Sam Smith, 2002 - As we moved this year towards a broader
war against Iraq one thing became clear:
there was a definite need for a regime change. . . in the American media.
Through a combination of ignorance, negligence, and
complicity this media has, for more than a decade, badly misled its audience
through mindless quotation of official sources, major omissions, chronic lack of curiosity, and masochistic submissiveness. In the war's earlier period, the
major media wouldn't even join the alternative press in a lawsuit to demand the
sort of access that would have made honest war coverage possible.
A prime example of the problem is the fact that the U.S. and
its allies have, over the past decade, killed more innocent Iraqi citizens than
has the Butcher of Baghdad. Not just by our continuing and largely unreported
bombing, but through the economic, social, environmental, and health costs of
our sanctions - as much an act of war as an invasion. It matters not to the
dead whether you shoot, bomb, or starve them.
Approximately 5,000 children under five have been dying each
month as a direct consequence of our embargo. In one of the rare media
references to this, Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes in May 1996 asked
Madeleine Albright, "We have heard that a half-million children have died
[because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean that's more children than died in
Hiroshima. And - and you know - is the price worth it?" Madeleine
Albright's stunning reply was: "I think this is a very hard choice, but
the price — we think the price is worth it." This was the same woman who
lectured us on the evils of Slobodan Milosevic.
And this year, even as we moved towards a new invasion, the
media remained quiet. An archive check of the Washington Post for 2002, for
example, finds only two references to the deaths of children in Iraq, neither
by a Post reporter.
Religion writer Karen Armstrong noted, "Muslim
extremists are opposed not to American freedom but to the foreign policy of the
United States, which, rightly or wrongly, they have experienced as invasive and
aggressive. They cite American support for despotic rulers, and Americans'
apparent indifference to the plight of Muslims in Palestine or in Iraq, where
thousands of children have died as a result of U.S.-led sanctions."
And in June, Paul William Roberts wrote the truth, but in a
book review, one of the least read parts of the paper:
Imagine that England went to war
with Russia over a long list of grievances, including Russian military
assistance to the Irish Republican Army, and that the war lasted a decade
before ending inconclusively, with millions dead and the economies of both
nations in tatters. Then imagine that England invaded Ireland, the United States
went to bat for the Irish and, when British forces refused to withdraw,
launched air attacks that reduced London to rubble and the rest of the country
to the pre-industrial era. Imagine next that, through the United Nations,
Washington insisted that the British surrender all weapons of mass destruction
and sent in teams of inspectors to every military base in the country.
Unsurprisingly, these weapons inspectors would meet with little cooperation. So
imagine finally that the Americans urged the UN to impose such severe trade
sanctions on England that they effectively terminated the entire British
economy for the next 10 years, causing widespread malnutrition, disease and the
death of some 500,000 children under the age of 5.
Oh, and while all of this is happening,
the rest of the world, if it thought about England at all, did not seem to
notice that any great injustice had occurred.
If you can imagine this far-fetched
scenario, you may be able to grasp something of the tragedy that is modern
Iraq. With a few notable exceptions, the media have acted for more than a
decade, and continue to act, as little more than propagandists and apologists
for the largely Western-held — and U.S.-led — position that Iraq merely got
what was coming to it and that Saddam Hussein is really to blame.
America has a sordid and criminal history of using its
military power to excess and then declaring its actions to be blessed. And the
media has long played a dirty and disreputable role in this rotten business.
Quite accidentally, your editor stumbled across a
manifestation of this phenomenon a few years back. I had spoken at the first
anti-war rally in DC during the Yugoslavia war. It was, I thought, a pretty
good speech and was pleased the next day to turn on C-SPAN as it was re-broadcasting
the rally - right at the point that a folksinger said that she was "just
the warm-up act for Sam Smith." I naturally stopped my weekend chores to
have a listen. But I never appeared. My speech had been cut in its entirety,
the only one to be so excised. I went back to find what I might have said that
so offended C-SPAN's sense of suitable Beltway discourse that they chopped me
out. I have a pretty strong suspicion it was this:
By the count of author Bill Blum,
since 1945 we have bombed China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo,
Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama,
Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia. . . At what point does the constant
reiteration of failed and fatal policy become a war crime and reckless
incompetence become grotesque cruelty and tactics of death become — to use a
term used casually these days — genocide? ~ The Holocaust resulted in some six
million deaths. Now here are some other figures: There were nearly two million
killed during the Vietnam war, most by air attacks that dropped twice as many
bombs as we did in all of World War II — nearly one 500-pound bomb per person.
One million civilians were killed by our strategic bombing in Japan even before
we got to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than two million civilians were killed
in our bombing runs over North Korea. And one million Iraqi have died as a
result of our sanctions.
Add these up and you come to the
same figure as the Holocaust. . . Trace the American role in this extraordinary
violence to its source and you come not upon political extremes, but to the
heart of this country's establishment.
And now we're at it again, and once
again the major media doesn't say a mumblin' word.
I ended my speech with words with something that seems just
as applicable now: At the end of the Second World War, Albert Camus had a
character write a letter to a German friend in which he said, “This is what
separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power
of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.”
That is our business today, and every day, until those who
lead us make it theirs as well — and no longer hide behind barricades
celebrating mindless power, deadly weapons, and corrupt intentions. Until they
turn instead to their proper business which is to join us in giving all the
lands of this fragile earth their truth
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