April 9th, 2006
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| “For every act of violence, there is encouraging progress in Iraq that’s hard to capture on the evening news,” President Bush told a news conference March 21. |
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Earlier, Vice President Dick Cheney complained on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” that “there’s a constant sort of perception, if you will, that’s created because what’s newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad.” Yup, constant car bombs do create a “constant sort of perception.”
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| In Vietnam, the “ground truth,” as intelligence agents call unspun facts, was that we lost the war because of flawed policy decisions, the weaknesses of the Saigon regime and the lack of a clear plan for victory. When those flaws became apparent to Americans back home, support for the war dimmed. Now, those same flaws show up in Iraq from time to time. Blaming the messenger won’t fix them. |
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Neither will cash. If Iraq’s fledgling democracy has a new enemy, in my view, it is the Bush administration’s casual attitude toward secret payments a U.S. contractor called the Lincoln Group made to Iraqi editors. According to the Los Angeles Times in December, the payments resulted in, among other things, the publishing of pro-U.S. news stories as if they had come from ordinary journalists, not American flacks.
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| Of course, possible bribes ultimately undermine the U.S. effort by raising suspicions about any pro-U.S. story that any Iraqi journalists publish, legitimate or not. |
| Yet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apparently sees no problem. He recently praised the propaganda effort in a newspaper column as a clever use of “nontraditional means to provide accurate information to the Iraqi people.” Accurate? According to whom? Well, the administration, of course. Why would any administration steer us wrong? |
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Interview of Clark Clifford that took place during the Nixon Presidency (April 1973):
Mr. Clifford offered to show us his view, and parted the slats of one blind. In the foreground, and below us, was the White House, in the back was the Washington Monument. We asked Mr. Clifford about the mood in Washington and in the country. He answered us in soft-spoken, measured sentences…
“It is the centralization of governmental power in the presidency. The executive branch is engaged in a planned campaign to denigrate the legislative branch and in a planned campaign to malign the press. The press has grown muted already. It feels obliged always to give ‘two sides’ to every story. This is an entirely new concept in journalism. The intention is to shake the people’s confidence in Congress and the press, so that in the end they will trust only the President. If we American’s aren’t careful, we could end up controlled and regimented to an extend never realized before…” |
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Observing the Nixon Years,
by Jonathan Schell.
Softcover, ©1989. pg. 163-164.
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Posted in The War Years | By Willie Buck Merle