IbnAlAawam
Junior Member
US public shrinks from war's reality
By K Darbandi
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 cleaning ladies to take care of the mess - just as the German, Polish, South Korean and other forces are cleaning up Afghanistan.
The US public currently opposed to Bush's policies in Iraq were not initially against going to war, and they are not now really in support of abandoning the "mission" and the devastated Iraqis. The truth is that the "involvement" in Iraq is not culturally
digestible anymore: it has become too alien to watch.
The war used to resemble video games: buildings or tiny figures on the screen blown away in a cloud of dust. It used to be sanitized. Now it is a bit too messy: the tortures, civilian deaths - the clean-cut look is not there anymore. What happened to the smart bombs, Rumsfeld?
The US military has spent billions of dollars since the Vietnam War to repackage foreign wars and bring a whole new look to the sensory internalization of its global crimes in the US public's eye. The US public is now used to this clean packaging and becomes very uncomfortable when wars are presented any other way. The US military has succeeded in packaging its war-presentation strategy so well that the public does not even have the stomach to tolerate the real thing anymore. Pentagon strategists over the years have indeed become the victims of their own success.
So too many young soldiers are now coming home without limbs or faces, and they have totally ruined the Superman image all were expecting. The war has caused a cultural crisis in the US.
The idea was to bring down the number of casualties, but the Pentagon and its huge medical establishment were so busy saving wounded lives that they totally forgot that what they have saved are basically human remains with a heartbeat; the mutilated, faceless and brain-damaged young men and women of the volunteer armed forces. The number of these victims is growing daily, and the financial, social and medical infrastructure to support their tattered existences has yet to be constructed.
Cultural identity is dear to all, but the pocketbook is a completely different matter. The US public has realized that this war is costing them too much and might, just might, ruin their plans for the next vacation to Disney World. Taking away our fairytale image is one thing, but you can't rob us of our fairyland! Hardship is for losers, and Americans are winners, especially when it comes to their fun time! People did not turn against the Iraq occupation because of the crimes against the Iraqis, or the complete disconnection of September 11 from Saddam Hussein. But they did partly depart from supporting it after all the implicit economic rewards turned into a financial nightmare.
At this juncture, the cultural crisis is compounded with the financial fiasco, one that the public knows it has to pay for sooner or later. The public is desperately awaiting a solution to this quagmire. The progressive intellectuals propose solutions; the Democrats have several solutions, but so does President Bush. Frighteningly, his might be the most compatible.
Give me back my culture
Well then, Bush says, let's reflect calmly on the true reasons for this fiasco. There must be something in the picture now that was not there when we went to save the Iraqis from Saddam. Uh, of course, it is the hostage-taking, terrorist-breeding, girl-stoning, Jew-hating Iranians! They are the real cause for the havoc in Iraq. Bush says: "I can fix it for you all; I will restore your Superman, fix your video games and arrange your trip to Disney World. Just let me get these hairy, dark bastards, and I will get you to your blond Cinderella in time for the 9 o'clock fireworks extravaganza!"
Says Bush: "Hear me out, folks! I have the cruise ships ready in the Persian Gulf. We'll go in fast and swift, mostly from the air and the sea; from that altitude you won't even see blood; I promise it will be clean, like the games. Then we occupy the southern oilfields, and I will bring all the money back with cheap Iranian oil, and Iraq will be ours again to manage ... how's that?" Go get 'em, tiger! Fox News and 300
What Fox News does in the current US political and cultural context is quite similar to what the movie 300 did by making the public feel good about itself by inviting them to attack and destroy a sub-human race. A "few good men" will annihilate the incompetent, savage and inhuman enemy in a very one-sided event.
A large number of people who watch Fox actually do not care about the truth, they want to hear a sort of affirmation ritual to feel better; but as the war-junkies that they are, they won't rest until they get their war. In this context, 300 is part of the war plan: to de-humanize the Persians, who are depicted in the picture as all the colored and sexually ambiguous people on this Earth. The neurotically selfish culture will reaffirm its racial superiority once again while we all wait for the anti-war sentiments to grow in the US public.
We need to understand better why people turn against wars. The US public, by and large, is composed of a very anti-intellectual culture and, with the current popular cultural traits, it will never turn against wars for the reasons that progressive intellectuals do. The link is missing, and has been missing for decades between us and the social body. The prime reasons lie in the public's current cultural traits and our failure to understand the public fully and all the good and evil that it carries with it, like all other people in other societies. [1]
More wars will come and go, but where we can start, in my opinion, is by smashing the Democrats' hold on the left wing in the US. Everything else will follow from that.
Note
1. Many Iranian intellectuals, under threat of war, have defensively drawn on the historical glories of the "Persian" civilization, attempting to purify the image of a very troubled society as they contemplate a possible invasion, vast bombing and war. Instead, they should focus on simple current facts, such as the vast crowds that still come to squares to watch public executions in the Islamic Republic. These and other dark voluntary acts by at least large segments of the Iranian public are part and parcel of what still keeps the Islamic Republic of Iran in power. Glorifying the public seems to be a universal disease of the progressive intellectual.
K Darbandi is an independent Iranian-American scientist and a former member of the Islamic Republic opposition.
