Invisible Cities

It's been an extraordinarily busy time, so I've let almost a month go by without posting, in the heat of a very interesting presidential campaign. The Kerry campaign is finally getting some traction with the obvious point that the Bush administration has been built on a structure of lies--not the piddling little rhetorical spin that all politicians use from time to time, but big, in-your-face Orwellian lies.

There are so many that it becomes hard to select a few. Josh Marshall circulated the term "up-is-downism" for the phenomenon last year . . .

Every administration fudges, conceals, or deceives in this way or that. But, at least in my memory, I cannot remember any administration or even any administration official that so routinely says things that are the polar opposite of reality --- when the facts to the contrary are sitting right out there in the open.

Outside of Iraq there's a whole list--the infamous Clear Skies initiative which delays the cleaning up of pollution, the Healthy Forests bit allowing clear-cutting of national forests, and the test-'em-and-penalize-the-schools No Child Left Behind act. Congress offers us the USA Patriot Act. There are so many lies outside Iraq that the public loses focus.

With Iraq the lies are unraveling daily, as the reasons or excuses for war disappear (no WMD, no attempts to buy uranium from Niger, no meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi agents, no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, no moral superiority of US over anyone else), leaving us with the pathetic "He was thinking about getting WMDs." With so many to choose from, there's no One Big Lie like Watergate, and the press doesn't know what to do.

With all this focus on WMDs, I'd like to return to other aspects of the fabric of lies associated with Iraq. The war was presented as a big PR spectacle. Two examples for support: 1) Saving Private Lynch. Does anyone recall the heroic US Army crashing into a hospital and saving Jessica from her Iraqi captors? Only she wasn't exactly being held captive, but receiving good medical care (as available--probably much better than Iraqis mostly receive now). The Pentagon produced it as a cinematic spectacle, and I would wager that most Americans still accept it as such. 2) Enraged Iraqis pull down Saddam's statue. That is, about 150 Iraqi men hit it with their shoes, while US armored vehicles pull it down with a cable, in a square secured by several US tanks.

War as PR spectacle has always been part of war, especially since the invention of photography. However, it has been used consciously by the Bush administration to build their reputation, and it has taken more than a thousand American casualties and perhaps 20,000 Iraqi ones, plus the angry reaction of most of the rest of the world, the evident disorder and lack of a plan, to demonstrate how hollow a war built on PR can be.

But hey--make sure not to forget Poland!
glt 06:18 - [Link]
...

Looks like I managed to post this three times . . . the delete function seems not to work, so I'll delete the first two this way.


glt 14:07 - [Link]
...

Weekend reading: as I was to travel by air for my nephew's wedding, I wanted something to read with a little content. (I don't like to carry lit anthologies and the like around.) I bought Imperial Hubris by Anonymous--who in this case is a specific CIA analyst with some expertise in the Middle East--and managed to get about halfway through in the time I had. (His identity is sort of public, thanks to work by Boston Phoenix. See this link to Editor and Publisher

Anon bases much of his argument on published statements by Bin Laden and others affiliated in some way. His contentions (the ones I remember) are these:

--Al Qaeda is not trying to kill Americans because they "hate freedom," our way of life, etc. Rather, they are trying to accomplish quite specific policy goals, which include getting the US to remove its military bases from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other points in Islamic countries; getting the US to stop its unquestioning support of Israel in the Palestinian conflict; building support in Islamic countries for sharia or a legal system based on the Koran.

--Bin Laden is using rhetoric much more skillfully than the US has in order to motivate Muslims to what he considers a defensive jihad;

--Bin Laden knows the US much much better than we know him. US responses could not have been better planned to suit his purposes of bringing a much wider circle of fighters into active engagement.

--Bin Laden is widely perceived as a modern equivalent to Islamic heroes fighting the Crusades, Imperialism, etc.

There are several points that I am not persuaded by--in particular, Anon seems to grant Bin Laden much more shrewdness than seems likely to me. But anyone having any illusions about the wisdom of US Middle East policy should have a look at this book--preferably before Nov. 2.


glt 14:05 - [Link]
...