"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he
always declares that it is his duty." ~ George Bernard
Shaw
IRAQ
REDUX
By
Dom Stasi
We are a people who observe
anniversaries. Some are grand and
celebratory recollections, events we embrace with family, friends, glee. Others are hardly more than obligatory nods
to some arbitrary date. Others still,
are those from which we cower.
Last week marked one of the
latter.
It marked an anniversary that
we, as free, intelligent, caring men and women can only face with horror. Last week marked the third anniversary of our
invasion of Iraq. It also marked the
third anniversary of our toleration of atrocity carried out in our name.
We are now in our fourth year of
occupation there. It is our fourth year
of stomping the life from a defenseless people and a sovereign state, neither
of which intended us harm. We are in our
fourth year of demonstrably senseless and often indiscriminate slaughter of
strangers in a strange land. It is a
slaughter carried out by an unholy alliance of the most and the least powerful
of our countrymen. It is an atrocity
inspired by the richest Americans, prosecuted by the poorest, and funded by
neither. The war makers' shield is the
worn façade of a once proud America.
Simply stated, we are in our
fourth year of the American democracy's abject failure.
The tragedy is compounded by an
apparent willingness on the part of so many of our countrymen and their "leaders"
to simply ignore or defend the litany of American atrocities rather than admit
to them. Their attitudes and actions
diminish us all. They diminish America.
But even as our countrymen kill
without reason, steal without recourse, proceed without plans, still another
atrocity - an entirely new one - must be
endured by thinking and reasoning Americans.
We must now, it seems, endure the nauseatingly predictable platitudes of
the very same hypocrites who cheered us into this bloody, oily, sorrowful, costly
mess. By that I mean the talking heads
of TV and the equally useful idiots of the press. I mean those who've spent the years since
9/11 growing rich or famous or just saving their jobs as propagandists by
exploiting the gullible, the easily-spooked, and the bloodthirsty among
us. They've done so with their words,
with their sensational if irrelevant reportage, and with their bankrupt
philosophies of fear and loathing, all of it screamed from their pulpits on high.
Those of us who think, are
condemned to watch along with those whom it seems do not.
We're condemned to eavesdrop as
those who still purport to be journalists and experts, yet have proven
themselves little more than accessories to grand theft and murder, weasel out
of the lies they've spewn since that September morn three years ago. We must listen, unwillingly, as their lies
impinge upon our ears, our eyes, our psyche, unrelenting, unwanted,
Orwellian. We must look at and we must
listen to the liars as they climb from the mire of their absolute professional
failings and personal cowardice, neither humbled nor repentant.
We must watch because it
is no longer enough to just change the channel.
No. The liars are everywhere
now. We are force fed their images by TV
screens that have become an irritating part of airport waiting rooms. We must
listen to them on taxicab radios. And we
must read, involuntarily, their glaring, monosyllabic headlines as we walk
quickly past the news stand where we once happily paused each day.
In short, if we are to be in the
American scene at all, we must endure the calculated assault on our senses that
today characterizes a ubiquitous popular media.
Undaunted by their unbroken
string of errors, the practitioners of pulp continue to regale us with their
dueling quotes disguised as insight, their neuroses disguised as toughness,
their White House press releases disguised as analysis, their incorrect
opinions disguised incredibly as wisdom.
In the words of the old Billy Joel song, we cannot avoid "Their pointless
points of view." It is brainwashing,
plain and by no means simple. And it
works.
Otherwise, how can it be that
after five years of this crap, they've not run out their credibility string
these know-nothing experts of the corporate media?
I had a willing hand in building
this media. Today, I find so much of it
insufferable.
Perhaps it's because I have
proximity. I can see what's crawling in
the darkness beneath the rocks. Perhaps
that's why I see signs that they are finally sounding and behaving like
the uninformed talking heads, or the outright liars they surely are. Perhaps it's why I see the fantasy of
balanced perception these hucksters so proudly hail, as slowly shifting its
underlying but mandatory bias.
Even outside the media's ivory
towers, much of the public is starting to sense that the pundits seem to be
suddenly, if dimly, aware that they might have missed something lo these past
few dismally retrogressive years.
Small wonder. Because the something they've missed has been
roughly as apparent to the rest of us as would be an enormous, stinking,
bellowing, rampaging, bull elephant living in our underwear. That something is of course the pop press's
long overdue recognition that this federal administration, this gaggle of
knaves upon whom the ladies and gentlemen of the information mass media have
spent the last five years doting, is a bunch of crooks, traitors, killers, and
just plain knuckleheads.
