Bush II and the "War on Terror"

excerpted from the book

Voices of a People's History of the United States

by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove

Seven Stories Press, 2004, paper

p604

Rita Lasar, "To Avoid Another September 11, U.S. Must Join the World" (September 5, 2002)

When the planes hit the World Trade Center last September 11, my brother Avrame, who was in the North Tower, refused to join the evacuation because he was concerned for the safety of his close friend and fellow worker, a quadriplegic who could not easily leave. So Avrame stayed, hoping that help would arrive. When it didn't, he and his lifelong associate died together, along with thousands of others innocent New Yorkers.

That day changed my life. It changed the lives of all those who lost loved ones in the towers.

It changed the lives of the relatives of those on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. It changed the lives of hundreds of families who lost loved ones in the Pentagon. And, perhaps to a lesser extent, it changed the lives of most people living in the United States.

In the months after the disaster, I often heard how September 11 changed the world. But I don't think the attacks changed the world. And to the extent that Americans believe that September 11 changed the world, it is because they don't know much about the world in which they live.

I have never heard anyone say that the horrific massacres of 1994 in Rwanda which took more than five hundred thousand lives-changed the world. Nor have / I ever been told that Indonesia's massacre of two hundred thousand East Timorese during a twenty-year span changed the world. I have not even heard that the daily loss of eight thousand souls in sub-Saharan Africa due to AIDS changed the world.

Were these people less important than my dear brother?

Despite my own personal grief, I must conclude that, in light of these far greater calamities, September 11 did not change the world. What it did, in its own terrible way, was invite Americans to join the world, which is already a very troubled place. The question is whether we will accept that invitation.

Sadly, President Bush has no interest in doing so. He does not want the United States to join, or even cooperate with, the new International Criminal Court. He has also withdrawn the United States from the long-standing Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia, even as India and Pakistan shudder on the verge of nuclear war. He refuses to support international agreements that would alleviate global warming, and he will not seek to ratify the treaty banning land mines, leaving the United States in the company of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Bush's "axis of evil."

And now the president is planning for a war against Iraq. Never mind that Iraq has committed no act of aggression against us that justifies war, that there has been no evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks. Neither does the president seem to care that the world is opposed to an invasion of Iraq.

The international coalition that fought the first Gulf War was cemented by the principle that one country cannot invade another without provocation. Now the White House is poised to dismiss the coalition to launch an unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

An isolated United States is an unsafe country. As September 11 showed, there are no barricades high enough, no bombs big enough, no intelligence sophisticated enough to make America invulnerable.

We Americans have a choice.

We can conclude that we are alone, that we owe the world nothing and that the world owes us everything. This is the assumption implicit in Bush's "you're either with us or against us" stance, which is a shortsighted and self-centered philosophy.

Or we can open our eyes and see the abundance of opportunities for making the planet a safer and more just place, by actively participating in international organizations, multilateral treaties and protocols that advocate peace and social equality.

We can no longer afford a go-it-alone approach. If we want the world's help in getting at the roots of terrorism, we are going to have to start helping the rest of the world. We are going to have to comprehend that there are millions of people around the globe who understand all too well the horror of tragedies like September 11.

When that realization occurs, only then will we glimpse how September 11 changed the world.

***

p612

Amy Goodman, "Independent Media in a Time of War" (April 21, 2003)

A Newsday reporter asked me the other day, am I opposed to "embedded" reporters? You know they say it in the mainstream media: "Our reporter embedded with the Marines."

Even Walter Cronkite the other day raised some objections "What an unfortunate choice of words," he said. And he was critical. You rarely hear that criticism in the mainstream media, the working journalists today. What kind of critical reporting do we get?

It's this parade of retired generals that are on the network's payrolls. We now have people like Wesley Clark, General Wesley Clark, on the payroll of CNN, who is questioning their embedded reporter on the front line. He is questioning the reporter and the reporter is saying, "Yes, Sir. No, Sir."

