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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLies the media repeats about Iraq: Phony patriotism, fake Syrian “moderates” and the very real end
of empire
In history there are the Punic Wars and the Opium Wars, each a turning point, and now we must talk of our Iraq Wars. As of this week they count three since George Bush the Elder cynically drew Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait 23 years ago.
Some of us may struggle with speechlessness, but there are many things to say about President Obama’s decision to widen his Iraq War with his new bombing campaign in Syria. The most important extends far beyond the shocking mess Washington has done so much to make in the Middle East, and it is this: Our wars deliver us to our turning point. In the blindness of our leaders, we Americans are being set up for an era of tragic, unnecessary decline.
It starts to look angelic, to put this point another way, to suggest that America still has a chance to correct some of its costliest and most destructive errors in the 20th century as it proceeds into the 21st. One guards optimism as a precious gift, but I confess mine now flags.
There is so much wrong with Iraq War III it is hard to know where to begin. The purported strategy, the what of it, will get us going.
There is next to no chance that Washington will “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State, to take Obama’s noted words for the mission. There is next to every chance that, as in Afghanistan and during Iraq Wars I and II, the military presence will win ISIS support because they speak for the perfectly well-grounded anti-Western resentment that spreads wide and deep across the Middle East.
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http://www.salon.com/2014/09/24/lies_the_media_repeats_about_iraq_phony_patriotism_fake_syrian_moderates_and_the_very_real_end_of_empire/
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cali
(114,904 posts)more:
<snip>
I will add this with some certainty. A social pathology is very plain among us now. The president withholds the word “war” from the national conversation, coalition allies doing nothing are engaged in “kinetic activities” — it is hard to match Kerry at his best — and so on. We find honor and patriotism where there is neither: Training deprived people to do our fighting is nothing more than cowardice dressed up as commitment. In all of this the media, more supine than ever in my lifetime, create a parallel reality the elaboration of which I have never seen.
Since we can no longer speak plainly of what we are doing, we export it from the language to the land — vast now — of the unsayable. To me this is an unmistakable expression of the burden of silent shame and a vaguely focused depression many, many Americans feel in the face of what is done in their names, even as they cannot articulate it.
Bragi
(7,650 posts)Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts...
George Orwell, 1946 "Politics and the English Language"
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
cali
(114,904 posts)
hedda_foil
(16,371 posts)geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)but rather ours?
Okay then.
cali
(114,904 posts)to be made, that at the very least, the U.S. sent mixed messages to Saddam re Kuwait.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)"Invade and annex--no worries we got your back."
She told him we wouldn't adjudicate their border dispute.
Read to the bottom of your link and you'll see that the claim that the US baited or induced the invasion is spurious bullshit, at best, and quite possibly willful mendacity.
Wilson's and Akins' views on this question are in line with those of former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who stated in a 1996 interview with Frontline that, prior to the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq "had no illusions" about the likelihood of U.S. military intervention. Similarly, in a 2000 Frontline interview, Aziz declared, "There were no mixed signals", and further elaborated:
“ ...it was a routine meeting. ... She didn't say anything extraordinary beyond what any professional diplomat would say without previous instructions from his government. She did not ask for an audience with the president [Saddam]. She was summoned by the president. ... She was not prepared.... People in Washington were asleep, so she needed a half-hour to contact anybody in Washington and seek instructions. So, what she said were routine, classical comments on what the president was asking her to convey to President Bush.[10]
