Iraq Occupation

The corporate media continues to downplay the continuing carnage in Iraq, reinforcing White House administration’s claims the so-called “surge” is working.

Corporate media outlets, of course, have bigger stories to report these days, such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s recent speeches and their impact on presidential contender Barack Obama’s campaign or 15-year-old Miley Cyrus’s recent photo shoot. This, the media pundits will assure us, is what ordinary Americans want to know about. But is it all they want to know about?

The mainstream American press, complicit in enabling President George Bush in the run-up to the war, undoubtedly has buried the Iraq story as part of the “surge-is-working” recent public relations initiative conducted by President George Bush and Gen. David Petraeus. This accomplishes two things for the right-wing in this country: (1) It puts a positive spin on the worst foreign policy decision in at least a generation, if not more, giving cover to Republicans running for office this year, and (2) it means Bush does not have to actually make any difficult decisions about the continuing Iraq occupation before he leaves office.

But here are some facts you might not know: American military and Iraqi civilian causalities have skyrocketed recently. The military reported 50 American troop deaths last month, which was the highest amount since September. Meanwhile, Iraqi civilian deaths are at their highest in six months as well. American military deaths are now at 4,065. Nearly 30,00 soldiers have been wounded. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from 83,000 to more than 600,000.

The way in which the mainstream media frames and positions a story is critically important in how the public views its importance. The surge in deaths should be a major headline, but the story has been relegated to secondary status. The issue is a vitally significant one in an election year in which voters must decide between two vastly different views about the Iraq war. Both Democratic presidential candidates, Obama and Hillary Clinton, want to begin removing American troops if elected. They see the war as a mistake and believe it has long been an irreversible quaqmire. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, wants to continue the Bush administration’s strategies (or non-strategies) about the war.

The corporate media continues to enable the worst president in American history and his courtiers to manipulate the news cycle as he spreads quasi-fascist propaganda sanctioning a senseless war, torture of prisoners and the suspension of habeas corpus. This specific dynamic—Bush and the docile corporate media—has changed the American presidency and the press forever. One has to ask larger questions: How can democracy survive within this dynamic? Can independent media outlets correct this structural error?

"There is this issue in a sense this term of battlefield geometry. As I mentioned, together with Ambassador Crocker and Iraqi political leaders, there’s even sort of a political military calculus that you have to consider, again, in establishing where the conditions are met to make further reductions" - Gen. David Petraeus, April 8, 2008

"This new increase in violence raises questions about the military success of the surge. But, more significantly, the purpose of the surge, as announced by President Bush last year, which was to give the Iraqi leaders breathing room to work out a settlement, has not been achieved." — U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), April 8, 2008

A day before Gen David Petraeus told the U.S. Congress and Americans to forget about any meaningful troop withdrawals from Iraq the military announced the deaths of ten American soldiers since Sunday.

See, you might not know about it because most corporate media outlets are putting Iraq stories on the back pages now, but American military and Iraqi civilian deaths actually spiked in March after some relative decline in violence over the last few months. The long, gruesome occupation is just as violent and senseless as ever.

Meanwhile, as Petraeus spoke Tuesday to Congressional committees, tension continued to increase between cleric Moktada Al-Sadr and Iraq Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. On Tuesday, Sadr, who controls the Mahdi Army milita, called off a planned anti-American protest this week after Maliki’s government begun detaining young Shiite men at checkpoints throughout the country in an effort to stop the rally. Sadr also threatened to end his militia’s cease fire truce. Sadr loyalists have recently clashed with government-backed troops in the Iraq city of Basra.

In another recent development concerning Iraq, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz now argues that his $3 trillion estimate for the overall cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation is probably too low. Stiglitz now says a “$4 or $5 trillion tag would be more reasonable.”

Against this backdrop and with Petraeus’s apparent blessing, our nation’s professional cabal of lying warmongers, the conservative ideologues and the radical right-wing media outlets are declaring much progress if not an impending victory (whatever this means to them individually) in Iraq because of Imperial President George Bush’s surge. The big lie always works best, right? The mighty surge has been an unqualified success. That’s the latest right-wing storyline, and the GOP is sticking with it despite increasing American military casualities.

But all this Iraq occupation cheerleading is from the same bag of lies and tricks the American people have been handed since the Bush administration was warning in 2003 of the immediate end of Western civilization because of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Petraeus has called for a halt to any American troop withdrawals after mid-July and stubbornly refuses to discuss or estimate future troop levels even though the surge has supposedly been so successful. That would still leave at least 140,000 troops in Iraq. Essentially, Petraeus once again deceptively described Bush’s philosophy of perpetual war in terms designed to manipulate a complacent U.S. Congress. There is no surprise here.

