Midway
through this month, a Wall
Street Journal headline captured the flimflam spirit that infuses
so much of what passes for mass communications these days: “Despite
Slump, Students Flock to Ad Schools.” Many young people can
recognize a growth industry and the business of large-scale deception
is booming.
But
if Madison Avenue makes us think of subliminal twists and brazen
lies, then Pennsylvania Avenue should bring to mind a similar process
of creating and perpetuating brand loyalty. The Defense Department
is far from truth in labeling. But no player in Washington would
suggest renaming it the War Department, any more than executives
in charge of marketing Camels, Salems, and Marlboros would re-brand
them with names like Cancer Sticks, Coffin Nails, and Killer Leaf.
As
the department head, Donald Rumsfeld has gone through media ups
and downs. Two years ago, he was riding high. Lately, his stock
has dropped. Like every person, he’s expendable. Individuals
are the easiest brand names to retire.
For
wars, brand loyalty is crucial. By the time most people think critically,
tragedies are history. Unlike a defective product (or a California
governor), wars are not subject to recall.
A
successful branding operation preceded the launch of war on Iraq.
Despite what we might call extensive consumer resistance in the
United States, the Bush administration pulled out all the stops
to persuade the U.S. public. The war sold politically because enough
people failed to see through the mendacity. They bought a bogus
story line as truth.
Now,
long after the Bush team’s pre-war lies served their purposes,
the dead are dead. While no recall can retroactively cancel the
war, no remorse can be heard from the perpetrators of the lies and
the carnage. Vehicles for war keep gunning their engines without
a single repentant glance into rearview mirrors from those in the
driver seats.
It
would be unduly charitable to describe U.S. foreign policy—and
the prevalent U.S. media coverage of it—as hit and run. Some
events do occur by chance or happenstance, but the baseline of governmental
policy and media spin is far from accidental.
Washington’s
policies toward the Middle East may or may not be inept, but overall
they’re purposeful. U.S. control over Iraq’s massive oil
reserves is one key goal; others include geopolitical leverage and
military domination of the region. Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s
rhetoric about human rights is akin to an upbeat photo for a full-page
cigarette ad.
The
tasks of news media ought to include demanding moral accountability
in every direction. We should want that from all journalists—U.S.,
Arab, or any other—in connection with the slaughter of innocents,
whether by Hamas, the Israeli government, Al Qaeda, or the Defense
Department.
Appropriate
scrutiny would extend to matters of cultural arrogance, which inevitably
takes the form of grievous assault. On this score, the U.S. is culpable.
Consider
this report that the British daily newspaper the Independent
published in mid-October: “U.S. soldiers driving bulldozers,
with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves
of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq
as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who
do not give information about guerrillas attacking U.S. troops.”
Now, suddenly, “the stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old,
protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the
road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad.”
Even
the finest and fattest U.S. papers seem to have scant room for remorse
about the human toll of Washington’s foreign policy. Along
the way, the chronic “brand loyalty” that has endlessly
reinforced support for Israel continues to blur coverage.
As
a matter of routine, Israel destroys precious olive trees and homes
that belong to Palestinians in the occupied territories. On October
13, Amnesty International issued a statement saying that it “condemns
in the strongest terms the large-scale destruction by the Israeli
army of Palestinian homes in a refugee camp in the southern Gaza
Strip town of Rafah, which made homeless hundreds of people, including
many children and elderly people.”
There
was nothing ambiguous about Amnesty International’s assessment:
“The repeated practice by the Israeli army of deliberate and
wanton destruction of homes and civilian property is a grave violation
of international human rights and humanitarian law, notably of Articles
33 and 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and constitutes a war
crime.”
Collective
punishment and other war crimes are also integral to the U.S. occupation
of Iraq. But in the United States—where taxpayers subsidize
those methodical crimes —brand loyalties are still too strong
and remorse too weak.
Norman Solomon
is co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t
Tell You.
