“Rouse yourself! Sit up!
Resolutely train yourself to attain peace.
Do not let the king of death, seeing you are careless,
lead you astray and dominate you. “Sutta Nipata II, 10
I was privileged to be incommunicado on a tropical island for a week, not following the war news until I devoured a New York Times when we got to the airport yesterday afternoon. Unsurprisingly, no WMD have yet been found in the advance to Baghdad (Reuters/Yahoo!), and the “nerve gas antidote” of last week turns out not to be (Ananova). According to Al Jazeera, Britain may be admitting there may in fact be no WMD to be found in Iraq. The civilian death toll continues to mount horrifyingly (CTV.ca). Areas “pacified” and “secured” by US-UK forces remain unwelcoming and chaotic (Le Monde) and humanitarian crisis is looming if not already upon the people of Iraq (Al Jazeera). The hardliners in the dysadministration seem to be winning the internal battle (Independent/UK [via Commondreams]) over whether we will ‘rebuild’ or ‘annex’ Iraq (NY Times) and whether we will continue to undermine the UN as facilitator of any of the higher aspirations of the world’s nations toward peace, cooperation or prosperity. Tony Blair by some accounts (Sydney Morning Herald) isn’t faring so well politically; price to pay for allowing one’s best intentions to be co-opted by American rapacity. Unsurprisingly, the Arab world sees through the US propaganda line (NY Times)
More surprising to find in taking the pulse of the war after a week’s absence is the seemingly rapid and wholesale drift in American public opinion, how malleable to the propaganda effort the public’s mind and will appear to be. When US forces were bogged down halfway to Baghdad, even generals on active duty were brimming with contempt (Guardian/UK) for Rumsfeld, calling him another McNamara and denouncing him for prosecuting this war “on the cheap.” The dysadministration spin has been an ever-shifting crafty attempt to soften the public underbelly (Washington Post) about how the war might take much longer than anyone had been promised and to obfuscate its purpose enough that the public will no longer recognize how it is being lied to.
It seems to have worked. Just a week later, as the invading forces encircle Baghdad, , things are little different than what was expected — US forces are still taking heavy casualties (Al Jazeera), with accumulating friendly fire incidents (Al Jazeera)
(and who killed those fleeing Russian envoys?) not to mention the many thousands of Iraqi soldiers slaughtered (Boston Globe: “…to send a message to both the Iraqi leadership and civilians that coalition forces could move into the city at will…”) and inestimable civilian deaths — and yet, while there is little rejoicing in Iraq, Americans are swept up in the euphoria of ‘winning’… Meanwhile, outside the US, doubts about US pie-in-the-sky claims to have the situation nearly licked and disdain for US ‘liberation’ rhetoric (Pacific News Service) accumulate… with the worst yet to come, street-by-street and house-by-house through the Iraqi capital.
