We don't want to hurt the president's feelings, do we?
- From: trudogg <trudogg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:06:41 -0400
[...what can you say about an elected official that will not listen to
over 3/4's of the people he's working for? A man that is so deep in
denial that he can't even logically see the problem he has caused, nor
the solution to it?]
For all the noise and carnage of war -- especially this unnecessary
war, which seems to possess a life of its own as it barrels forward
uninterrupted on two fronts -- our language of condemnation remains
remarkably polite.
Thus a new CBS news poll shows that Americans are "increasingly
dissatisfied" with the Iraq operation, with 77 percent telling
pollsters they think it's "going very badly" -- as though the public
were turning thumbs down on a reality TV show. Our formerly bellicose
media now seem to be doing their best to reduce the national mood to a
whisper. Shhh! We don't want to hurt the president's feelings, do we?
Meanwhile, the headlines scream "Incoming!"
About the same time that a thundering yet strangely irrelevant
majority of Americans were telling CBS they want this war to stop, the
U.S. military and NATO were churning up evil publicity in both Iraq
and Afghanistan -- and in the process ensuring that the war on terror
will not run out of enemies -- simply by waging the war they have
waged from the start.
That war, no matter what the Pentagon flaks say afterward, can be
summed up thus: No civilian shall ever come in the way of America's
intention to kill its perceived enemies.
From Iraq, the Associated Press reported on Saturday, regarding twopre-dawn raids on Sadr City in which 26 Iraqis died: "But residents,
police and hospital officials said eight civilians were killed in
their homes and angrily accused U.S. forces of firing blindly on the
innocent." Later in the story, unnamed Iraqi officials were quoted as
saying that "all the dead were civilians."
And from Afghanistan, the UK Observer reported that a three-hour NATO
air strike on a village in the southwest province of Helmand killed
between 50 and 80 civilians, many of them, we are told in an almost
ritualistic reminder of what that term means, women and children. The
Observer continued: "...more than 200 (civilians) were killed by
coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to
have been killed by Taliban militants."
This is the war that has started to play badly to the couch potato
public the media perceive us to be: A lumbering superpower in a
gorilla suit somehow finds itself battling tiny, hate-filled fanatics
in two exotic, incomprehensible Middle Eastern countries. The
freaked-out superpower (bewildered by all the hate it has encountered)
stomps heavily at the scurrying fanatics wherever it encounters them,
thinking once all the bad people are dead these two societies will be
nice places to live.
The hate-filled fanatics, meanwhile, are fighting essentially a
public-relations war, baiting the superpower with their crude
explosive devices into retaliatory tantrums that inevitably wipe out
women and children, making the superpower more and more hated and more
and more bewildered. The fanatics, of course, kill civilians too.
Whichever side kills the fewest feels entitled to claim the survivors'
allegiance.
While it's not clear who is actually winning the nice-guy war -- who,
objectively, is responsible for the fewest innocent casualties (with
both sides holding the other responsible even when it's their
explosives that do the killing) -- it's becoming increasingly clear
that the superpower-baiting fanatics are winning the public relations
war.
In both countries, even the proxy governments want the superpower to
stop killing their people. In Afghanistan, according to the Observer
-- where the new head of NATO operations, American Gen. Dan McNeill,
is nicknamed "Bomber McNeill" -- President Hamid Karzai has condemned
the coalition's careless use of extreme force and its attitude that
Afghan lives are "cheap." And a British officer, commenting on the
carnage of the Helmand Province air strike, said, "Every civilian dead
means five new Taliban."
In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the U.S. had no business
raiding Sadr City and, as AP reported, declared: "The Iraqi government
totally rejects U.S. military operations ... conducted without a
preapproval from the Iraqi military command. Anyone who breaches the
military command orders will face investigation."
And here we are, back at home with our poll numbers and our
consciences. The political process is broken; the war and the
undisclosed agenda -- permanent U.S. occupation of a strategic region
-- have, if not complete political immunity, then at least what seems
like indefinite opportunity to pursue a failed strategy. Maybe things
will turn around!
On the same day that coalition bombers were pummeling the Afghan
village for three hours, children in nearby Zabul Province added
another dimension to the drama. Three were killed and a fourth was
injured when an old rocket they were playing with exploded. Their
deaths reminded some of us, perhaps, that wars never end and that the
reality TV show that's "going very badly" for us is going a lot worse
on location.
Robert Koehler
.
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