By K Darbandi
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 cleaning ladies to take care of the mess - just as the German, Polish, South Korean and other forces are cleaning up Afghanistan.
The US public currently opposed to Bush's policies in Iraq were not initially against going to war, and they are not now really in support of abandoning the "mission" and the devastated Iraqis. The truth is that the "involvement" in Iraq is not culturally
digestible anymore: it has become too alien to watch.
The war used to resemble video games: buildings or tiny figures on the screen blown away in a cloud of dust. It used to be sanitized. Now it is a bit too messy: the tortures, civilian deaths - the clean-cut look is not there anymore. What happened to the smart bombs, Rumsfeld?
The US military has spent billions of dollars since the Vietnam War to repackage foreign wars and bring a whole new look to the sensory internalization of its global crimes in the US public's eye. The US public is now used to this clean packaging and becomes very uncomfortable when wars are presented any other way. The US military has succeeded in packaging its war-presentation strategy so well that the public does not even have the stomach to tolerate the real thing anymore. Pentagon strategists over the years have indeed become the victims of their own success.
So too many young soldiers are now coming home without limbs or faces, and they have totally ruined the Superman image all were expecting. The war has caused a cultural crisis in the US.
The idea was to bring down the number of casualties, but the Pentagon and its huge medical establishment were so busy saving wounded lives that they totally forgot that what they have saved are basically human remains with a heartbeat; the mutilated, faceless and brain-damaged young men and women of the volunteer armed forces. The number of these victims is growing daily, and the financial, social and medical infrastructure to support their tattered existences has yet to be constructed.
Cultural identity is dear to all, but the pocketbook is a completely different matter. The US public has realized that this war is costing them too much and might, just might, ruin their plans for the next vacation to Disney World. Taking away our fairytale image is one thing, but you can't rob us of our fairyland! Hardship is for losers, and Americans are winners, especially when it comes to their fun time! People did not turn against the Iraq occupation because of the crimes against the Iraqis, or the complete disconnection of September 11 from Saddam Hussein. But they did partly depart from supporting it after all the implicit economic rewards turned into a financial nightmare.
At this juncture, the cultural crisis is compounded with the financial fiasco, one that the public knows it has to pay for sooner or later. The public is desperately awaiting a solution to this quagmire. The progressive intellectuals propose solutions; the Democrats have several solutions, but so does President Bush. Frighteningly, his might be the most compatible.
Give me back my culture
Well then, Bush says, let's reflect calmly on the true reasons for this fiasco. There must be something in the picture now that was not there when we went to save the Iraqis from Saddam. Uh, of course, it is the hostage-taking, terrorist-breeding, girl-stoning, Jew-hating Iranians! They are the real cause for the havoc in Iraq. Bush says: "I can fix it for you all; I will restore your Superman, fix your video games and arrange your trip to Disney World. Just let me get these hairy, dark bastards, and I will get you to your blond Cinderella in time for the 9 o'clock fireworks extravaganza!"
Says Bush: "Hear me out, folks! I have the cruise ships ready in the Persian Gulf. We'll go in fast and swift, mostly from the air and the sea; from that altitude you won't even see blood; I promise it will be clean, like the games. Then we occupy the southern oilfields, and I will bring all the money back with cheap Iranian oil, and Iraq will be ours again to manage ... how's that?" Go get 'em, tiger! Fox News and 300
What Fox News does in the current US political and cultural context is quite similar to what the movie 300 did by making the public feel good about itself by inviting them to attack and destroy a sub-human race. A "few good men" will annihilate the incompetent, savage and inhuman enemy in a very one-sided event.
A large number of people who watch Fox actually do not care about the truth, they want to hear a sort of affirmation ritual to feel better; but as the war-junkies that they are, they won't rest until they get their war. In this context, 300 is part of the war plan: to de-humanize the Persians, who are depicted in the picture as all the colored and sexually ambiguous people on this Earth. The neurotically selfish culture will reaffirm its racial superiority once again while we all wait for the anti-war sentiments to grow in the US public.
We need to understand better why people turn against wars. The US public, by and large, is composed of a very anti-intellectual culture and, with the current popular cultural traits, it will never turn against wars for the reasons that progressive intellectuals do. The link is missing, and has been missing for decades between us and the social body. The prime reasons lie in the public's current cultural traits and our failure to understand the public fully and all the good and evil that it carries with it, like all other people in other societies. [1]
More wars will come and go, but where we can start, in my opinion, is by smashing the Democrats' hold on the left wing in the US. Everything else will follow from that.
Note
1. Many Iranian intellectuals, under threat of war, have defensively drawn on the historical glories of the "Persian" civilization, attempting to purify the image of a very troubled society as they contemplate a possible invasion, vast bombing and war. Instead, they should focus on simple current facts, such as the vast crowds that still come to squares to watch public executions in the Islamic Republic. These and other dark voluntary acts by at least large segments of the Iranian public are part and parcel of what still keeps the Islamic Republic of Iran in power. Glorifying the public seems to be a universal disease of the progressive intellectual.
K Darbandi is an independent Iranian-American scientist and a former member of the Islamic Republic opposition.