As the circulation and ratings
of news media dwindle, a growing number of the media's practitioners seem
suddenly less willing to blindly kiss up and ask softball questions at White
House press briefings in an effort to get - albeit incorrect - information from
a vindictive and stonewalling White House communications office. They seem no longer completely blinded - not
completely blinded - by the Bush administration's staged, if non-existent
heroics. In fact, we are starting to
actually hear and read about this administration's serial incompetence. The irony is that we're getting it from
another bunch of proven incompetents: the mainstream press, the cable TV
pundits, and the oh-so-serious "Sabbath Gasbags," as columnist Calvin Trillin has correctly
labeled the Alibi Ikes who appear on the Sunday morning TV "news" shows.
Could it be that the mainstream
media have actually noticed in our "leaders" an absence of both ethics and
abilities that the "alternative" press and so called "fake news" had somehow
recognized and have been reporting on contiguously since the 1999 campaign?
But instead of coming clean, the
talking heads of electronic and the stenographers of print journalism are
visibly struggling to cover those deadly mistakes now.
Unfortunately, and in the finest
tradition of the paranoid corporate hacks they so obviously are, the blabbers
and scribblers are not admitting their deadly mistakes. Instead, they are squirming in the light and
heat of accountability. The disciples of
"stay the course" are suddenly drifting to port. I say drifting because they are following the
current, not leading, not navigating, not forecasting, not doing what training
and ethics would mandate.
No. They are drifting - less wrong today than
yesterday perhaps, but not more right.
They are hoping to hide their post 9/11, unbroken record of wrongness,
and wrongness, and more wrongness yet, and doing it the only way they know how,
behind a facade of righteous indignation and feigned outrage.
Will their public, their readers
and viewers and listeners, those who've hung on their every word and gesture
while themselves cowering too deeply in fear to find the truth on their own, be
willingly fooled again? Perhaps. Because when it comes to punditry, angry
commentary is usually enough. Sprinkle
it with a smattering of arcane words
their fans don't recognize and it'll sound downright brilliant. In fact, if the commentary is delivered by a
bulimic Barbie doll, or a guy wearing googley eyeglasses and a bowtie some
might think it worthy of a Pulitzer!
To validate this, one need only
stop for a moment and consider the childlike, credulous, and hopelessly biased
fan base the conservative pundits have built.
Look at the growing ratio (60 to 1) of right-wing versus progessively
formatted radio talk shows that have emerged in the past 15 years. Compare that to the declining circulation of
newspapers among informed and critical readers and the ever-more tabloid
editorial formats that will drive many of us farther away still. Consider that each of them has closed its
foreign bureau or reduced it to but a single correspondent, most covering an
entire continent. Consider this in the
light of its rationale: a self-defeating hope of gaining a foothold among the
uncritical, the true believers, the semi-literate - or more simply put: the
easily sold.
Consider these things and you'll
understand why the pundits think that they can fool their faithful base yet
again and get away with it. Do that, and
you'll see why perhaps this time, after
all this time, the pundits might actually be right about something.
Could it be that those who
remain faithful to these so called journalists who've gotten it wrong from the
start, will believe much on faith? Need
it only come from a pulpit of authority?
I, for one, think so.
That pulpit might be a podium
emblazoned with a fancy emblem, such as that behind which the president stands
when he lies to us. Or it might be a
newspaper masthead, a radio tower, a TV satellite in space. It matters but little. It's an authority icon, and they - the
faithful - are childlike. They'll
believe what they're told, wholly unaware that when examined in context, faith
and knowledge can coexist only in inverse proportion.
Sooner or later, when claim
after claim goes unproven and unfounded, all but the most completely credulous humans
lose their faith in authority. Critical
thinkers eventually demand evidence.
Since 9/11 the authority peddlers have shown us much of the former and
none of the latter.
So, as we the people reflect
upon a sad anniversary, a period spent in mass demonstrations, or in quiet and
somber contemplation of that which our countrymen have wrought with their fear
and ignorance, we mustn't forget the travesty of truth spewn forth by the
vulgar, manipulative swine of the right-wing and mainstream media who fed that
fear and ignorance. We should be less
than willing to forgive these killers of the innocents whose words are their
weapons - these creatures whose putrid mouths and poison pens now feign a
righteous outrage as if this debacle of blood and death and heartbreak and
robbery, this avoidable human tragedy, unfolded sans their complicity.
