[Peace-discuss] Paul Street - The Frontline of Imperial Evasion at “P”BS

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

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  The Frontline of Imperial Evasion at “P”BS

Opinion <http://www.telesurtv.net/english/section/opinion> > Articles 
<http://www.telesurtv.net/SubSecciones/en/opinion/articles/>
Imagenes para contenidos


    "Frontline couldn’t bring itself to remotely discuss the important
    extent to which the murderous and medievalist Islamic State is a
    natural outcome of US imperial assault very much on the model of the
    genocidal Khmer Rouge’s rise to power in Cambodia in the wake of
    Washington’s giant South Asian bombing campaign in the late 1960s
    and early 1970s."

Published 7 November 2014

<http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/TheFrontlineof-Imperial-Evasion-at-PBS-20141107-0056.html#><http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/TheFrontlineof-Imperial-Evasion-at-PBS-20141107-0056.html#> 

  US military undertakings are portrayed by ruling US 
media as arising from noble if sometimes misplaced intentions.

One of the fundamental principles behind “mainstream” media coverage and 
commentary on United States foreign policy is that the criminal and 
imperial nature of Washington’s actions abroad can never be 
acknowledged. Also beyond the parameters of acceptable reporting and 
opinion in that media is the real depth and degree of the monumental 
harm the US empire causes in other nations and regions (and for that 
matter, in the “homeland”).  There is some limited room for admitting 
that tactical and strategic “mistakes” may have been made by US planners 
and operatives abroad. Still, these errors must always be discussed as 
part of Uncle Sam’s supposedly and always benevolent purpose and 
essence, with the terrible consequences and transgressions minimized and 
toned down.  As the brilliant left critic Michael Parenti noted seven 
years ago:

“Be it the Vietnam War, the invasions of Grenada and Panama, the 
intervention against Nicaragua, the Gulf War massacre, and subsequent 
invasions of Afghanistan, US military undertakings are portrayed [by 
ruling US media] as arising from noble if sometimes misplaced 
intentions.  The media’s view is much the same as the view from the 
State Department and the Pentagon. The horrendous devastation wreaked 
upon the presumed beneficiaries of US power generally is downplayed – as 
are the massive human rights violations perpetrated by US-supported forces…”

To see those richly ideological boundaries in operation in the nation’s 
supposedly “objective” and “value-free” mass media, it is best to 
examine the “leftmost” outposts of establishment opinion. As Noam 
Chomsky has been saying for decades, it is at the “liberal” /New York 
Times/, the /Washington Post/, MSNBC, and the “Public” Broadcasting 
System where the most relevant boundaries of acceptable debate are set, 
not at more reliably and stridently reactionary venues like FOX News or 
the /Wall Street Journal/, or other “conservative” organs like the 
/Weekly Standard./

Last week’s “P”BS Frontline report 
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/rise-of-isis/> (I am writing on 
the morning of Wednesday, October 29, 2014) on /The Rise of ISIS/ is a 
textbook case study in the rigid nationalistic and imperial boundaries 
set at the (not-so) portside extremities of dominant US media.  It’s a 
sharp and professional production.  It contains a wealth of information 
and footage on the brutality of ISIS, the sectarian policies of the 
Maliki regime, the ethnic and regional politics fueling the Islamic 
State’s emergence in Iraq, the critical role of the Syrian crisis in the 
remarkable success of formerly marginal jihadist forces, and 
more.  Frontline posed stern questions about the Obama Administration’s 
real or alleged failure to properly gage the potency of the ISIS 
threat.  It spoke to numerous current and former top military and 
intelligence officials on White House miscalculations and other 
“mistakes,” putting Obama’s National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes on 
camera to repeatedly deny charges of strategic oversight.

Consistent also with my longstanding sense that the “P” in “PBS” should 
be said to stand for “Pentagon” and/or “Presidential” (there’s a case to 
made also for “Petroleum”), however, the Frontline production’s main 
accomplishment was to bypass the single most significant point about the 
phenomenon it purported to explain. Frontline couldn’t bring itself to 
remotely discuss the important extent to which the murderous and 
medievalist Islamic State is a natural outcome of US imperial assault 
very much on the model of the genocidal Khmer Rouge’s rise to power in 
Cambodia in the wake of Washington’s giant South Asian bombing campaign 
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analogy was recently developed by 
John Pilger on /TeleSur English, /“According to [Khmer Rouge leader] Pol 
Pot, his movement had consisted of ‘fewer than 5,000 poorly armed 
guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and 
leaders.’ Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone to work,…the 
west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck….The Americans 
….levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and 
corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible 
from the air. The terror was unimaginable…. completed.  Under [US] 
bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.”

“ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush 
and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 
people — in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had 
done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and 
sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. 
Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without 
fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs 
of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.”

“[George W.] Bush and [Tony] Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a 
nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda — like Pol Pot’s ‘jihadists’ — seized the 
opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war 
that followed. ‘Rebel’ Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and 
Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through 
Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. …ISIS is the 
progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as 
both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against 
humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a 
western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by 
the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and 
culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies.

“Let me ask you this,” the US comedian George Carlin queried his 
audience in 2005, adding that “this is a moral question, not rhetorical, 
I'm looking for the answer: what is the moral difference between cuttin' 
off one guy's head, or two, or three, or five, or ten - and dropping a 
big bomb on a hospital and killing a whole bunch of sick kids?” Carlin’s 
question applies to the conduct of the US-funded Israel Defense Forces 
in Gaza this past summer.  It is relevant also to savage US assaults on 
the Iraqi city of Fallujah in the spring and fall of 2004 – massive 
attacks that targeted hospitals and used radioactive ordnance that left 
“a toxic legacy…worse than Hiroshima” (UK journalist Patrick Cockburn), 
plaguing the city with an epidemic of child leukemia and birth defects. 
(Predominantly Sunni Fallujah is now under ISIS control, along with most 
of the rest of Iraq’s Anbar Province.)

