[Peace-discuss] Solomon's new book

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Jules Siegel's [mailto:jules_siegel at cafecancun.com] review of
a new book by Norman Solomon, who seems to me to have been
writing eminent sense about the war.  --CGE]

   War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits 
   Keep Spinning Us to Death 
   By Norman Solomon, $24.95, 314 pages, 
   John Wiley & Sons.

In War Made Easy Norman Solomon demolishes the myth of an 
independent American press zealously guarding sacred values 
of free expression. Although strictly focusing on the 
shameless history of media cheerleading for the principal 
post-World War II American wars, invasions and 
interventions, he calls into question by implication the 
idea of the press as some kind of institutional counterforce 
to government and corporate power.

The utter idiocy of many of the examples he has compiled in 
this impeccably documented historical review will be 
familiar to readers who follow the news on the Internet. 
They achieve fresh impact because of the way Solomon has 
organized and analyzed them. Each chapter is devoted to a 
single warhawk strategy ("America Is a Fair and Noble 
Superpower," "Opposing the War Means Siding with the Enemy," 
"Our Soldiers Are Heroes, Theirs Are Inhuman") illustrated 
with historical examples for the Dominican Republic, El 
Salvador, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, both Iraq wars, 
and other miscellaneous conflicts in which the media were 
almost universally enthusiastic accomplices.

War Made Easy should really be subtitled "War reporting 
doesn't just suck, it kills." It makes you feel like 
demanding a special war crimes tribunal for corporate media 
executives and owners who joined the roll-up to Shock and 
Awe as non-uniformed psywar ops. To be sure, this would 
raise the issue of whether or not following orders might 
suffice for the defense of obedient slaves such as Mary 
McGrory and Richard Cohen who performed above and beyond the 
call of duty.

"He persuaded me," she gushed the morning after Powell spoke 
at the United Nations. "The cumulative effect was stunning." 
In the same Washington Post edition Richard Cohen wrote, 
"The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of 
it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in 
its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only 
hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but 
without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or 
possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

Solomon demonstrates how this kind of peppy pre-war warm-up 
degenerates into drooling and heavy breathing once the 
killing begins. As if observing a heavy metal computer game, 
the pornographers of death concentrate on the exquisite 
craftsmanship and visual design of the murder machines, and 
the magnificence of the fiery explosions they produce.

"When the Gulf War's massive bombardment began," he writes, 
"a CNN correspondent remarked on the 'sweet beautiful sight' 
of bombers leaving runways in Saudi Arabia. CBS 
correspondent Jim Stewart told viewers about 'two days of 
almost picture-perfect assaults.'"

Los Angeles Times reporter Jacques Leslie was invited onto a 
helicopter to watch a B-52 strike in Vietnam. "Suddenly gray 
clouds took shape on the ground in front of us and billowed 
to a height of a thousand feet or more," Leslie later wrote 
in a memoir. "I was surprised to feel so little: no horror, 
no pain, just marvel at the dubious wonders of technology. 
Had men been killed beneath the smoke? Did they mean 
anything to me? I knew I should be appalled, but I felt only 
numbness: it was like watching people die on television."

Skepticism only emerges when it is clear that a given war is 
not going well, Solomon observes. Otherwise, the media 
mostly report the war the way the government tells it. They 
become, in effect, merely another psychological warfare 
asset. The authorities not only employ public relations 
firms to assist them, but also discuss the information 
management strategies in public sessions at think tanks and 
academic institutions.

War Made Easy is a definitive historical text that belongs 
in every serious library as an indispensable record of the 
real relationships among government authorities and media 
outlets. The book should be required reading for journalists 
and journalism students. It will dispel many illusions about 
the true reach of freedom of the press and replace them with 
a much more appropriate and healthier professional cynicism.

Perhaps if Gary Webb had somehow been made aware of all this 
before writing Dark Alliance, he might not have committed 
suicide in the sodden ashes of his ruined career, because he 
would have known in advance what he was really up against.

August 26, 2005