TheMillerCircle.org

It is the cooperativity of the mainstream media with the administration and their subservience to the military rules governing access that prevents us from seeing the kinds of horrific images we got exposed to during the Vietnam War. Remember the famous photograph of children running down a Vietnam village road, with a naked girl fleeing in shocked fright, burned with napalm and running for her life, her face expressing shear horror? We don’t see those kinds of images in this war, and the administration would like us to believe that their absence reflects the new technology, with smart bombs, precision attacks and highly focused lethality where only the truly bad guys get knocked off. We all know of course, that is pure rubbish. But the Swift Boat types and Fox news help to insure that a significant population of Americans will stay the course and support the actions of the empire, no matter what. I rarely watch Fox news except to serve as an occasional reminder that something is truly screwed up about a country that gives a public broadcast license so that a major political party can have its own public propaganda TV channel (if our ship ever gets righted, that license has to go). If you didn’t watch Fox news during the build-up to the Iraq invasion you missed out on a military hardware sales program: every Fox reporter was hyping his favorite weapon or plane (yes, "his" is correct, as this is definitely a guy thing). But, back to the main point. As Howard Zinn emphasizes, the way we conduct our wars has shifted from the 90% combatant fatalities during WW I, to the 90% civilian deaths from the way we conduct our wars of today. This transition took place in large part because of the increased emphasis on aerial warfare, where you don’t assess the damage or, if you do, it gets neatly classified as "collateral damage" as if a neurosurgeon was at work and accidentally nicked a small blood vessel (quite often meaning thousands of casualties). The pinnacle of this new strategy was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed hundreds of thousands, leaving thousands of others to die of acute radiation sickness, while the survivors got exposed to the long-term consequences of radiation. But, it was also practiced with a highly lethal outcome through the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo. And, in Vietnam we "carpet bombed" Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. But, most significantly, bomber pilots don’t usually see their victims get torched, so they have fewer nightmares. In the air, you’re much more of a remote killer, a little closer to a video game with the buttons but without the visualization of the victims. But, it’s quite different for the soldiers on the ground.

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Now in our sixth year of war in Iraq, with no end game even contemplated by the administration, it is abundantly clear that Bush and Cheney have unfinished business in the Middle East and their motivations for staying there will make it challenging for any future administration to leave. It will take a sea change in our nationalized and militarized foreign policy to get out of Iraq. But, to understand why, you have to leave the WMD issue and the other bogus reasons given to us for the invasion in 2003 and concentrate on the following fact: never before in the history of the U.S. have we had two oil men in the top two positions of our government and never before have we had a foreign policy so singularly obsessed by the oil issue. In the past year it has become much clearer why GW Bush has constructed the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad and why the "surge" of this year will continue and war activity is likely to increase.

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Almost completely unknown to the public, and seemingly outside of the purview of the mainstream media, the Pentagon has continued lockstep in its march and preparation for " the long war." Stimulated by the events of 9/11, the Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld, pursued the policy that America’s response to those events would be purely a military response, as outlined by the neocons and as befitting a great military empire. Fortress America continues to advance. The Pentagon continues its preparation for a confrontation with Iran and we have a president who does not think any more authority from Congress is needed to launch military actions. He is further emboldened by a Congress that refuses to challenge him on the budget, as he continues to talk about a declining budget deficit, created by not including the costs of the Iraq war in the calculation. As president, at least for Republican presidents, you are given so much freedom for your actions that accountability is not a serious issue and not something that anyone in the White House seems to worry about. Apparently those that once did are now gone.

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