Author: Norman Soloman

Political aphorisms don’t get any more cogent: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

George Orwell’s famous observation goes a long way toward explaining why — a full year after the invasion of Iraq — the media battles over prewar lies are so ferocious in the United States. Top administration officials are going all out to airbrush yesterday’s deceptions on behalf of today’s. And tomorrow’s.

The future they want most to control starts on Election Day. And with scarcely seven months to go in the presidential campaign, the past that Bush officials are most eager to obscure is their own record. In late 2002 and early last year, whenever the drive to war hit a bump, they maneuvered carefully to keep the war caravan moving steadily forward.

There is no doubt they were a hard-driving bunch. The most powerful squad of the Bush foreign-policy team ran on the fuel of certitude at such a prodigious rate that even their momentum had momentum — maybe, in part, because their lives’ trajectories seemed to demand it: War had been declared first within themselves.

Such steeliness has been almost boilerplate in history. Excuses for aggressive war have never been hard to come by. In this case, media pundits, academics, and other commentators could do little more than shed light on the fact that the people in charge had had war in mind from the outset.

Civic engagement — or demonstrations — against the war scenario were, in effect, attempts to impede leaders who had already gone around the bend. A very big bend. But it was taboo for American mass media to suggest the possibility that the lot of them — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and, yes, Powell — were in their pursuit of war on Iraq significantly deranged.

Working from their initial conclusion of war’s necessity, top Bush administration officials — with assistance from many reporters and pundits — were hell-bent on getting the invasion under way well before the extreme heat of summer.

There was also political weather to be navigated. The electoral storms would soon be starting for the 2004 presidential contest, and a secured victory over Iraq well in advance seemed advisable.

In the months before the invasion, journalists kept writing and talking about the “chances” of war, as though President Bush hadn’t already made up his mind to order it. Yet, what Bush said in public was exactly opposite to reality — a “one-eighty.” As he talked about preferring to find an acceptable alternative to war, he and his advisers were actively seeking to bypass and discredit every such alternative.

Despite the obstacles, which included vital activism and protests for peace, the chief executive easily got his war — the best kind, to be fought and endured only by others.

Eighteen months ago, looking out at Baghdad from an upper story of a hotel, I thought of something Albert Camus once wrote: “And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.” Later, any and all words were to be vastly outmatched by the big guns trained on Iraq.

One afternoon, 14 months ago, inside a little shop in Baghdad’s crowded souk, a young boy sat behind an old desk, brown eyes wide, quietly watching his father unfurl carpets for potential customers. I wondered: Will my country’s missiles kill you?

Nearly 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died because of the war during the past year.

Key questions of the past are also crucial for the future. Can the United States credibly wage a “war on terrorism” by engaging in warfare that terrorizes civilians? Does the mix of mendacity and deadly violence from the Oval Office really strike against terrorism or does it fuel terrorist cycles?

And, in the realm of news media, how many journalists are willing and able to go beyond reliance on official sources to bring us the truth about lies that result in death?

Norman Solomon is co-author with Reese Erlich of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.

Reuters is one of the more independent wire services. So, a recent news story from Reuters — flatly describing American military activities in Iraq as part of “the broader U.S. war on terrorism” — is a barometer of how powerfully the pressure systems of rhetoric from top U.S. officials have swayed mainstream news coverage.

Such reporting, with the matter-of-fact message that the Pentagon is fighting a “war on terrorism” in Iraq, amounts to a big journalistic gift for the Bush administration, which is determined to spin its way past the obvious downsides of the occupation.

Here are the concluding words from Bush’s point man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, during a November 17th interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” program: “The president was absolutely firm both in private and in public that he is not going to let any other issues distract us from achieving our goals here in Iraq, that we will stay here until the job is done and that the force levels will be determined by the conditions on the ground and the war on terrorism.”

Within hours, many of Bremer’s supervisors were singing from the same political hymnal:

On a visit to Europe, Colin Powell told a French newspaper that “Afghanistan and Iraq are two theaters in the global war on terrorism.”

In Washington, President Bush said: “We fully recognize that Iraq has become a new front on the war on terror.”

Speaking to campaign contributors in Buffalo, the vice president pushed the envelope of deception. “Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror,” Dick Cheney declared.

Whether you’re selling food from McDonald’s or cars from General Motors or a war from the U.S. government, repetition is crucial for making propaganda stick. Bush’s promoters will never tire of depicting the war on Iraq as a war on terrorism. And they certainly appreciate the ongoing assists from news media.

For the U.S. public, the mythological link between the occupation of Iraq and the “war on terrorism” is in play. This fall, repeated polling has found a consistent breakout of opinion. In mid-November, according to a CBS News poll, 46 percent of respondents said that the war in Iraq is a major part of the “war on terrorism,” while 14 percent called it a minor part and 35 percent saw them as two separate matters.

A shift in such perceptions, one way or another, could be crucial for Bush’s election hopes. In large measure — particularly at psychological levels — Bush sold the invasion of Iraq as a move against “terrorism.” If he succeeds at framing the occupation as such, he’ll get a big boost toward a second term.

Despite the Bush administration’s countless efforts to imply or directly assert otherwise, no credible evidence has ever emerged to link 9-11 or al-Qaeda with the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Now, if “terrorism” is going to be used as an umbrella term so large that it covers attacks on military troops occupying a country, then the word becomes nothing more than an instrument of propaganda.

Often the coverage in U.S. news media sanitizes the human consequences — and yes, the terror — of routine actions by the occupiers. On November 19th, the U.S. military announced that it had dropped a pair of 2,000-pound bombs 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. Meanwhile, to the north, near the city of Kirkuk, the U.S. Air Force used 1,000-pound bombs — against “terrorist targets,” an American officer told reporters.

Clearly, the vast majority of the people dying in these attacks are Iraqis who are no more “terrorists” than many Americans would be if foreign troops were occupying the United States. But U.S. news outlets sometimes go into raptures of praise as they describe the high-tech arsenal of the occupiers.

On November 17th, at the top of the front page of The New York Times, a color photo showed a gunner aiming his formidable weapon downward from a Black Hawk helicopter, airborne over Baghdad. Underneath the picture was an article lamenting the recent setbacks in Iraq for such U.S. military aircraft. “In two weeks,” the article said, “the Black Hawks and Chinooks and Apaches that once zoomed overhead with such grace and panache have suddenly become vulnerable.”

“Grace” and “panache.” Attributed to no one, the words appeared in a prominent mash note about the machinery of death from the Times, a newspaper that’s supposed to epitomize the highest journalistic standards. But don’t hold your breath for a correction to appear in the nation’s paper of record.

Norman Solomon is co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.