So, while they endeavor to
convince themselves and persuade their followers that it would all have
happened with or without their encouragement, the rest of us just won't buy it
anymore.
But lest we do forget, and as we
watch them slowly squirm and change their childish stories, hoping their
murderous lies of the recent past will fall into the great American memory
hole, as they probably will if the rest of us remain silent, please allow me to
remind us all how very obvious was the criminal manipulation of our innocent,
frightened, gullible, or just simple-minded American brethren who believed the
lies of the corporate press and right wing media and the White House communications
office.
To that end I offer the
following: I began the article that appears below back in January of the
strange - though apparently predictable - year, 2003. Completed and published
in its print version weeks before the invasion of Iraq began, I was moved to
write it while witnessing what seemed a growing and irrational level of support
for an unjustified, but ever-more-probable "war" against a people who - despite
their despicable leader - had done us no appreciable harm. Since that time, not a speck of evidence has
been found that might indicate that they had they ever intended to. The war
against Iraq is an action that was - and remains - a crime against humanity,
all of humanity not just the innocents whose lives, families, and bodies it's
ruined so far. It is a crime of maiming
and murder, of robbery and deception on the grandest of scales. As Americans of self-proclaimed free will we
have borne witness or been party to a horrific atrocity accomplished by an
easily manipulated president for his personal ends and the personal ideologies
of those who control him. His actions
were supported and enabled by an as-easily manipulated press. And all of it was instigated upon our
countrymen's now world-famous ignorance, bigotry, and fear. Three years ago,
they the people - (I refer to Americans of popular mind) - frustrated by our
government's inability to bring the perpetrators of September Eleventh to
justice, seemed intent upon killing somebody.
In fact, the somebody need not be demonstrably complicit in our
violation, merely different, Arab-seeming, Muslim-like, virtually
defenseless.
Three years on and Hussein is neutered.
No matter. We still kill the
other Iraqis upon whose oil and homeland our armies tread uninvited, unwelcome,
unreasoned, unwavering.
Three years on and nothing's
changed but the story of why we're there.
Stay the course there, change the story here.
Three years on, and at home we
face more danger from terrorists than ever.
Abroad, Osama bin Laden is now a folk hero on the order of a turbaned
Davy Crockett. And when the monetary
cost of our leaders' treasonous folly is tallied, our children's future has
been traded for blood and nothing more.
Nothing.
We've squandered our national
security. Economic stability is
security. Money is security. Not guns, not armies, money! It's the reason the paranoids at the top of
this dung heap are gathering as much of it as they can. The rest, well, the rest have seen their
economic stability thrown away along with their children's prospects for a
better life. Anyone doubting that need
only realize that America and Americans are today more indebted to foreigners
than at any point in our personal or our nation's history. Ever.
As this congressional election
year unfolds, and we continue to suffer the perpetual spectacle of our
rudderless republic amok in the world; as we further endure the waffle and
babble of most of our elected representatives in their collective careerist
attempts to distance themselves from their savage decision to slaughter over
100,000 civilians; as we watch them defend their willingness to do so; and as we endure the pundits' ratings-preserving
bullshit, I ask you once more to consider the following short essay. It was first published at the start of 2003
and before the start of what was at that time still quietly called Operation
Iraqi Liberation (OIL) by its plotters.
In the interim, the acronyms have changed, but nothing has changed as
relates to Iraq's complicity. This war was never justified. Thinking, objective
Americans knew that then. Today, a growing number of formerly trusting,
nationalistic, credulous, or perhaps just slow to comprehend Americans are coming
to know it too.
For today, only slaves to their
personal biases cling to the myth of might is right, Go W, These Colors Don't
Run, Power Of Pride, and God Bless America.
Which god might that be? Which America would he deign to bless?
So, come back with me now to the
dawn of 2003. Read once more - or
perhaps for the first time - what was written before the headlong plunge into a
war for oil and personal revenge against a nation we'd spent the previous 12
years disarming. Read what we knew and
our government pretended they did not.
Get mad as hell again.
Get mad with the talking heads,
get mad with the politicians, get mad with the yellow "journalists" whose lies
you've rejected, and stay that way until November. Then march to the polls with the
single-minded will to toss these bums out of our - OUR! - government and start
the process that will impeach and/or indict the rest.
It can be done!
In the name of our children's
and our country's future, it must be done.
******************************
The following
was first published in February, 2003.
It is offered here for your
recollection and reference.
