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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWar Eternal: One Man Gathers What Another Man Spills
Last edited Thu Sep 25, 2014, 12:03 PM - Edit history (1)
President Barack Obama sits with the Prime Minister of Iraq.
Telling the U.N. General Assembly that the Islamic State group
understood only "the language of force," Obama asked other
nations to join a military coalition against the militant group.
UN headquarters, Sept. 24, 2014.
(Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)
War Eternal: One Man Gathers What Another Man Spills
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Thursday 25 September 2014
One man gathers what another man spills.
- Robert Hunter
The front page of Tuesday's New York Times made for one of the most debilitating brain cramps in recent memory. The banner headline, set beside a photograph of missiles being fired from an American warship, was, "US and Allies Strike ISIS Targets in Syria." This, as we have since learned, was the announcement that the United States had opened its aerial campaign against terrible people in yet another country, one more bellicose headline out of fifty dozen we've seen since the US began this war some 24 years ago.
The brain cramp, however, came with the second headline, just beneath the proclamation that we were in the process of attacking ISIS in Syria with air strikes. "In Iraq," it read, "Strikes Fail to Dislodge ISIS." The accompanying text underscored the grim, yet utterly predictable facts read: "After six weeks of Western air support, Iraqi forces have scarcely budged the militant fighters from their hold on more than a quarter of the country."
Take those two headlines and run them through the Magical Media Nonsense Translation Machine, and you get one cogent sentence: "Even though air strikes don't work against ISIS, as has been clearly established in Iraq, the US is deploying air strikes against ISIS in Syria." Because, yay! Another country to bomb! Bombing the problems we caused by bombing the problems we caused will totally work this time, honest to golly, we swear, because bombing our way out of the mess we made by bombing the problems we've already bombed has never led to more bombing after we tried to bomb away the consequences of our bombs, because you, American, are expected to be stupid, and not remember the history you've seen unfold on your television time and time and time and time again for the better part of the last three decades.
Speaking of history unfolding on television, it was Eugene O'Neil who said, "There is no present or future - only the past happening over and over again - now." In that spirit, President Obama appeared before the United Nations on Wednesday to deploy a brand new rhetorical lash with which to whip the people of the United States, and especially the "news" media that "informs" them, into a proper froth to help ignore the upcoming casualty lists: ISIS, he declared, is a "Network of Death." Not to be confused, of course, with "Axis of Evil," or "Hussein is Hitler," or any of the other slogans or promises or threats that have been burped up to sustain this quarter-century beating we have delivered upon Iraq and the surrounding region, which includes, of course, Syria.
See, when we unleashed our war in Iraq eleven years ago, we did two things almost immediately: 1) We obliterated the Sunni-led government in Baghdad and installed a Shi'ite government directly controlled by Iran, and that government made life a living Hell for Iraq's Sunnis, so millions of them fled Iraq and flooded into Syria, destabilizing that country; 2) We disbanded the standing Iraqi Army, which was comprised of Sunni war veterans hardened by battles against the US and Iran, and those displaced and pissed-off seasoned war veterans eventually swelled the ranks of ISIS, which explains not only their prowess on the battlefield, but also their acumen in deploying the kind of scary propaganda the US "news" media gobbles up and spreads like rancid butter on moldy bread.
(snip)
The really nifty part, however, is the specific reasons being peddled for why we are totally justified in dropping bombs and missiles in Syria and Iraq simultaneously: Syria is too weak to defend itself, and Iraq is too weak to defend itself, so we have to defend them instead. Nowhere in these justifications is the acknowledgement that the US has been actively destabilizing Syria for the last two years by promoting Syrian rebels, in effect helping to create ISIS. Neither is there acknowledgement that Iraq is weak because we have been bombing them for 24 years, and with vigor since 2003, and never mind the Iraq-war refugee crisis that helped to subsume Syria in the first place.
See, the reason we have to bomb them is because we bombed them, and then fired the Iraq Army and gave ISIS a pile of battle-seasoned veterans the opportunity to re-take the country they lost when we bombed them, then we bombed them some more to make them really angry, and then encouraged the people we bombed to bomb Syria because Assad is bad, but now Assad is less bad because we have to bomb the people trying to bomb him because we're afraid they will bomb us, thanks to a "news" media that desperately wants us to be convinced that we're all about to be bombed.
Twenty-four years of this, and counting, from Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama.
One man gathers what another man spills.
The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26422-war-eternal-one-man-gathers-what-another-man-spills
phantom power
(25,966 posts)kas125
(2,472 posts)hearing St. Stephen in my head all day. Thanks!
WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)It just took that long for the PR to be approved. Do they name wars anymore? Or will this just be colloquially be known as "the smartest war in the room" because beheadings? I wonder if they'll use the same font as the campaign?
Deny and Shred
(1,061 posts)You've expressed much of what I've not wanted to think about since the UN speech. Thank you. 'Network of Death' really bothers me, too. Bush was all about the propagandic sound-byte. This is the first time I've felt overtly propagandized by President Obama.
Your tone, for me, is spot on as it helps illustrate the truly asinine nature of our Middle East 'strategy'.
The US has left behind or 'spilled' a tremendous amount of weapons, equipment and training in the region. Is it at all surprising its been 'gathered' to help galvanize this new enemy?
... and the politicians throwing stones, singing 'Ashes Ashes All Fall Down' ...
kas125
(2,472 posts)Warpy
(110,900 posts)The point is that there is always going to be some vicious group over there, whether blowing up their children with C-4 vests or mounting a military campaign punctuated by horrible execution videos featuring foreigners. It is not going to stop until the borders the Brits fucked up 100 years ago are redrawn more sensibly and the west is largely out of the middle east.
That means Carter was right and what we need to do is stop wasting money on bombs and start to pour it into renewable energy sources and mass transit to get us off the black goo addiction.
Otherwise, we are going to be bombing those people every few years and wondering why they hate us so much, time to bomb them again because they hate us so much, risking another fiasco the next time we put a monumentally stupid president into office because gosh darn it we'd like to drink beer with him.