Thursday, March 20, 2008

The Latest Casualty

By Christopher Platt


The latest casualty of our war in Iraq and Afghanistan is … public interest in these protracted, brutal conflicts. It’s gone. News coverage of the two-front war is now spotty, and sporadic, at best. A brief, glaring retrospective this week only, on the 5-year anniversary, and that will about do it. Casualty reports for US troops – arguably the most-meaningful news that slouches off the battlefields to strike more and more Americans in their homes – are given about as much space and consideration as, say, a truck crash on a snowy mountain highway.

The media now has other subjects it considers more important – like the economy … the elections … racism … the peckerdillos (I like this spelling better) of assorted “upright” elected officials, and the resulting career prospects of the objects of their paid affections … and drug-taking by professional sports figures. Yes, these are mighty distractions, and it makes sense that some of these stories could bump the war off the front pages – or the first 20 minutes of a news broadcast.
But it’s the first item on the list that really shouldn’t claim pride of place. That’s because, I believe, the much ballyhooed Recession, in which we either find ourselves mired, or on the brink of, depending on which economist you talk to, was fabricated with the sole purpose of taking the war out of first place in our national consciousness, to get America to turn its attention away from our pathetically inadequate prosecution of an intractable conflict… and to get America to largely forget about the war abroad, by getting it to focus on “the war at home.”
But wait! Doesn’t this sound sort of familiar? Well, yes. A decade ago, there was a movie called Wag the Dog, based on a novel published several years earlier, entitled, American Hero, by Larry Beinhart. In case you missed the film, or didn’t get your copy of Beinhart’s clever novel, Amazon.com says “In Beinhart's wacky satirical thriller, Hollywood and the GOP stage the Gulf War in order to salvage George [H.W., that is] Bush's reelection campaign.” In other words, our government manufactures a potent distraction far from home for the American public, so the public doesn’t see what’s happening right under its nose. We all knew the book was fiction because the thing they were trying to cover up was a Bush presidential sex scandal. Still, the idea of fabricating a distraction made perfect, perverted sense, otherwise.
As funny and biting as Wag the Dog turned out to be, it wasn’t the first literary treatment of such a conspiracy and cover-up. In George Orwell’s prescient 1984, published in 1949, the meta-nation of Oceania, comprising North America, South Africa, Australia, and Airstrip One (formerly England), with its ally, Eastasia, is supposedly at war with the superstate of Eurasia. At other times, Oceania is allied with Eurasia against the superstate of Eastasia, or Oceania finds itself pitted against the combined forces of Eurasia and Eastasia.
The hero, a schlub named Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of Truth. His job consists of constantly changing all recorded and written mentions of the war to reflect only the name of the current ally and the current enemy. There is, it transpires, no foreign war at all. The phony, interminable conflict allows the government to keep the people under its thumb, and to mute any criticism of how the government oppresses its brainwashed citizens.
The term Doublethink is Orwell’s term for a thought-control process that allows people to come to believe, even to assert, statements that are patently and obviously false. Wikipedia describes it thus: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”
When much of what was predicted in 1984 failed to materialize on-schedule, many of us shook our heads thankfully, and quickly forgot the message of the story. But some took Orwell’s lessons to heart. Karl Rove, who perfected the rhetorical tactic of staying “on message” relentlessly, regardless of the reality the message might conflict with, certainly did. How many times have we heard Rove, or Bush, or Cheney, or Rice, or Rumsfeld, tell the same tales over and over? Weapons of Mass Destruction? Hussein was in bed with Osama bin Laden? The surge is working? Fictions repeated endlessly can have two effects. First, they start to sound like the truth. Second, they become inaudible or invisible.

