[Peace-discuss] Robert Jensen's Film review

[Morton K. Brussel]

He's one of my favorites. --mkb

ZNet | Anti War

It didn’t start with Iraq: A review of the film War Made Easy

by Robert Jensen; September 14, 2007


When George Bush began trying to justify the occupation of Iraq by  
invoking the “lessons” of Vietnam, I had the urge to send him a copy  
of the new documentary “War Made Easy” www.warmadeeasythemovie.org  
featuring Norman Solomon. That’s hardly surprising -- no doubt we’ve  
all had the occasional desire to try to educate our president.

Then as I read and listened to the responses from mainstream pundits  
-- most of whom missed the real insights to be gained by analyzing  
the U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia and the relevance of that history  
to our invasion and occupation of Iraq -- I realized a whole lot of  
allegedly smart people need to see the film.

But the real mark of the film’s value is that everyone -- even those  
of us who think of ourselves as well-informed with a critical  
framework -- can learn much from Solomon’s analysis in the film and  
his book by the same name. At a time when it’s more crucial than ever  
to understand the post-World War II era in which the United States  
became a permanent warfare state, Solomon’s film and book hone in on  
one of the key features of that project: The propaganda aimed at us  
in the United States is as important to that military-industrial  
project as the guns trained on people in the Third World.

The goal of that propaganda is to get people to believe a claim that  
is contradicted by all of history and contemporary experience -- that  
the objective of the United States in its military interventions  
around the world has been not to expand and deepen economic  
domination (which has been the goal of all other empires) but to  
bring peace, freedom, and democracy to the world. U.S. officials are  
not the first in world history to assert such noble motives for such  
inhuman policies (just ask the Brits), but never has that claim been  
made so relentlessly, with so much help from allegedly independent  
journalists.

“War becomes perpetual when it’s used as a rationale for peace,”  
Solomon says in the film, and then goes on to provide ample evidence  
of how the justification for perpetual war has been manufactured,  
packaged, and sold. If it weren’t such serious business, the  
producers’ collection of sound bites from presidents -- Democrats and  
Republicans alike, all mouthing some version of “We seek peace” --  
would be comical. From Korea through every conflict up to Iraq, the  
rhetoric is remarkable similar, as are the real aims and the deadly  
consequences of the policy.

Solomon’s target is not just the politicians, however, but the  
journalists who become the vehicle for selling that story. His work  
reminds us that even when journalists seem to be reporting critically  
about failed war policies, they almost always implicitly endorse U.S.  
officials’ underlying claim about the desire for peace and democracy.

While the film covers all the conflicts in the post-WWII period, it  
is the Vietnam/Iraq parallels that are most chilling. One of the most  
crucial to remember -- in defiance of the distorted revisionist  
history that suggests the U.S. public lost its will to support the  
Vietnam War because of relentlessly critical news coverage -- is that  
journalists were largely supportive of the war in the early years.  
Not until the failures on the battlefield were too obvious to ignore  
did the media coverage abandon the administrations’ propaganda line.

The producers of this film have used archival footage brilliantly,  
and one of the most illustrative clips is of Walter Cronkite in 1965  
climbing into a B-57 to go along on a bombing run. In the breathless  
fashion typical of so much war reporting, Cronkite extols the virtue  
of the airplane and the thrill of the mission. Viewers see him get  
off the plane and say to the officer he’s about to interview, “Well,  
colonel, it’s a great way to go to war.”

After the Tet Offensive in 1968 Cronkite would declare the war “mired  
in stalemate,” and so he’s remembered as a critic of the war. But  
like most of the press corps he first was enthusiastic about U.S.  
power, and even in that famous 1968 broadcast he didn’t challenge the  
basic propaganda story about the so-called Communist threat.

That segment also reminds us that journalists have long expressed a  
giddy, almost childlike, fascination with the increasingly high-tech  
weapons with which these wars have been fought. Journalists, it  
seems, are always suckers for machines that go fast and blow things  
up. Solomon suggests that there’s “a kind of idolatry there. Some  
might see it as a worship of the gods of metal.” This technology  
fetish reached unimaginably sick levels in the 2003 invasion of Iraq,  
when the news media flooded us with high-tech graphics and retired  
military officers offering commentary.

Solomon reminds us that for all the talk about precision weapons, the  
percentage of deaths that are civilians has climbed steadily from 10  
percent in World War I to almost 90 percent in Iraq. He describes how  
“an acculturated callousness” to the effects of massive bombardment  
has built up in our society, facilitated to a large extent by  
journalists who are more likely to focus on how a weapon works than  
what it does to victims. One of the film’s most poignant scenes comes  
when images of those victims are shown over the voice of former  
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld waxing eloquent about the  
unprecedented humanitarianism of this “precision” bombing.

But back to Vietnam and Bush’s bizarre analogy, in which he suggested  
that the United States’ mistake was not invading another country to  
block a popular leftist government that had been on the verge of  
winning a fair election. No, it turns out that our mistake was  
leaving an immoral and unwinnable war too soon.

When I asked Solomon last week for his reaction to Bush’s comparison,  
he pointed out that Bush was invoking a familiar “stab-in-the-back  
theme” to assert that a lack of resolve at home undermined the  
military effort, to bolster the idea that with continued support,  
“this time the USA can, and must, see the war through to its  
appropriately triumphant conclusion.” But the possibility of such a  
victory in Iraq is about as likely as it was in Vietnam, in large  
part because each war was morally bankrupt from the start.

It was the same game during the Vietnam War, Solomon said, pointing  
to news footage from “War Made Easy” of a network TV announcer  
saying, “Appealing for public support for his peace policy, Mr. Nixon  
said, ‘The enemy cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only  
Americans,’ he said, ‘can do that.’”

Perhaps we have not really been defeated and humiliated by either the  
enemy or ourselves, but by leaders who have created this warfare  
state and journalists who have helped sell it to the public. “War  
Made Easy” is a useful tool for progressive educators and activists  
who want to redefine peace and end a state of perpetual war.

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