul Cellucci's coattails to a nice paying gig with Bush & Co., should know a thing or two about absurd estimates: he was the one brought in to get a handle on cost overruns after Bechtel's "Big Dig" went from around $3 billion (initial estimates) to over $14 billion (final cost). It's going to get pretty expensive to rebuild Iraq, I reckon, especially when companies like Bechtel are being paid with U.S. taxpayer dollars and the Iraqi people's oil money.

PK
http://www.dailygrasshopper.com