DEAR
FELLOW AMERICANS
By Dom Stasi
February 2003: George W. Bush does not appear to be a complicated
man. In fact, with the exception of his apparently instant grasp of the complex
legal abstractions attendant to Antonin Scalia's appointing him president of
the United States, Mr. Bush seems the very paragon of intellectual simplicity
itself. "I see things in black and white," he so readily declares.
"I'm not about nuancing," he adds, daily swelling America's lexicon
if not its coffers. How comforting a worldview his must be.
Well, however comforting it might be to Mr. Bush and his ilk, the rest of us
should be troubled as hell by such statements emanating from a president of the
United States. In fact, I would submit that his "good versus evil/you're
either with us or against us" homilies have a profoundly discomforting,
even juvenile, quality to them. Yet we've watched silently these past two years
of civil retrogression as he's drawn conclusions supremely unworthy of any
world leader, much less one who must reconcile diplomacy to awesome power, less
yet again America's president.
We the people seem not the least bit troubled by this apparently simple man's
simple words. Neither are we much concerned that the simple man seems so
readily accepting of complex advice, advice fomented in minds perhaps not as
simple as his own, minds whose motivations most Americans - to their credit -
neither know nor understand.
Mr. Bush is also a man of obvious faith. Witness the zeal with which he
promotes his constitutionally dubious "faith-based initiative" even
as we prepare for mortal war.
Of course, faith can be a wonderful and healing force. It can also be blind, if
not tempered with reason. For faith is a state of mind that cannot coexist with
knowledge in context. To quote the American genius, Carl Sagan, "I'd
rather know than believe." When confronted with this particular black and
white simplicity, Mr. Bush will too quickly opt for the latter. It's easier to
believe than it is to know - more convenient, less critically complex. Witness
his indifference toward that critical basis of knowledge called evidence.
Witness how readily he eschews it when it interferes with his decision-making.
Such credulity is both troubling and, in the complex global framework of today,
patently un-American. Rarely in the practice of American governance has that
credulity been more blatantly manifest than it has been these past weeks in
Bush's approach to the matter of Iraq. The promotion of his agenda, through the
compelling yet wholly circumstantial evidence provided the United Nations by
the charismatic Colin Powell, was pure theater. For however compelling the
secretary of state's presentation might have been on the visceral level, it was
wholly inconclusive on a critically objective basis. Its examples of
"evidence" were wholly refutable in their ambiguity, its dramatics
better suited to inspiring Hollywood actors to action than lethal armies. Such
evidence as that, which Secretary Powell presented, would be dismissed as
circumstantial by any honest judge in any American court of law. Neither would
such ambiguities hold up against a reasonable jury in whose hands lay the fate
of but a single, however suspect, human being in an American trial. But alas,
this is international power ball, not an American trial, and however
inconclusive the out-of-context sound bytes and meaningless snapshots presented
by Colin Powell might appear to a trained and objective analyst (such as
myself), they are apparently definitive enough for Mr. Bush and a majority of
Americans to willingly, if not eagerly, sacrifice the lives of an as-yet
incalculable number of innocents to arbitrary and merciless execution. I submit
that had the same standard of evidence been applied to Mr. Bush's insider
trading allegations, or to his alleged dereliction of military duty during the
Vietnam War, his government service might by now find itself limited to the
manufacture of license plates.
But more to the point: Does Saddam have nuclear weapons?
He almost certainly does not.
Does he have chemical and biological weapons? Probably. But these are hardly
weapons of mass destruction by modern standards.
I pose this latter assertion not as conjecture, but as a matter of history
supported by physical evidence. But the audit trail to that evidence - based
upon American government records - might surprise you.
Quoting the president's father, who, near the end of his term, said, "As
you may remember from history, there was a lot of support for Iraq at that time
[1980s] as a balance against a much more aggressive Iran, under
Khomeini."
A lot of support? How about $5 billion in intelligence, weapons and
training?
Recorded history, not conjecture.
Quoting again, this time the man considered America's foremost war historian,
Gabriel Kolko: "The United States was Iraq's functional ally and
encouraged it to build and utilize a huge army with modern armor, aviation,
artillery and chemical and biological weapons." Saddam's first recorded
use of mustard gas, cyanide and nerve agents against humans began at that time.
This begs the question: Was our $5 billion gift of weapons and training a
coincidence or the proximate cause of Iraq's use and subsequent knowledge of
germs and gas?