Thanks to such operations, Washington turned Iraq into “a disaster zone 
on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory” (Tom Engelhardt, 
Tom Dispatch.com <http://dispatch.com/>, January 17, 2008). According to 
the respected journalist Nir Rosen, in December 2007, “Iraq has been 
killed…the American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the 
Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century” (/Current History, 
/December 2007).

The US destruction of Iraq predates the 2003 invasion, of course.  After 
encouraging Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in late 1990, the 
US slaughtered thousands of surrendered Iraqi conscripts withdrawing 
from that country on “The Highway of Death” in late February of 1991. 
The Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac, testified that, “U.S. 
planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and 
at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It 
was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty 
miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, 
scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the 
sun…it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people 
who had no ability to fight back or defend.”

This great testament to “Western civilization” and U.S. benevolence was 
the culmination of “Operation Desert Storm,” on which Obama has sought 
to model his anti-ISIS air war.

After the one-sided imperial slaughter 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=Ixp-83qslMsC&pg=PR5&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3%23v=onepage&q&f=false> of 
Iraqis that is known in U.S. History texts as “The First Persian Gulf 
War,” US “economic sanctions” killed at least half a million Iraqi 
children <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/072100-03.htm>.  That’s 
the number of dead Iraqi minors that CBS’s Leslie Stahl famously asked 
US Secretary of State Madeline Albright about on national television in 
1996. The Madame Secretary did not dispute the appalling number. She 
said “we think the price [the giant juvenile death toll in Iraq] is 
worth it” (for the advance of inherently noble US foreign policy goals). 
“Mainstream” US media offered no judgment on that remarkable statement. 
As Albright explained three years later, “The United States is good. We 
try to do our best everywhere.”

While Obama claims to care that ISIS kills Muslims as well as Christians 
and others in the Middle East, it is simply beyond the pale for a 
“mainstream” US reporter or commentator to note that nobody has killed 
and maimed more ordinary Muslim people in Iraq than Uncle Sam. All told, 
the number of unnatural deaths caused by U.S. attacks and sanctions in 
Iraq since 1990 certainly exceeds two million and may go as high as 3.3 
million (including 750,000 children).

The deadly havoc wreaked by “good” Uncle Sam in Iraq since at least 1990 
(a fuller account would include a US-backed Iraq coup in 1963 and US 
backing of Iraq in a bloody war with Iran during the 1980s) is difficult 
to fathom. The U.S. has murdered Iraqis indiscriminately, treating 
“collaterally” killed Iraqis as nothing more than “bug-splat” – a candid 
elite U.S. military term for civilians expected to die in the US 
invasion of Iraq.

None of this ugly, quasi-genocidal history can receive the slightest bit 
of serious attention in reigning US media, even and indeed especially on 
so-called public media. US culpability and its consequences are 
unmentionable in the dominant communications institutions. The doctrinal 
rules of US “mainstream” reporting and commentary require that US crimes 
and their toll (including the rise of vicious outfits like the Khmer 
Rouge and ISIS) be thrown down George Orwell’s totalitarian “memory 
hole” even as they occur.

So what if doing so means that the news’ producers and consumers miss 
the biggest part of the story in question? That’s the point, actually. 
US Corporate war and entertainment media doesn’t exist to tell us the 
truth about contemporary tragedies and crimes. Its mission is to sell 
goods and services to people with money and to advance a view and record 
of the world and current events that matches the interests and 
perspectives of its owners, advertisers, and other reigning authorities.

  “/The United States is good. We try to //do// our best everywhere.” 
/These are venerable incantations internalized by every “mainstream” US 
newscaster, reporter, editor, and commentator who wants to keep their 
careers alive. It’s an ancient occupational requirement in imperial 
media, where nothing ever changes.

“We should not accuse [‘mainstream’ media personnel] of doing a poor or 
sloppy job of reporting,” Parenti reminds us. “If anything, with great 
skill they skirt around the most important points of a story” so as to 
“avoid offending those who wield politico-economic power while giving 
every appearance of judicious moderation and balance. It is enough to 
take your breath away.” They are masters in the “fine art of evasion.”

That’s a perfect description of “P”BS Frontline’s /Rise of 
ISIS/ special, which artfully treats Washington as at worst a 
well-intentioned but ill-informed, befuddled, and insufficiently 
aggressive and interventionist power in the Middle East. If anything, 
indeed, the US culpability indicated in Frontline’s account is about 
Washington (under Obama) /not projecting enough force and control and 
thereby “losing Iraq”/ (as if Iraq is US property). Never mind that 
mass-homicidal US-imperial force projection and control is the leading 
cause of the murderous mess that Mesopotamia has become, making it 
fertile ground for medieval butchers like ISIS, itself funded by 
numerous US “partners” (including arch-reactionary Saudi Arabia).

The monumental historical omissions are more than just coincidentally 
consistent with the US military- and security- industrial complex’s 
commitment to endless war. They are darkly reminiscent of the 
totalitarian state maxim in /Nineteen Eighty Four/: “Who controls the 
past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

*Paul Street’s latest book is */*They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy*/ 
<https://paradigm.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=367810>

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