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CounterPunch
February
27, 2003
The First Shots of the War
Propaganda
Blitz: Score One for Saddam
by WAYNE MADSEN
The first shots of the US-Iraq war were fired
on February 26. Instead of using precision guided munitions or
Scuds, the primary combatants--George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein--used
the medium of television to lob the first propaganda rounds.
Bush chose to use as his forum the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), the rabid right-wing think tank that
is as much the home for current neo-conservative war mongering
as the Munich-based Thule Society was for Nazi ideology in the
1920s.
Saddam, on the other hand, chose as his
venue an interview on 60 Minutes II with CBS anchor Dan Rather.
The White House certainly knew it had been upstaged by Saddam.
The Karl Rove/Ari Fleischer spin machine immediately demanded
that CBS give a Bush spokesperson equal time. When CBS insisted
the spokesperson had to be either Bush himself or Colin Powell,
the White House offered up Condoleezza Rice, an uninformed mouthpiece
whose endless nervous rhetoric has already nauseously filled
the Sunday talking head shows with the type of drivel one can
read in any White House press release.
Fortunately, CBS and Rather held their
ground. Saddam definitely played to the American audience. Obviously
aware of the many anti-war protest  signs that referred to Bush's lack of
mental acuity, Saddam challenged the American president to an
international televised debate moderated by Dan Rather. Saddam
also rejected the notion that he would set fire to his oil wells
and blow up his dams--allegations that have been streaming forth
from the U.S. propaganda canyons of Washington's K Street disinformation
mills.
Granted, Saddam is a ruthless dictator
who has gassed his own people with chemical weapons material
partly supplied by Donald Rumsfeld. True, Saddam is a leader
who tortures and executes his political opponents in the same
spirit that other erstwhile U.S. allies, including Marcos, Mobutu,
Somoza, Papadopoulos, Noriega, Reza Pahlavi, Suharto, and Pinochet,
tortured and executed their own. However, Saddam's televised
peace plea coming just hours after it was revealed that Bush
wanted to assassinate him in contravention of a presidential
Executive Order issued by President Ford and reinforced by Presidents
Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton, made Bush II out to be some
sort of psychopathic stalker.
But Bush's appearance before the AEI
to beat the war drums is not much different than Hitler's annual
speeches before enthusiastic Nazis at Nuremberg. NBC's Tom Brokaw
actually referred to AEI as "a venerable institution."
Rather won in the understatement category when he said that Bush
chose to speak before a "politically-friendly" audience.
AEI is the cesspool for much of the anti-Arab,
anti-French, anti-German, and pro-Bush nationalistic dogma that
daily seeps into the speeches of senior Bush administration officials.
Lynne Cheney uses her AEI perch to call
for a rewriting of American history to show the superiority of
white Europeans over the non-Christian savages that either already
populated the continent before the arrival of Columbus or the
non-Christian slaves who were brought to the continent against
their will. Cheney would have every school board in the land
adopt her nursery rhymes about American history as gospel.
Much of the Bush administration foreign
policy propaganda that is billed as "scholarly research"
emanates from the likes of AEI's resident scholars Richard Perle
and Michael Ledeen, former Reagan administration officials. Both
Perle and Ledeen tow the Ariel Sharon-Binyamin Netanyahu line
that after Iraq, the next military targets must be Iran, Syria,
Libya, and beyond. Their disciples are embedded in the policy
making structures of the Pentagon, State Department, and National
Security Council. These include Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith,
Dov Zakheim, Peter Rodman, Elliott Abrams, Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, Eric Edelman, and John Hannah.
Leading State Department war advocate
John Bolton, Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International
Security, was a senior vice president of AEI. Bolton's deputy
at State, David Wurmser, was a senior AEI fellow.
The former head of the US Central Command,
General Anthony Zinni, a tough-talking Italian from Philly, summed
up Perle pretty accurately in Dana Priest's new book, "The
Mission." When Priest asked Zinni about Perle, the former
Marine general responded, "Perle! Ha! A paper cut was his
biggest scrape."
Bush's speech to the AEI was an actual
case of "what goes around, comes around." Much of the
speech came right from AEI propaganda studies. It was interesting
that Bush omitted Saudi Arabia when he spoke of defeating countries
that financially support suicide bombers. While Saddam has funneled
money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, it is clear
that Saudi Arabia has provided millions of dollars more through
both government and Islamic charity channels.
Bush spoke of democracy for Iraq. There
is a fat chance of that now. The United States has apparently
decided to allow Turkish troops into the quasi-independent northern
Kurdish sector of Iraq and Saudi Arabia to have a role in Shi'ite
southern Iraq. The track record of the Turks with the Kurds and
the fanatic Saudi Wahhabis with the Shi'ites suggests that a
post-Saddam Iraq controlled by an American pro-consul dependent
on Turkish and Saudi military support will be a blood bath that
would even make Saddam cringe.
Bush spoke of Palestinian statehood.
This is a false flag. With the likelihood that a Hashemite King
may be restored to the throne in Baghdad, it is not inconceivable
that the Israeli right-wing will suggest that since Jordan and
Iraq would be under one Royal House, the Palestinians in the
West Bank could easily be relocated to the suzerainty of their
former royal domain, meaning any part of a "democratic Iraq."
Many Palestinians have close ties to Iraq, having worked there
since the Palestinian diaspora. The concept of mass relocation
of people is ingrained in the mindset of AEI neo-conservatives
and their allies. When Wolfowitz was U.S. ambassador to Indonesia,
he did not blink an eye as that dictatorship moved hundreds of
thousands of Javanese Muslims to majority Christian areas of
East Timor, Sulawesi, Moluccas, and West Papua. The result was
bloody religious warfare and the rise of Muslim fundamentalist
groups allied to Al Qaeda. And as Assistant Secretary of State
for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Wolfowitz was mum on the
forced removal of minority groups by Burma's military government
and China's mass infusion of ethnic Han Chinese into Tibet to
make Tibetans a minority in their own country. With Bush so beholden
to the ideologists of AEI, he just might buy off on a forced
migration of Palestinians. There may even be some obscure biblical
passage he could lean on to justify his actions.
Regardless, after round one of the Saddam-Bush
II face-off, Saddam wins. Bush will have to continue to work
hard on his audiences and his message. Saddam should brush up
on his English. He admitted to Rather that he has some English
fluency. For Saddam, the next appearance should be on Larry King,
where he can be expected to be asked some probing questions like,
"What's your favorite food?" "Have you been following
the Robert Blake trial?" and "What do you really think
about George W. Bush?"
Wayne Madsen
is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist.
He wrote the introduction to Forbidden
Truth.
Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com
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