Why would our leaders want to distract us, and why pick Recession as the distraction of choice? The first part is easy. By any measure, civil or military, our engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan has been an utter disaster. We’ve lost thousands of our young people and seen tens of thousands more permanently crippled and disfigured by a conflict without end. The two nations we’ve invaded have endured perhaps a hundred times as many deaths and dismemberments. Peace is NOT at hand. The surge is NOT working. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and the only bright spot in Iraq comes from a small cadre of our former enemies, who miraculously decided that Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a bigger threat to them than we are. Our once-mighty military has been drained beyond comprehension, and has neither been re-staffed nor re-equipped. And yet our leaders (and some of our presumptive future leaders) are turning their jaundiced eyes towards our next “enemy,” Iran. You might say they are getting ready to send our precious youth off to do battle with the evil Eastasia, having declared an imaginary victory over Eurasia.
So, why Recession? Sheer genius. Instead of fabricating a war to distract us from a moribund economy, the administration created the spectre of an economic debacle, to distract us from this miserable war. The problem is that they’ve gotten us into a war that many acknowledge cannot be won. Yet we cannot afford to lose it, either. And just throwing up our hands and walking off the battlefield is a lousy option, too. There’s nothing we can do that makes any sense, nothing that will have any effect on the war anytime soon. Its inherent intractability is exacerbated by the heightened visibility the war has been accorded by the media, effectively rubbing our leaders’ noses in their mess.
That same genius brought our spineless Democratic Congressional leadership into the game. Since they had nothing to show for all their puffery since getting elected on the promise of ending the war, their slip was showing, too. They jumped on it.
In previous wars, one big government problem was managing “the war at home.” Shortages, rationing, economic restrictions, all were necessary, yet all had to be minimized or at least played down, lest they distract the people’s attention to supporting the war effort. But our current war is different. Our 21st century economy has been strong enough to shrug off -- until now, anyway -- a war that so far has cost about $504 billion. We have sustained a half-trillion-dollar war with little visible impact or strain, until now. No shortages, no rationing, no economic dislocation. Until now. Why?
Because of that damned intractability, our leaders now want us to feel enough pain to forget the endless war. How to do that? Hit ’em in their pocketbooks! The economy is already sagging badly, so let’s just push it over a cliff! Start rumors flying that a recession is looming, that savings and investments will be devalued, that formerly stalwart financial institutions may be in big trouble because of greed (not hard to convince us of that), and that we will no longer be able to afford those things that make life in America so worthwhile. Oil speculators got the message first, helping to set up the conditions needed to take down a flailing, but not-yet mortally wounded, economy.
Now, repeat the message, over and over. Stay on-message, day after day, as more and more economists – who should know better – start rechecking their numbers and redefining the classic definitions. Stay on-message until the fiction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Keep chattering until every American knows exactly how bad our economy has stumbled – and has forgotten utterly about that inconvenient war. Now, of course, the Recession really may be upon us.
And look what else has happened. A new poll from the respected Pew Research Center (read it here: http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=401) sees an amazing decline in public awareness about the number of deaths in Iraq. Pew says, “Public awareness of the number of American military fatalities in Iraq has declined sharply since last August. Today, just 28% of adults are able to say that approximately 4,000 Americans have died in the Iraq war.”
As of March 17, the Department of Defense had confirmed the deaths of 3,990 U.S. military personnel in Iraq. The Pew people didn’t ask about deaths in Afghanistan, but – for the record – that number is 418 on the day I write this.
The report continues, “In August 2007, 54% correctly identified the fatality level at that time (about 3,500 deaths). In previous polls going back to the spring of 2004, about half of respondents could correctly estimate the number of U.S. fatalities around the time of the survey.” And, finally, “The drop in awareness comes as press attention to the war has waned. According to the News Content Index conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined since last year, dropping from an average of 15% of the newshole in July 2007 to just 3% in February.” In January 2007, it had averaged 23%!
In case there was any doubt that the Recession gambit has paid off, the Pew researchers conclude, “As news coverage of the war has diminished, so too has public interest in news about Iraq. According to Pew's News Interest Index survey, Iraq was the public's most closely followed news story in all but five weeks during the first half of 2007; however, it was a much less dominant story between July 2007 and February 2008. Notably, the Iraq war has not been the public's top weekly story since mid-October.”
Finally, after five years, our leaders can justify crowing, “Mission Accomplished!” But this mission, to change the hearts and minds of America, and distract us from the tragic and wasted loss of young lives, to destroy our economy just to save face amid the ruins of a failed war, is a victory for Doublethink, nothing else.

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