Op-Ed

Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here -- Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew -- had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter's "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of thousands and sallied forth to buy up every copy of Carter's book and toss each one into the Charles River, would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?

            Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. He has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs who "flatly condones mass murder" of Israeli Jews. (This last was from Murdoch's New York Post editorial, relayed to its mailing list by the Zionist Organization of America.)

It wasn’t Katrina, not even close, but Seattle’s storm of the century was no picnic. It gave me one more a taste of a future where the weather can suddenly turn--and destroy the habitability of our world.  The storm hit Seattle mid-December with pounding rain and 70 mile-an-hour winds, reaching 110 miles per hour, 35 miles to the east, on the slopes of the Cascade Mountains. The ground was already soggy from the wettest November in Seattle history, and as the wind and rain uprooted trees, many fell on houses and cars, blocked roads and took down local power lines, cutting off heat and light to over a million residents in the city and surrounding areas. Thirteen people died. Sanitation systems overflowed, dumping tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Puget Sound. A week later, nearly a hundred thousand people were still living in the cold and the dark. Although my own lights stayed on, the next street was dark, and I could drive ten minutes and pass block after block of blackened houses.

Impeach Disney and General Electric
Remarks at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tenn., January 13, 2007.

By any serious standard of journalism, impeachment should be in the news right now.  This illustrates the worst problem with our media.  It's not how they cover stories.  It's how they do not cover stories. 

A Newsweek poll a while back said that 51 percent of Americans want Bush impeached and 44 percent do not.  That's about double the support there was for impeaching Clinton when it was in the news every single day.

Dozens of cities have passed resolutions for impeachment.  State legislatures have introduced the same.  One outgoing congresswoman introduced articles of impeachment in December. Dozens of scholars have written books advocating for impeachment.  There are DVDs, forums, marches, rallies, protests.  A week ago, we packed a huge ballroom for an impeachment forum, and to make it easy, it was the ballroom in the National Press Club.  The media couldn't make the elevator trip to be there. 

Bush's Escalation Speech
Remarks at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tenn., January 13, 2007.

I'd like to request that nobody shout during this event, and I'll tell you why.  I watched Bush's speech with some people who thought it would be a good idea to take a sip of liquor every time he told a lie.  Three days later my head is aching.

But it aches mostly because of the media's coverage of the speech.  Idiots don't offend me as much as smart people following idiots do.  The Washington Post printed Bush's speech for those who missed it, and then printed some analysis of it.  But the analysis was provided by the White House, which published a glossy brochure that so-called reporters could plagiarize.

A make-or-break speech by a beleagured American president is usually preceded by a demonstration of American might somewhere on the planet, and the run-up to Bush's address last night was no exception. The AC-130 U.S. gunship that reportedly massacred a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia's southwestern border, apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock, was deployed on its mission on Sunday, to make timely newspaper headlines indicative of Bush's determination to strike at terror wherever it may lurk. Moral to nomads: When the U.S. president schedules a speech, don't herd, don't go to wedding parties, head for the nearest cave.

            President Bush stuck to his expected script and said he plans to boost America's forces in Iraq by 4,000 Marines to Anbar province and five combat brigades -- 17,500 troops -- to Baghdad, in a new scheme to regain control of the city. Past strategies to do this had failed, Bush explained, because of insufficient numbers. He added ominously, "Also, there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have."

Here's why.

Bush just connected Iraq to 9-11 again, and the media will not tell you it was a lie.

Bush just gave a list of reasons why this time his escalation of the war will work. The reasons amounted to:

1)We'll have more troops.
2)We'll go into neighborhoods holding hands with Iraqis
3)Maliki won't "tolerate" any interference

A minute later Bush told us there will still be IED attacks and suicide bombings. The media will not point out that such actions ought really to count as interference.

Bush just announced that he wanted to share Iraq's oil profits with all of the Iraqi people, and the media will not examine what Bush is actually doing or even question his right to determine what happens to Iraq's oil.

Bush just said that Al Qaeda is "still" active in Iraq, and the media will not tell you that Al Qaeda's activities in Iraq really began when Bush attacked and turned the country into a training ground for terrorism.

Bush just issued a vague threat to Iran and Syria, and the media will not question his right to do that or the sanity of doing so.

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.

            It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. "You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically," he said.

            His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Here's a statement that's blasphemy both in the peace movement and in the halls of the warmongers:

Whether we escalate the war or not is unimportant. 

Back to Saddam one last time, and his trial and death, and the strong possibility - indeed, the common-sense conclusion - that part of the point of the charade was to silence him.

Why else try him only for his earliest crimes when the later ones racked up the big numbers (and, incidentally, served so nicely as a moral cover for our own activities in Iraq)?

Our alliance with Saddam in his "foment war with Iran" phase is so well documented - who hasn't seen the photo of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan's special envoy, in 1983, for instance? - that there's almost certain to be something hideously compromising in the secret record, which an ex-dictator at large would surely have talked about and a real trial would have unearthed.

President Bush may be a headless horseman. But the biggest problem is what he rode in on.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a good name for it 40 years ago. “The madness of militarism.”

We can blame Bush all we want -- and he does hold the reins right now -- but his main enablers these days are the fastidious public servants in Congress. They keep preparing the hay, freshening the water, oiling the saddle, even while criticizing the inappropriately jocular rider. And when the band plays “Hail to the Jockey,” most of the grown-up stable boys and girls can’t help saluting.

The people who actually live in Iraq have their own opinions, of course. UPI reported at the end of December that a new poll, conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, found that “about 90 percent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the U.S.-led invasion than it is today.” Meanwhile, according to a CNN poll last month, 11 percent of Americans support sending more U.S. troops to Iraq.