[Mb-civic] Terrorism, "The War on Terror" and the Message of Carnage

[Michael Butler]

    Terrorism, "The War on Terror" and the Message of Carnage
    By Norman Solomon
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Saturday 09 July 2005

    When the French government suggested a diplomatic initiative that might
interfere with the White House agenda for war, the president responded by
saying that the proposed scenario would "ratify terror." The date was July
24, 1964, the president was Lyndon Johnson and the war was in Vietnam.

    Four decades later, the anti-terror rationale is not just another
argument for revving up the US war machinery. Fighting "terror" is now the
central rationale for war.

    "The contrast couldn¹t be clearer between the intentions and the hearts
of those who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who
kill, those who¹ve got such evil in their hearts that they will take the
lives of innocent folks," President Bush said Thursday after the London
bombings. "The war on terror goes on."

    A key requirement of this righteous war is that all inconvenient history
must be deemed irrelevant. "By accepting the facile cliche that the battle
under way against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding
those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge
our own culpability," journalist Chris Hedges has observed. "We ignore real
injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and
despair."

    In the aftermath of 9/11, writer Joan Didion critiqued "the wearying
enthusiasm for excoriating anyone who suggested that it could be useful to
bring at least a minimal degree of historical reference to bear on the
event." Overwhelmingly, politicians and pundits were quick to get in a
groove of condemning any sensible assertions "that events have histories,
political life has consequences, and the people who led this country and the
people who wrote and spoke about the way this country was led were guilty of
trying to infantilize its citizens if they continued to pretend otherwise."

    Voices of reason, even when they¹ve come from within the country¹s
military establishment, have been shunted aside. In late November 2002, a
retired US Army general, William Odom, told C-SPAN viewers: "Terrorism is
not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It¹s a tactic. It¹s about as sensible
to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we¹re going to win that
war. We¹re not going to win the war on terrorism. And it does whip up fear.
Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of
parliament have closed a few."

    Two years after 9/11, Norman Mailer asked: "What does it profit us if we
gain extreme security and lose our democracy? Not everyone in Iraq, after
all, was getting their hands and/or their ears cut off by Saddam Hussein. In
the middle of that society were hordes of Iraqis who had all the security
they needed even if there was no freedom other than the full-fledged liberty
offered by dictators to be free to speak with hyperbolic hosannas for the
leader. So, yes, there are more important things to safeguard than security
and one of them is to protect the much-beleaguered integrity of our
democracy. The final question in these matters suggests itself. Can leaders
who lie as a way of life protect any way of life?"

    The president who lied his way into an invasion of Iraq is now
exploiting Thursday¹s atrocities in London to justify US policies that are
bringing daily atrocities to Iraq. Bush is intent on sending a message to
"the terrorists" by continuing the Pentagon¹s war effort.

    The idea of communicating by killing is very familiar. There¹s nothing
new about claiming to send a righteous message with bullets and bombs.

    In his book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," former war
correspondent Chris Hedges writes that he saw such transmissions up close:
"Corpses in wartime often deliver messages. The death squads in El Salvador
dumped three bodies in the parking lot of the Camino Real Hotel in San
Salvador, where the journalists were based, early one morning. Death threats
against us were stuffed in the mouths of the bodies." Hedges adds: "And, on
a larger scale, Washington uses murder and corpses to transmit its wrath. We
delivered such incendiary messages in Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, and
Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden has learned to speak the language of modern
industrial warfare."

    And Hedges notes: "It was Robert McNamara, the American Secretary of
Defense in the summer of 1965, who defined the bombing raids that would
eventually leave hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon dead as
a means of communication to the Communist regime in Hanoi."

    Forty years later, with a "war on terrorism" serving as the central
theme of pro-war propaganda, the United States and its military allies are
routinely sending lethal messages. It should not surprise us when such
messages are returned to sender.

    This article is adapted from Norman Solomon¹s new book War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Book excerpts are
posted at: WarMadeEasy.com.