Ann, something that is very Irish.
US public still believe the fairy tales of the cheerleaders of war
Sunday September 10th 2006
IT was startling, last week, to discover the depth of ignorance that still exists five years after 9/11. It's as though history began the day that the Twin Towers crumpled in clouds of dust. What happened before is deemed not to matter. The reality of the world surrounding the 9/11 atrocity remains irrelevant.
For Americans, the horror and humiliation of that atrocity was so great that for many it wiped out all context. Everything began on 9/11. And absolutely anything was acceptable if it would - or might - stop another such atrocity.
It was the most photographed atrocity, the most videoed, the most talked about and written about. Yet on Thursday the US news channel CNN published the results of a poll that shows the shocking extent of the ignorance.
Over the past five years, a series of investigations have established beyond doubt that there was no connection whatever between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Yet the CNN poll showed that 43 per cent of Americans still, to this day, believe there was a direct connection.
It was that alleged connection, always unlikely but stated as a fact by the Bush regime, which allowed Americans endorse the devastation of Iraq, and the series of atrocities that followed. As of yesterday, 2,667 American soldiers have been sacrificed to that myth, and uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis.
The existence of such ignorance, with such horrific consequences, is damning evidence of the failure of the US media. Hugely over-paid and over-rated, the titans of American journalism - at the TV networks and at such newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post - simply didn't do their jobs.
The widespread corporate interests of the giant companies behind the media made them wary. Fear of presidential power made them deferential. Dread of being accused of a lack of patriotism made them cringe. They bowed, unquestioningly, to the cheerleaders of war.
We live in the information age, we are told. Unlimited numbers of TV channels, cheap and fast printing techniques, unprecedented numbers of books published. Mobile phones and satellite technology allow us to walk down a New York street and converse with someone in West Cork who has just finished chatting with someone else in a Borneo jungle. Emails fan out across the globe in milliseconds, the vast store of information on the internet is a mouse click away. Yet, enormous numbers of people remain no more aware of the world around them than were 16th Century peasants.
Prey to rumour, fear and myth.
When the Twin Towers were destroyed, we saw it live on TV. We heard the shrieks of grief. The images were overwhelming. And now, five years later, those images still have the power to shock. For many, the deaths of those 3,000 innocents stand out from all the other atrocities that came before and those that have come since.
To suggest that there might be complexities behind the atrocity was to risk being accused of excusing terrorism. All the complex causes of terrorism were dismissed - the nationalism, the religious fanaticism, the rage at injustice, the twisted idealism, the urge for revenge for atrocities committed by western interests in far-off places.
The decades of foreign policy that saw US troops - and US surrogates - wade through blood in the Middle East, Asia and South America were washed away in the horror of those powerful 9/11 images. The resentment bred injustice, raw material for use by fanatics, was ignored.
In place of reality there was a simple explanation - the terrorists are psychopaths. They hate us, they hate our freedoms, without cause or reason. All that can be done with psychopaths - we were told - is to exterminate them before they exterminate us. And if that means flattening entire villages within which they shelter, along with uncounted numbers of innocents, so be it.
A considered, effective response to 9/11 was out of the question. Perhaps, given the history and ambitions of all the forces involved, it was impossible. There was always going to be a bloodbath.
Five days after 9/11, on this page, I quoted George Bush.
"Through the tears of sadness I see an opportunity," he said. George and his mates, who had long cherished a plan to remodel the Middle East in their own image, saw a silver lining to 9/11. The horror, the fear, the American sense of unique victimhood, gave Bush a blank cheque.
So, Saddam, a local thug, a sometime ally of the west (we sold him lots of Irish beef) became the new Hitler.
The cliche tells us that the world changed on 9/11. It did, but in more ways than one. For the first time on home soil, Americans were devastated by a terrorist atrocity. And 9/11 took more than lives - it took away the sense of invulnerability. It shocked and humiliated the country. Americans - like Nicaraguans, or Salvadorans, or Palestinians, Vietnamese or Cambodians before them - justifiably felt victimised. They now had the fervour of victims and the righteousness.
And it was a unique sense of victimhood, because for the most part they remain uninformed of the varieties of atrocities suffered in other countries, or the role of their nation's foreign policy in such matters.
Any retaliatory atrocity could be justified - against anyone, anywhere - on the grounds that it would revenge an injustice and it would - or just might - protect America from another 9/11.
For many in the Middle East, 9/11 changed something else. For so long, the technological superiority of the west ensured that Arabs and Muslims could rely on being the losers in any conflict. Horrific though it was, 9/11 showed that even the strongest player in the game was no longer invulnerable.
More recently, the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon, and the failure to achieve a victory over Hizballah, created the same sense that things have changed, defeat is not inevitable, the big guys are vulnerable.
For a long time, Muslim extremists preached that the west was out to destroy Islam, just like the Christian crusaders of old. The vast majority of Muslims knew this was nonsense. Then came George Bush and his mates, and their unlimited firepower. Using 9/11 as cover, they set about reshaping vast numbers of human lives, as though they were playing with pieces on a chess board.
And the Muslim extremists say, look, we were right.
Immediately after 9/11, the US blasted Afghanistan, smashed the Taliban, slaughtered civilians and chased al-Qaeda into the Pakistani mountains. Then, leaving a small force behind, Mr Bush and Mr Blair set out to reshape the Middle East. In their ignorance, they unleashed the forces now dictating events.
Five years after 9/11, the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan. Iraq is now a training ground for terrorists. And the bloodletting has only begun. America can't walk away, as it did from Vietnam. The region is too important strategically.
Books such as Fiasco , Thomas Ricks's superbly researched account of the Iraq disaster, are now in favour in the US. Some Americans are desperately seeking to understand how they got to where they are. And, with the bulk of the media still fearful, still cringing, still splashing in the shallows, almost half of all Americans still believe in the fairy tales spun by war's cheerleaders.
Gene Kerrigan
unison.ie |