Why was this historically recorded transaction never mentioned or referenced
among the "evidence" the Bush administration seemed so desperate to
produce? Let's be simpler still. Whose spent nerve gas canisters did the
weapons inspectors find in the sands of Iraq following the Gulf War and again
so recently? Are they ours? Russia's? Or the product of "evil" Iraqi
science? These too represent direct evidence, physical evidence. We are told
only of their presence, never of their provenance. Well, it takes no leap of
imagination to conclude that the act of giving Saddam the wherewithal to use
germs and poison gas is less inflammatory than when we gave him these
capabilities. If not the material itself, we certainly offered Saddam access
or, at the very least, tacit approval and huge sums of money to gain access to
these products of World War I era technology that have now - in the nuclear age
- become known as "weapons of mass destruction." But that we did so
during the Iran-Contra years, the conservative movement's Camelot years ... the
Ronald Reagan years, well, that makes public consideration of this stuff a Bush
administration taboo. Now, I ask you, what sort of an American president, however
reluctantly, chooses to suppress direct evidence while allowing his cabinet to
compromise national security by revealing confidential sources in a misguided
dog and pony show whose probative value will be argued by historians forever.
Could the answer be a president who would compromise his citizens' safety
before risking the wrath of his faithful right-wing base, a wrath he'd surely
incur by blaspheming its beatified former president, Ronald Reagan? Conjecture?
My apologies.
President Bush (the current one), while expecting the United Nations to
rationally consider its course, recently offered a characteristically simple
mandate: "Show some backbone," he admonished the ostensibly spineless
world body. Act upon Iraq or be considered irrelevant was the Hobson's choice
he offered up, adding that the United States will "act" with or
without the UN's assent. By this simple dictate, the president himself rendered
the world body irrelevant, nullifying in advance the implications of whatever
consensus might derive from disciplined, civilized discourse - discourse born
of empirical inspection. Instead, we and the world at large are subjected to
Mr. Bush's peevish ultimatums. We witness scene upon scene akin to an American
prosecutor advising a global jury, "I'm gonna hang the suspect, no matter
what you people decide."
Last week he turned that same reductio-ad-absurdum logic upon the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization. When European NATO member states did the very
thing treaty organizations are formed to do - enforce the treaty and keep the
peace - Mr. Bush declared them irrelevant.
Yesterday, he completed the circle. This president who ascended his high office
one-half million votes short of a popular mandate, referred to the millions of
anti-war demonstrators whose voices were raised in global unity this weekend,
and by inference another 100 million less active but like-minded Americans, as
- you guessed it - irrelevant.
But perhaps the most troubling insight into our president's simplicity is
simplicity itself. Despite that George W. Bush somehow commands the most
terrible and destructive power ever poised upon our fragile planet by mortal
man, he has not yet so much as learned its name (the power, that is - I must
presume he knows the planet's name). I, for one, cannot persuade myself that
George Bush's ignorance of the atom, which begins with the assumption of a
"nuke-u-lus" at its center, does not extend to the implications of
its misuse. Perhaps that, too, is irrelevant.
Make no mistake, this writer considers
Saddam Hussein a festering pustule on the anus of humanity. I care not one wit
for his well being or how horribly he might meet his end.
However, I neither earned nor did I contribute a lifetime of tax dollars
expecting that, in the end, so much as a penny of my taxes would be used along
with yours to incinerate children. But acquiescing to George W. Bush's horrific
demands in the absence of genuine, direct, supporting evidence of our enemy du
jour's capabilities or intent will mean just that. As one Iraqi diplomat said,
upon considering the likely indiscriminate slaughter of his people,
"America has smart bombs, but not smart leaders."
Lest we as a nation become as simple as our American president's diatribes, we
the people must understand that through such inhumane and undisciplined use of
its irresistible power, the United States - not simply the United Nations or
the treaties we sign in good faith, but the United States itself, its people
and the grand human experiment to which we ascribe and to whose principles our
forbears committed their lives -- will be rendered truly, not allegedly,
irrelevant.
That would be the truest manifestation of spinelessness imaginable.
-END-
-The Author -
Dom Stasi is a technology executive in the television and motion picture
industry in Hollywood. Mr. Stasi also
flew aerial reconnaissance during the Cold War and, after an honorable
discharge, worked as a flight test engineer whose specialty was the flight test
and certification of advanced military aerial reconnaissance systems.
-Footnotes & References-
1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/international/middleeast/26KAY.html?hp
2. Counterpunch, January 19, 2004: Alexander Cockburn
3.
ttp://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/17/1543215&mode=thread&tid=47
Copyright: Dom Stasi