Duty to Warn

AUSTIN, Texas -- Oh good. It looks as though we're going to have as big a fight over postwar plans for Iraq as we did over the war itself. Just what we need, more of everybody being at everybody else's throat.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who seems prepared to run the world, favors one Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile-emigre group, as postwar leader (read figurehead-puppet). Chalabi is bitterly opposed by both the State Department and the CIA.

According to Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay, American military planes flew Chalabi and 700 troops, the newly named "First Battalion of Free Iraqi Forces," into Nasiriyah Sunday to be integrated into Gen. Tommy Franks command. Landay reports, "Senior administration officials said that Chalabi had had difficulty recruiting enough forces to go into southern Iraq and may have tapped the discredited Badr Brigade, an Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim group, to get his 700 soldiers." Think how happy the Iraqis will be to see some detachment from their old enemy Iran.

Minutes after the dawn spread daylight across the Iraqi desert, "embedded" CNN correspondent Walter Rodgers was on the air with a live report. Another employee at the network, former U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark -- on the job in a TV studio back home -- asked his colleague a question. When Rodgers responded, he addressed Clark as "general" and "sir." The only thing missing was a salute.

That deferential tone pretty much sums up the overall relationship between American journalists and the U.S. military on major TV networks. Correspondents in the field have bonded with troops to the point that their language and enunciated outlooks are often indistinguishable.

Meanwhile, no matter what tensions exist, reporters remain basically comfortable with Pentagon sources. And what passes for debate is rarely anything more than the second-guessing of military decisions. It's OK to question how -- but not why -- the war is being fought.

Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards observed the other day that the price of gasoline has gone so high in Texas that women who want to run over their husbands have to carpool.

Thought we needed a laugh before plunging back into the war. Here's a lovely item. Australian Broadcasting Corp. reports U.S. soldiers in Iraq are being asked to pray for President George W. Bush. Thousands of Marines have been given a pamphlet, put out by In Touch Ministries, called "A Christian's Duty." It is a mini prayer book that includes a tear-out card to be mailed to the White House pledging that the soldier who sends it has been praying for Bush.

"I have committed to pray for you, your family, your staff and our troops during this time of uncertainty and tumult," says the card. "May God's peace be your guide."

That's special.

The time has come when silence is betrayal of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Rev. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 – exactly one year after, to the day, he delivered his most profound indictment of U.S. militarism. His “Silence is Betrayal” speech, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, denounced “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift.”

As half a million dollar missiles fall on the Iraqi people, as the citizens of the United States face a $400 billion deficit, the highest in history, and the yearly defense budget of the U.S. approaches $500 billion approximately half of the military spending on Earth, King’s words remain relevant today.

King, despite his inner search for truth, did not come easily to opposing the politics of the Johnson administration as the Vietnam War raged. King’s great spirit, that seemed to instinctively speak truth to power, feared “the apathy of conformity” in “his own bosom.” King courageously overcame being “mesmerized by uncertainty” and instead, spoke out forcefully.

AUSTIN, Texas -- See if this doesn't make you wince. The Washington Post reported last Saturday on how the Bush administration's attempts to bully Turkey had backfired. Courtesy of John Marshall's website, TalkingPointsMemo.com, I found this paragraph: "But one senior U.S. official acknowledged that U.S. pressure in recent months has backfired, saying that at one point Pentagon officials insinuated to Turkish politicians that they could get the Turkish military to back the request for U.S. troop deployments in Turkey. 'It was stupid stuff. These are proud people,' he said. 'Speaking loudly and carrying a big stick wins you tactical victories from time to time, but not a strategic victory.'"

Marshall explains, "The backdrop here is that the military pushed out an Islamist government only a few years back. Going over the civilians' heads to the Turkish General Staff would inevitably raise the specter of a repeat of those events."

Think about it. We're supposedly fighting a war to bring democracy to Iraq, and we threaten one of our strongest democratic allies with a potential military coup? Is this nuts, or what?

Two months ago, when I wandered through a large market near the center of Baghdad, the day seemed like any other and no other. A vibrant pulse of humanity throbbed in the shops and on the streets. Meanwhile, a fuse was burning; lit in Washington, it would explode here.

Now, with American troops near Baghdad, the media fixations are largely tactical. "A week of airstrikes, including the most concentrated precision hits in U.S. military history, has left tons of rubble and deep craters at hundreds of government buildings and military facilities around Iraq but has yielded little sign of a weakening in the regime's will to resist," the Washington Post reported on March 26.

Shrewd tactics and superlative technology were supposed to do the grisly trick. But military difficulties have set off warning bells inside the U.S. media echo chamber. In contrast, humanitarian calamities are often rendered as PR problems, whether the subject is the cutoff of water in Basra or the missiles that kill noncombatants in Baghdad: The main concern is apt to be that extensive suffering and death among civilians would make the "coalition of the willing" look bad.

AUSTIN, Texas -- There was Donald Rumsfeld on Sunday morning repeatedly warning the Iraqis that prisoners of war are protected by the Geneva Convention and showing pictures of POWs is wrong. That would be the same Donald Rumsfeld who refused to classify the POWs at Gitmo in Cuba as POWs, instead calling them "detainees" and "military combatants."

The administration initially prepared to claim Al Qaeda fighters were not covered by the Geneva Convention, until the military pointed out that what goes around, comes around. We displayed pictures of our prisoners wearing black hoods, in chains and housed in outdoor, chain-link kennels.

If the Republican Guard surrenders, will right-wing radio talk jocks who have never been near a war refer to them as "hummus-eating surrender monkeys"?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ... You need to keep an eye on the back pages of the newspapers and the brief recaps that follow, "And in other news today ..." There is stuff flying under the radar you would not believe.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Don't you hate when war starts in springtime? We are now united in desperately hoping that the war will be both easy and short.

The most depressing thing about this war is that we are going into it with the support of the majority of public opinion in exactly two countries, the United States and Israel -- and that is indeed a miserable failure of diplomacy, as Sen. Daschle put it.

In the current issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria has a long and thoughtful piece on what went wrong. He reports, "I've been all over the world in the last year, and almost every country I've visited has felt humiliated by this administration." He quotes Jorge Casteneda, the recently resigned foreign minister of Mexcio: "Most officials in Latin American countries today are not anti-American types. We have studied in the United States or worked there. We like and understand America. But we find it extremely irritating to be treated with utter contempt."

The national media echo chamber is not receptive to conscience. On television, the voices are usually loud and facile. People often seem to be shouting. In contrast, the human conscience is close to a whisper. Easily unheard.

Now, the biggest media outlets are in a frenzy. The networks are at war. Every cable news channel has enlisted. At the bottom of FM radio dials, NPR has been morphing into National Pentagon Radio.

With American tax dollars financing the war on Iraq, the urgent need for us to get in touch with our consciences has never been more acute. The rationales for this war have been thoroughly shredded. (To see how the sordid deceptions and outright lies from the Bush team have been demolished by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy, take a look at the www.accuracy.org website.) The propaganda edifice of the war rests on a foundation no more substantial than voluminous hot air.