Sure, Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, gave himself the necessary political cover Tuesday in his comments by qualifying his reports of glorious success with words such as “uneven” and “still-fragile” and the vacuous and meaningless “battlefield geometry,” but he certainly accomplished his mission as a major political courtier for the Bush regime, giving Republicans like U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) an opportunity to twist his words into an extended, drawling campaign advertisement for the presumptive Republican nominee U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona). (And, yes, media darling McCain still cannot get his facts straight about the Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq.)

Come on, how can any rational person not see Petraeus's empty terms of "battlefield geometry" and "political military calculus" (see the above quote) as anything less than rhetorical subterfuge? Basically, the Occupation General is counting on American people, specifically members of the U.S. Congress, to not challenge his pseudo-math terms because, really, these terms are just too complicated for our Senators, Representatives and you to understand. It's a Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert skit in the making.

The bottom line from Petraeus is that Bush and company will continue their open-ended occupation of Iraq through the president’s last term, no matter what the cost in human suffering, no matter how much money American taxpayers must pay for this disaster and no matter what the majority of American citizens think about the ongoing occupation.

(Click here to view a short video we put together here at Okie Funk about the Iraq occupation. Be sure to turn up the speakers.)

Salon.com blogger and author Glenn Greenwald is writing the best media criticism in the nation right now.

One of his latest posts deals with an important issue raised by many bloggers and political activists in the past several years. (Okie Funk has raised this point, too.) Essentially, Greenwald’s argument is this: Those people who were 100 percent right about the Iraq occupation and opposed it from the beginning continue to be marginalized by mainstream media outlets.

I would go further to say there remains an institutionalized bigotry and bias—at least in my part of the world—targeting people who were right about the most important foreign policy event in a generation. (Greenwald may or may not agree with this.) The people who were wrong about weapons of mass destruction, who predicted foolishly the Iraq war would be a cakewalk, cost little money and secure democracy in the Middle East, remain ensconced in power in public and private institutions. They work against people who were right about all these points. This institutionalized bigotry is subtle, for sure, but it exists. Some people have suffered in their jobs and in their private lives because they were right. They continue to suffer.

Here is the prevailing premise of the bigotry: If you were wrong about Iraq, then that is okay. You are a good conservative or so-called “liberal hawk,” who deserves to be rewarded with leadership positions, raises, promotions and all the spoils of institutionalized prestige and success. (This is a view promoted by media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.) If you were right, you are a leftist kook who needs to go sit in the corner and shut up. In this way, using this illogic, the right-wing continues to triumph and dominate almost every sector of American life. The Iraq occupation is truly the ur-event that defines how the right-wing has managed to shift the political discourse so far to the right, that even right and wrong, truth and lying, are no longer operative or even debated in any meaningful sense.

This may sound like sour grapes coming from someone who publicly opposed the war from the beginning, but the philosophical and political implications here are enormous, and they deserve reconsideration as the American military death toll in Iraq climbs to 4,000 and the occupation extends into its sixth year. Greenwald compares the illogical premise in the previous paragraph to someone using a surgeon that has repeatedly botched your operations. Why would you continue to use a surgeon who makes mistakes and causes you harm? Yet that is what mainstream media outlets do, that is what most public institutions continue to do. They continue to rely on and reward people who were completely wrong, whose shallow ideology has miserably failed this country. Columnist William Kristol, a new columnist at The New York Times, is one of these people.

Do you personally know someone in a position of leadership—political or otherwise—who supported the Iraq invasion and was wrong about how easy it would be to occupy the country? Have they recanted, apologized, spoke out? No. Then that person should not be in that particular position of leadership. Their judgment cannot and should not be trusted on any issue.

What is at stake here is nothing less than the basic structures of our democracy. Certainly, pure democracy is not necessarily dependent on right or wrong. Misguided, bigoted people can and do vote to reward “wrong,” but a long-term, systematic embrace of the illogical as is the case with the Iraq occupation can only result in governmental tyranny and the permanent displacement of the truth-seeking individual. This has already happened to some extent in our country. It continues to happen.

The most recent lie, for example, of Imperial President George Bush, the worst president in American history, is that the so-called “surge” is working. But the bombings continue in Iraq, Americans continue to lose their lives (more American soldiers died in 2007 than in any other year of the war), Iraq’s political systems remain impotent and vulnerable and the American treasury will be plundered for at least $3 trillion. Every day brings more news of the continuing carnage, but it does not fit the current Bush spin cycle. So it is all relegated to the back pages, and then the right-wing pundits—some like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times actually have the gall to define themselves as centrists or moderates—pronounce that everything, really, everything is okay in Iraq.

Meanwhile, our country flounders in an economic morass created by the very same people who were wrong about Iraq. But do not count on the country’s basic institutions to make this connection and replace their leadership.

Until this country and its basic public and private institutions reward those people who were right about Iraq, the country will continue its downward spiral. Do not count on American mainstream media outlets to cover in any depth this spiral. Do not count on the country’s most basic institutions to correct the Big Error. They are the main reason this country is in distress in the first place.

As Ford Madox Ford writes in his novel The Good Soldier, “It is all a darkness.”