This is journalism in America today. They have redefined "general news," and we have got to challenge that.

'Why is it that if they have these retired generals on the payroll, they don't have peace activists and peace leaders also on the payroll? So let's have the same number of reporters embedded with Iraqi families, let's have reporters embedded in the peace movement all over the world, and maybe then we'll get some accurate picture of what's going on. Aaron Brown had some interesting comments. He said he admits CNN Newsnight came "a little late" to the peace movement. But once the war started, those voices are irrelevant because then the war is on.

We're seeing these romanticized pictures of soldiers against sunsets and the planes on those aircraft carriers that the embedded photographers are getting at the sunrise hour.

Think about Dan Rather the night that the bombs started falling on Iraq. He said, "Good Morning Baghdad." And Tom Brokaw said, "We don't want to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because we're going to own it in a few days." And Peter Jennings was interviewing Chris Cuomo, who is a reporter for ABC, and he was out on the street, where we were, Times Square, with thousands of people in the freezing rain who had come out to protest the war. They had all sorts of signs that were sopping wet, and people were trying to keep the umbrellas up and the police charged a part of the crowd. Jennings said to Cuomo, "What are they doing out there? What are they saying?" And he said, "Well, they have these signs that say 'No Blood for Oil,' but when you ask them what that means, they seem very confused. I don't think they know why they're out here." I guess they got caught in a traffic jam. Why not have Peter Jennings, instead of asking someone who clearly doesn't understand why they're out there, invite one of them into the studio, and have a discussion like he does with the generals?

Why don't they also put doctors on the payroll? That way, you can have the general talking about the bomb that Lockheed Martin made, and the kind of plane that drops it, and whether it was precision guided or not. And then you can have the doctor talking about the effect of the bomb. Not for or against the war, just how a cluster bomb enters your skin and what it means when your foot is blown off, if you're lucky and you're not killed. So why not have doctors and generals at least? But this is just to show how low the media has gone.

You have not only Fox, but MSNBC and NBC-yes, owned by General Electric, one of the major nuclear weapons manufacturers in the world. MSNBC and NBC, as well as Fox, titling their coverage taking the name of what the Pentagon calls the invasion of Iraq: "Operation Iraqi Freedom." So that's what the Pentagon does, and you expect that. They research the most effective propagandistic name to call their operation. But for the media to name their coverage what the Pentagon calls it-everyday seeing "Operation Iraqi Freedom"-you have to ask: if this were state media, how would it be any different?

Even now, the media has had to start reporting a little bit on the protest. But it's not those events that we're talking about. It's the daily drumbeat coverage who is interviewed on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post for the headline stories and the network newscasts that matters. They're the ones shaping foreign policy.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting did a study. In the week leading up to General Cohn Powell going to the Security Council to make his case for the invasion and the week afterwards-this was the period where more than half of the people in this country were opposed to an invasion-they did a study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. The four major newscasts. Two weeks. Three hundred and ninety-three interviews on war. Three were anti-war voices. Three of almost four hundred, and that included PBS. This has to be changed. It has to be challenged.

We are not the only ones-Pacifica Radio, National Public Radio stations we are not the only ones that are using the public airwaves. They are, too. And they have to provide the diversity of opinion that fully expresses the debate and the anguish and the discussions that are going on all over this country. That is media serving a democratic society.

For awhile in talks before the invasion, I've been saying as we see the full-page pictures of the target on Saddam Hussein's forehead that it would be more accurate to show the target on the forehead of a little Iraqi girl, because that's who dies in war. The overwhelming majority of people who die are innocent civilians. And then what happens on the first night of the invasion? Missile strikes a residential area in Baghdad. They say they think they've taken out Saddam Hussein. Independent reporter May Ying Welsh, who stayed there as the bombs fell, who you heard on Democracy Now! on a regular basis, went to the hospital right after that first attack, and there was a four-year-old girl critically injured from that missile attack and her mother critically injured and her mother's sister. That's who dies, that's who gets injured in war. .

