Many politicians and pundits have told us that “Iraq is not Vietnam.”
Certainly, any competent geographer would agree.
Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different.
And the dynamics of U.S. military intervention in the two countries
-- while more similar than the American news media generally
acknowledge -- are far from identical.
Iraq is not Vietnam. But the United States is the United States.
War after war, decade after decade, the U.S. news media have
continued to serve those in Washington who strive to set the national
agenda for war and lay down flagstones on the path to military
intervention.
From the U.S. media’s fraudulent reporting about Gulf of Tonkin
events in early August 1964 to the fraudulent reporting about
supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the first years of the
21st century, the U.S. news media have been fundamental to making war
possible for the United States.
We need to confront the roles of the corporate media in helping to
drag the United States into one war after another. In a country with
significant elements of democracy, it matters what people think. The
propaganda functions of media are crucial for the war makers.
There are exceptional news reports. By definition, they’re
exceptions. What matters most is the routine coverage that bounces
around the national echo chamber. Repetition is the essence of
propaganda. And the messages of the warfare state are incessant.
Several decades ago, Dwight Eisenhower warned about a
“military-industrial complex.” He was the last president to
acknowledge its existence. The more that the military-industrial
complex has gained strength, the less it has been acknowledged in
media and politics.
Last year, while doing research for my book “War Made Easy,” I read
the annual reports of many military contractors for the Pentagon --
small, medium and large corporations. Those annual reports were
clear: War is very profitable for our company. We expect more war,
and that will mean a cornucopia of profits. On the other hand, a
falloff of war would severely damage our profits. But not to worry.
In the midst of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of
militarism,” today we must demand real journalism -- and confront the
manipulations of news media.
The lifeblood of democracy is the free flow of information for the
body politic. Corporate media and inordinate government power are
responsible for deadly blockages.
Those blockages are causes and consequences of a political culture
that’s oriented toward death. The priorities reflected in a routine
U.S. military budget of half a trillion dollars per year are lethal.
Pentagon firepower kills. So does economic injustice.
With repeated use of violence more massive than any other entity on
the planet can dream of mustering, Uncle Sam is the globe’s dominant
serial killer. This reality, so obvious to most of the world, is
hidden in plain sight across the U.S. corporate media spectrum.
The United States is the United States. And that’s the ultimate
continuity between the Vietnam War and the U.S. war effort in Iraq
today.
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This article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s keynote speech at the annual
awards ceremony of Project Censored on Oct. 22, 2005, at Sonoma State
University in California. Solomon is the author of the new book “War Made
Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For
information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com