Mr. President, Surge This
By David Swanson
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.
Here's the situation we're in. President Bush and his gang lied us into a war. The occupation of Iraq has nothing to do
with weapons of mass destruction or 9-11 or Saddam Hussein or democracy or making Americans more safe. There is no
reason for this war respectable enough to discuss in public. And so, the U.S. corporate media does not discuss the
reason, or absence of any reason, for the war. Instead we're treated to endless debates over whether the war is a civil
war, or we're given hundreds of hours of coverage of a report that has no legal force and no coherent point to it. Or we
learn all about new appointees and how their personalities differ from those of the outgoing war-makers. Or we learn
about new committee chairs and power-shifts in Congress. Or we hear about polls and surveys on the war. Or media
coverage focuses on whether to escalate the war by sending in an additional number of troops that is small relative to
the number already there.
All of these stories, including the story of Bush's expected proposal for escalation of the occupation, serve the same
purpose: they allow the U.S. media to claim to be covering the war without actually discussing what purpose the war
serves and without showing us what the war is doing to people.
Now, in one sense, an escalation of the war is important. Every single person criminally ordered to ship out to kill and
risk death is important. Every person they kill or injure or traumatize is important. And an escalation moves us in the
wrong direction.
But the possible outcomes of the current debate range from continuing this illegal war using 10 or 20 percent more
troops, to continuing this illegal war using the current number of troops. Should Congress find the decency to block an
escalation, that will be important, but its importance will lie in its potential to lead to further action. The debate
we need to be having is over defunding and ending the war.
Once again, the White House has gone on the offensive from its weakest position and managed to move the full range of
debate into the pro-war camp. This could not be done were it not for media outlets that pretend to cover the war without
mentioning what the war is about.
If mention were made of what the war is about, Americans would learn about the permanent military bases their tax
dollars are building all over Iraq, not to mention the world's largest embassy. And pundits would be forced to stop
pretending that the war can ever be brought to a close without completely overturning the operations of the warmongers.
"Redeployment" wouldn't cut it. Only honesty would work. Saying "No!" to an escalation, as many peace groups are now
focused on doing, completely avoids the topic at hand and defines as victory achieving the status quo, the same status
quo that led to the November 7th electoral mandate for peace and accountability.
The insanity of this has penetrated the corporate media only to the extent of putting the word "surge" in quotation
marks, a practice that newspapers do not apply to most nonsense terms. "Department of Defense," for example, still
appears with no quotation marks. Following the quotation mark policy consistently would mean having to put over half the
words in a Bush speech in quotation marks. I expect, rather, that newspapers will soon drop the quotation marks around
"surge."
The insanity of the current debate would become clearer if we could see the war. Short of that, we can substitute the
term "child abuse" for the term "war". After all, the war is killing and injuring children and their parents by the
hundreds of thousands. Surely any conclusions we reach regarding child abuse must be even worse regarding this war. Now,
imagine this piece of news:
The White House is expected to announce on Wednesday its long-awaited plan to recruit 20,000 more pedophiles to give a
quick boost to project Child Torture. Currently 140,000 child abusers are serving their country in the four-year mission
in California, but experts agree that there remain children in the southern part of the state who have not yet been
abused at all.
Now, do two things to that piece of news. First, make it worse by adding murder to it. Second, make it totally
acceptable by moving it from California to Iraq. But why should that make it acceptable?
Mike Ferner [ http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/17047 ] recently calculated what the murder we are engaged in in Iraq would look like in the United States:
"Last fall the British medical journal 'Lancet' published a study done by researchers from Johns Hopkins University
estimating that the midrange number of Iraqis dead 'as a consequence of the war' was about 2.5 percent of that country's
population, or roughly 655,000 people. Over 90 percent of those died from violence. Comparable casualties in our country
would mean that every person in Atlanta, Denver, Boston, Seattle, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Baltimore, San Francisco,
Dallas and Philadelphia would be dead. Every. Single. Person. And we are just now getting serious about cutting off
money for this war?
"Besides that unimaginable death toll, every person in Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, Kansas,
Mississippi, Iowa, Oregon, South Carolina, and Colorado would be wounded. Every. Single. Person. Would that be the point
we stopped politely asking our Congress members to please end the war, and began taking over their offices in every
state in the union?"
Terry Jones, writing in The Guardian [ http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/17056 ], recently calculated what Americans are paying in dollars for all this murder and injury:
"Early this year the Bush administration is to ask Congress to approve an additional $100bn for the onerous task of
making life intolerable for the Iraqis. This will bring the total spent on the White House's current obsession with war
to almost $500bn - enough to have given every US citizen $1,600 each. I wonder which the voters would have gone for if
given the choice: shall we (a) give every American $1,600 or (b) spend the money on bombing a country in the Middle East
that doesn't use lavatory paper?
"Of course, there's another thing that George Bush could have done with the money: he could have given every Iraqi
$18,700. I imagine that would have reduced the threat of international terrorism somewhat. Call me old-fashioned, but I
can't help thinking that giving someone $18,700 brings them round to your side more quickly than bombing the hell out of
them. They could certainly buy a lot of lavatory paper with it.
"In 2002 the house budget committee and the congressional budget office both guesstimated the cost of invading Iraq at
approximately $50bn; $500bn seems a bit wide of the mark. What's more, with over half a million dead, it means that the
world's greatest military superpower has spent a million dollars for every Iraqi killed. That can't be value for money!"
But we don't see film or photos of the dead [ http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/image ]. We don't think of killing people as a central part of this occupation, even though intellectually we understand that
it must be. Now is a moment to do more than understand this. Now is a moment to demand more than a stop to the "surge."
Now our chant must be: De-Escalate! Investigate! Troops Home Now! And the specific demands we make of Congress [ http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/16562 ] must reflect that.
The National Conference for Media Reform [ http://www.freepress.net/conference ], which will be held this coming weekend in Memphis, couldn't come at a better time. Let's hope that, coming out of it,
we can create media that report on war as war.