Our mission is to make dissent commonplace in America, so you're not surprised when you're at work, someone walks over to the water cooler and makes a comment, and someone isn't shocked and says, "What's that all about?" but that it comes out of the finest tradition that built this country. People engaged in dissent. We have parallel worlds in this country. For some, it's the greatest democracy on earth. There is no question about that. But for others, immigrants now in detention facilities, they have no rights, not even to a lawyer. And we have to be there and we have to watch and we have to listen. We have to tell their stories until they can tell their own. That's why I think Democracy Now! is a very good model for the rest of the media, as is the Indy Media Center all over the country and the world. Built on almost nothing except the goodwill and the curiosity and the interest and the passion of people who are tired of seeing their friends and neighbors through a corporate lens, and particularly tired and afraid of the fact that that image is being projected all over the world. That is very dangerous. Dissent is what makes this country healthy. And the media has to fight for that, and we have to fight for an independent media.

***

p615

[In August 2003, while serving in Mosul, Iraq, Tim Predmore, a soldier with the 101st Airborne Division, wrote this statement, published in the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois and later in the Los Angeles Times.]

Tim Predmore, "How Many More Must Die?" (August 24, 2003)

"Shock and Awe" were the words used to describe the awesome display of power the world was to view upon the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was to be an up-close, dramatic display of military strength and advanced technology within the arsenal of the United States and the United Kingdom's military.

But as a soldier preparing for the invasion of Iraq, the words "shock and awe" rang deeper within my psyche. These two great superpowers were about to break the very rules they demand of others. Without the consent of the United Nations, and ignoring the pleas of their own citizens, the United States and Britain invaded Iraq.

"Shock and Awe"? Yes, the words correctly described the emotional impact I felt as we prepared to participate in what I believed not to be an act of justice but of hypocrisy.

From the moment the first shot was fired in this so-called war of liberation and freedom, hypocrisy reigned. Following the broadcasting of recorded images of captured and dead U.S. soldiers over Arab television, American and British leaders vowed revenge while verbally assaulting the networks for displaying such vivid images. Yet within hours of the deaths of Saddam's two sons [Uday and Qusay Hussein], the American government released horrific photos of the two dead brothers for the entire world to view. Again, a "do as we say and not as we do" scenario.

As soldiers serving in Iraq, we have been told that our purpose here is to help the people of Iraq by providing them the necessary assistance militarily as well as in humanitarian efforts. Then tell me where the humanity was in the recent Stars and Stripes account of two young children brought to a U.S. military camp by their mother, in search of medical care? The two children had been, unbeknown to them, playing with explosive ordinance they had found and as a result were severely burned. The account tells how the two children, following an hour-long wait, were denied care by two U.S. military doctors. The soldier described the incident as one of many "atrocities" he has witnessed on the part of the U.S. military.

So then, what is our purpose here? Was this invasion due to weapons of mass destruction as we so often heard? If so, where are they? Did we invade to dispose of a leader and his regime on the account of close association with Osama bin Laden? If so, where is the proof? Or is it that our incursion is a result of our own economic advantage? Iraq's oil can be refined at the lowest cost of any in the world. Coincidence?

This looks like a modern-day crusade not to free an oppressed people or to rid the world of a demonic dictator relentless in his pursuit of conquest and domination but a crusade to control another nation's natural resource. At least for us here, oil seems to be the reason for our presence.

There is only one truth, and it is that Americans are dying. There are an estimated ten to fourteen attacks on our servicemen and women daily in Iraq. As the body count continues to grow, it would appear that there is no immediate end in sight.

I once believed that I served for a cause: "to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Now, I no longer believe; I have lost my conviction, my determination. I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies. My time is done as well as that of many others with whom I serve. We have all faced death here without reason or justification.

How many more must die? How many more tears must be shed before America awakens and demands the return of the men and women whose job it is to protect them rather than their leaders' interests?

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