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2 SPEAKING
FREELY US public shrinks from war's
reality By K Darbandi
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Why is the United
States so close to another major war in the midst
of the Iraq fiasco?
While the majority of
the US public supports withdrawing from
Iraq, according to the polls,
there is no indication that they have any anti-war
sentiments toward Iran. There is no massive outcry
against the current administration's obvious and
public call for yet another war.
Ordinary
logic would have guided one to believe that the
global bully has learned its lessons and will
start negotiating with the regional bully, Iran.
To the amazement of many, it seems as if the
political space is there for the administration of
President George W Bush to keep pounding the war
drums. Reports indicate that massive firepower is
ready to be launched against the Iranian regime,
the Iranian state and its society as a whole. And
the US public is hardly blinking.
If
only people knew There are, of course, a
lot of individuals and political movements and
action groups in the US and Europe who are
spending valuable time and effort opposing current
US policy. The vital connection, however, between
these trends and the public at large is missing.
Some in the progressive anti-war camp
might be thinking that the US public is not
opposing President Bush's policies on Iran because
of media propaganda by networks such as Fox, or
the intrigues of big businesses such as
Halliburton and other employers of Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney, or maybe even the Israeli
lobby and other mysterious interest groups.
These assumptions, however, truly insult
people's intelligence. They assume that after four
years the US public is not yet aware that the
attacks of September 11, 2001, and Iraq are not
connected, other than the fact that both involve
Arabic-speaking peoples. It assumes that people
still do not realize that the Iraq war was
pre-preemptive, a war of choice, and waged on
shaky allegations and against international law.
It assumes that in the wealthiest democracy on
Earth, the public has been stupefied to such an
extent that they just need to know the facts to
act in a very anti-warlike fashion.
Fox
News and a few very large conglomerates have done
it again: the US public still does not know that
Israel is the biggest recipient of US aid and has
been using it slowly to exterminate a whole group
of people. If only people knew after more than 40
months that their soldiers in the field are also
torturers who kill detainees in their custody, and
rape and murder 13-year-olds and their whole
families; if only they had seen the Abu Ghraib
pictures and videos, they would know how
criminally disposed the US military can be and how
much worse the next war is going to get. If only
the US public knew how they have destroyed a
country of 25 million people, they would stop
their president from picking on another one of 70
million.
The simple fact is that no public
is that stupid and ignorant. They might not stand
up to the moral and ethical standards of
progressive intellectuals, but in the social
context of US society, with all the availability
of information, social comfort and leisure time,
people cannot be so intellectually deprived. There
is nothing in their water or genetically wrong
with the US public to force such general behavior,
and there is no lack of access to alternative
information other than big media in the US. The
vast majority have enough leisure time and basic
life comforts to access and pursue all sorts of
information that affects them.
The US
public is so not anti-war that in the past weeks,
even front-running Democratic presidential
candidates have shown their worth to be head of
state by leaving "the military option on table"
against Iran (Hillary Clinton), or by promising to
invade another country's territory, in this case
Pakistan, in pursuit of "terrorists" (Barack
Obama).
Somebody needs to explain how the
front-runners of the so-called opposition party
can be so overtly against international law and so
pro-military in the midst of the Iraq war fiasco.
The lady and the black candidates are only
responding to the trends already present in the
country. They are trying to look presidential in
the eyes of the US public. As Noam Chomsky has put
it, the assumption of the US ruling elite is that
they own the world, and in my view, Clinton and
Obama are only working based on this assumption.
Anti-war activists in the US could have
the wrong assumption about US public, in that they
assume people in general are inherently good,
moral and ethical beings. So if they are complicit
in participating indirectly in one genocide after
another, if they send their sons to commit one
atrocity after another, then there must be a lot
of brainwashing and false propaganda going on that
have led them to act that way.
Superman, video games and Disney
World The US public turned against the
Iraq war only after it started going south. Check
the US opinion-poll history on Wikipedia for
yourselves.
The public image of the war
promised by then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
was to get in quick, smash everything, make it
safe for oil-drilling, and pull out, putting the
place in the hands of a loyal puppet regime to
deal with the aftermath. Sort of like the rhythm
of events in classic Superman movies, where things
are as clear as black and white: Superman vs the
Bad Guys. And the red-and-blue guy can't just take
it slow like Sherlock Holmes and use his head to
solve the problem. No, there is not much to dwell
on - he is muscular, fast and invincible. And boy,
is he American!
Well, the Iraq war started
and was projected like the ending of a Superman
movie, but in time gradually turned into
Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the US forces
playing the German Nazi nitwits of the movie: they
are on the set only to be blown away. So people
gradually lost interest, and I don't blame them;
what happened to the happy ending? Most of them
want out now and allow Iraqi warring factions to
fight one another to total death and destruction.
You see, even the sentiments against the Iraq war
have a very xenophobic and racist tone to them.
Though the US public fully knows that it was
American boys who smashed up the place, no ethical
conclusions are drawn from it.
Instead, a
slimy sense of superiority kicks in. It's a belief
that the Iraqis are not worthy of our
reconstruction help and our boys getting blown
apart for it, so give me the remote and let's
change the channel - forget about it! All right,
maybe the mess is too much for the Iraqis to clean
up by themselves, so let's "internationalize" the
situation and call on the foreign-speaking
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