The literary plutocrats of the punditocracy have been wracking their brains lately to make sense of the antiwar movement in America. Partly because they equate "movement" with street demonstrations, they are genuinely surprised that the Iraq War has become so incredibly unpopular. Gosh, how could the Big Pundits possibly have predicted that a war launched to great fanfare to find "weapons of mass destruction" that allegedly threatened a "mushroom cloud" in an American city any day, that a war like that would become terribly unpopular when it turned out that the justification for war was, like, totally bogus?
How could it be, that after years of turning points and tipping points and endless optimistic predictions from the trustworthy Bush administration and an unbroken string of pronouncements of progress and victories and insurgents killed and weapons captured from our infallible generals, why, why, why would the war become so unpopular?
The Iraq War and the general militarization of foreign and domestic policies committed by the Bush administration under the rubric of the GWOT (global war on terrorism) has exposed some serious, deep-rooted problems in American society. And while the Republicans rave on about the Liberal Press Conspiracy, some of the real weaknesses of the mainstream press have been laid bare for those in the "reality-based community" who are willing to look at them. The best shorthand to describe them? Judith Miller.
It's a major sign of the dysfunction of our Potemkin "press corps" that one of the more sensible commentators on the Iraq War has been Chris Matthews, widely known as "Tweety" in Liberal Blogostan. Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby has been one of Tweety's most severe critics, citing him as one of the worst "journalists" in the business. But Somerby gives him credit on the war.
Somerby's been harshing on liberal bloggers for the last year or so, and his commentary on that topic can be faulted for failing to fully appreciate the difference between news-and-politics blogging in general - is anyone calling it "blogism" yet? - and news journalism. But he has a decent point in criticizing bloggers for being careless in assuming that because Tweety is generally useless across the board on most issues, his commentary on the Iraq War is an exception.
On Friday, the Howler wrote:
Matthews says a lot of utterly foolish, embarrassing things; [Todd] Gitlin has a long list of them in his piece. ([Tweety's] abject fawning to Giuliani continued last night, although Gitlin skips this embarrassing theme - understandably, since he had many to choose from.) But more and more, the liberal web and liberal journals have begun to cherry-pick and distort claims in the way the pseudo-conservative world has done for these past many years. And the progression concerning Matthews has been especially weird. When Matthews was an unvarnished, unalloyed nightmare for Dems, the liberal world stared into space and said nothing. Now that he presents a weirdly mixed bag, we have begun to complain - and to put our thumbs hard on the scale as we do. Media Matters gimmicks a pointless complaint from a program where Matthews went after Bush hard. And Gitlin betrays no real idea of what Matthews has done for three years.
Matthews says a lot of embarrassing things. In the past few years, he has fawned to Republicans on personality issues - while going after Bush's defining policy [the Iraq War]. But then again, what about us? Do we have to be so much like the crackpots we all used to criticize? Can't libs and progressives be a bit smarter? Or are we really just secret Sean Hannitys, deep in our cherry-pickin' souls?
Meanwhile, despite the astonishing derilection of duty by most of what Robert Dreyfuss called the "press corpse" the other day, there's an honest-to-gosh antiwar movement with widespread support. And, yes, it does include demonstrations, too. Lisa Söderlindh reports in "Troops Home" Call Echoes Across U.S. Inter Press Service 03/24/06:
"The most important thing coming out from this week is that the activities happened all across the U.S.," Hany Khalil of United for Peace and Justice, one of the largest anti-war groups here, told IPS. "It reflects that the peace movement really has been mainstreamed."
Anti-war demonstrations in the United States have drawn fewer participants than just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but the wide range of local activities "is far more important than one giant demonstration", Phyllis Bennis of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies said at an anti-war conference Monday.
The nationwide events are "an example of an ongoing opposition to a war that the American people, more than the U.S. administration, and even more than the Congress, understand has no legitimacy left", she said.
Iraq War veterans are taking a more and more visible role in actively opposing the Bush war policies. Also something to remember for the long term, when jingo Republicans will accuse the antiwar movement of stigmatizing "all soldiers" as "baby-killers and torturers" or some other variation of the whiny white-folks claim that the jingoes will come up with.
Citing the renowned civil rights and political activist Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. who spoke out against the Vietnam War at a rally in New York in April 1967, Iraq veteran Geoffrey Millard said "a time comes when silence is betrayal", and that time has "now come for the U.S. in relation to the war in Iraq".
Millard served in Iraq for 13 months. "I just happened to be a dumb 17-year-old kid who only needed his mom's permission to go to the war," he said at a town hall meeting in New York Tuesday, adding that it ended up being the biggest mistake of his life.
Söderlind has the highest figure I've seen yet on the nubmer of Iraqi civilians likely to have been killed:
Since the Iraq invasion, more than 150,000 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have been killed, and some figures point to 200,000. More than 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died, and some 15,000 have been wounded, according to the latest figures reported by the U.S. Defence Department.
The PBS Newshour, which is far from the hotbed of incidiary liberal agitation that the residents of OxyContinLand imagine it to be, ran a decent segment on Friday featuring four Iraq War veterans: Veterans Discuss Iraq 03/24/06. One of Margaret Warner's guests, Marine Corps Captain Nathaniel Fick, who she idetifies as "a platoon commander in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars", took on the accusation made by the President and Republican jingoes that criticism of Bush's war policies or of our infallible generals is somehow damaging the fighting morale of American military units in Iraq and thereby endangering their lives. Fick debunked the charge by referring to the realities of combat motiviation:
I think there are two factors at play here.
First of all, the active-duty members of the U.S. military are professional volunteers. And as such, they swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president, or a policy, or an administration. And they swear to obey the lawful orders of the democratically elected government, full-stop.
And so public opinion doesn't affect them very much. When I was in Iraq, we listened on a shortwave radio to protests in Washington and in London, and we had our own opinions about the justice or injustice of the war, but as an active-duty serving member of the U.S. Military, that doesn't matter.
The second factor is that this opposition to the war, growing opposition, is very passive in nature because the war simply doesn't affect many American citizens. During Vietnam, for instance, you saw college campuses as hotbeds of activism. Right now, they're islands of apathy, because most people really aren't affected.
So the opposition becomes sort of a knee-jerk, popular thing to do, or say, or believe. It's not true analysis. And so I think that that's disheartening, and it speaks of a wide civil-military divide in our society. (my emphasis)
(Continued in Part 2)
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