While McCain Walks in McNamara's Footsteps
By Norman Solomon
From: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040207R.shtml
Monday 02 April 2007
The media spectacle that John McCain made of himself in Baghdad on Sunday was yet another reprise of a ghastly ritual.
Senator McCain expressed "very cautious optimism" and told reporters that the latest version of the US war effort in
Iraq is "making progress."
Three years ago, in early April 2004, when an insurrection exploded in numerous Iraqi cities, US occupation spokesman
Dan Senor informed journalists: "We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems." Nine days later,
President Bush declared: "It's not a popular uprising. Most of Iraq is relatively stable."
For government officials committed to a war based on lies, such claims are in the wiring.
When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited Vietnam for the first time, in May 1962, he came back saying that he'd
seen "nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future."
In October 1966, when McNamara held a press conference at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from a trip to
Vietnam, he spoke of the progress he'd seen there. Daniel Ellsberg recalls that McNamara made that presentation "minutes
after telling me that everything was much worse than the year before."
Despite the recent "surge" in the kind of media hype that McCain was trying to boost last weekend in Baghdad, this
spring has begun with most news coverage still indicating that the war is going badly for American forces in Iraq. Some
pundits say that US military fortunes there during the next few months will determine the war's political future in
Washington. And opponents of the war often focus their arguments on evidence that an American victory is not possible.
But shifts in the US military role on the ground in Iraq, coupled with the Pentagon's air war escalating largely out of
media sight, could enable the war's promoters to claim a notable reduction of "violence." And the American death toll
could fall due to reconfiguration or reduction of US troop levels inside Iraq.
Such a combination of developments would appeal to the fervent nationalism of US news media. But the antiwar movement
shouldn't pander to jingo-narcissism. If we argue that the war is bad mainly because of what it is doing to Americans,
then what happens when the Pentagon finds ways to cut American losses - while continuing to inflict massive destruction
on Iraqi people?
American news outlets will be inclined to depict the Iraq war as winding down when fewer Americans are dying in it.
That happened during the last several years of the Vietnam War, while massive US bombing - and Vietnamese deaths -
continued unabated.
The vast bulk of the US media is in the habit of defining events around the world largely in terms of what's good for
the US government - through the eyes of top officials in Washington. Routinely, the real lives of people are noted only
as shorthand for American agendas. The political spin of the moment keeps obscuring the human moment.
Awakening from a 40-year nap, an observer might wonder how much has changed since the last war that the United States
stumbled over because it could not win. The Congressional Record is filled with insistence that the lessons of Vietnam
must not be forgotten. But they cannot be truly remembered if they were never learned in the first place.
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Norman Solomon's book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, is out in paperback. For
information, go to: www.normansolomon.com.