by Aryn Seiler
Daily Lobo Columnist
In recent days the press has reported occurrences that might cause concern.
The military is enforcing the total censorship of the Iraqi press. All weapons are being confiscated from the Iraqi people, some facing imprisonment, and our military is assassinating Iraqi "dissidents," often missing targets and hitting bystanders. NPR reported these stories without any commentary or inquiry.
The corporate-sponsored "invasion" of Iraq is being followed by the corporate-sponsored "occupation" of Iraq. Since 12 years of sanctions and weekly bombing raids couldn't bring the Baath party down, invasion was necessary.
And while the Bush administration looked to a new Cold War and the militarized Reagan years, it hoped for victory without ground war.
Success was not forthcoming. Sanctions failed to secure U.S. hegemony over Iraq, invasions failed, perhaps occupation will as well. U.S. puppet regimes have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and proven to be a caustic way to control countries for corporate purposes such as Vietnam, Argentina, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Will we grow tired of the reliance on unlimited aggression, occupation and war?
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For those who believe Iraq houses weapons of mass destruction, Condoleezza Rice argued, "If they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."
The mainstream media tepidly critiqued the validity of the administration's claims. The public hardly seems stirred. Is the media's role to numb the population, affect the perception of reality and endorse the current administration?
For those who cleave to the belief that the occupation of Iraq will result in some measured benefit for the Iraqi people, consider Collin Powell's 1992 press briefing and its cogency today: "Saddam Hussein is a terrible person, he is a threat to his own people. I think his people would be better off with a different leader, but there is this sort of romantic notion that if Saddam Hussein got hit by a bus tomorrow, some Jeffersonian democrat is waiting in the wings to hold popular elections [laughter]. You're going to get probably another Saddam Hussein. It will take a little while for them to paint the pictures all over the walls again but there should be no illusions about the nature of the country or its society. And the American people and all of the people who second-guess us now would have been outraged if we had gone to Baghdad with American soldiers patrolling the streets two years later still looking for Jefferson." (as quoted by Tariq Ali, New Left Review April 2003).
Is anyone starting to wonder why the United States invaded Iraq? There seems to be a constellation of reasons. Iraq's oil supply is among the world's largest. The United States. prizes the control of oil imports and exports in the region.
Plans are drawn up and construction begins to build a pipeline to transport oil through the Middle East to China. The corporations colonizing Afghanistan will show evidence for the pipeline on their Web pages.
In 2000, Iraq began exclusively doing business in euros. The United States had no entry into the market. Privatization of wells would diminish OPEC and "shock and awe" tactics would reinforce, before the world, U.S. domination.
The events of Sept. 11 were a boon to the administration that would manipulate media language to enforce a popular belief that Iraq had some connection with Al Qaeda.
The greatest number of highjackers were Saudi, yet the media continued to foster the idea that a link could be made between Sept. 11 and Iraq. Why was there no clarification of this fiction and deceit?
This calls into question the command of reality the administration and its corporate sponsors enjoy through the media. Anything can be said or omitted without impunity as long as it supports U.S. corporate, global hegemony. It is as though the spirit of our time has done away with truth. French theorist, Jean Baudrillard went so far as to deny that the Gulf War ever took place.
The New American Century is ushered in with the belief that nothing can be known. The military-industrial complex uses this state of truth to cloud reality - to the point of absurdity, to the point of mysticism. We can see these tactics employed by the Third Reich. Is confusion manifested in the malaise of a public that knows it can't trust its media? What is to be done when a prevailing fashionable discourse convinces us that everything is simulated, nothing is real, and truth is a valueless term? Does the intellectual class use the rupture of reality to claim innocence before complexity? Does the intricacy and convolution of political situations become an excuse for inaction? The depth of ideological complicity between anti-realist or irrationalist doctrines and covetous empire reveals a crisis of political courage. And I ask, where are the philosophers?
