Glimmer of hope in Najaf: Delegation Arrives in Najaf to Meet With Sadr (washingtonpost.com, 08/17/04). Iraqis sympathetic to the situation the people of Najaf find themselves in, and hoping to prevent a bloodbath, refocused the national conference on the siege of Najaf. They've drafted a document proposing amnesty for Sadr's militia, turning Sadr's group into a legitimate political party, and ending the standoff at the Imam Ali Mosque, returning it to common Iraqi use rather than the exclusive use of Sadr's group.

Contrast this with the interim figurehead Allawi's 'whatever the U.S. wants is fine' position.

I don't think I previously posted a link to this: IRAQI WAR CASUALTIES, 3/21 - 7/31/03. Raed Jarrar, Director of this survey, is the same Raed that Salam Pax, 'the Baghdad Blogger,' was writing to when he titled his blog "dearraed.blogspot.com." (Pax is on a "hiatus" to edit a film.)

The Baghdad Burning blog pointed me back to that link. River doesn't make the current situation sound any better than today's other reading has...

More news which suggests the U.S. isn't making much progress on winning over people by attacking Najaf: Aljazeera.Net - Iraqi 'human shields' flock to Najaf (english.aljazeera.net, 08/16/04): "Around 2000 Iraqi civilian 'volunteers' have formed a human shield around Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf as US-led forces beseige the city."

Aljazeera.Net - Najaf officials quit in protest (english.aljazeera.net, 08/13/04):

Sixteen of Najaf's 30-member provincial council resigned in protest at the US-led assault on [] Najaf.... The council's resignations came several hours after the deputy governor of Najaf resigned in protest against the US offensive on the city.... On Thursday evening, the director of tribal affairs at the Iraqi Interior ministry announced his resignation through Aljazeera and said he could no longer work with the interim government in good faith given the "carnage and barbaric aggression of the US-led forces in Najaf."

This doesn't bode well.

Understatement of the day, from Informed Comment : 08/01/2004 - 08/31/2004:

I think the Americans are gradually incurring feuds with all the major clans of Iraq, and this is undesirable.

Voices in the Wilderness is alarmed that the U.S. "has told civilians to leave Najaf, in what appears to be the creation of a free fire zone, where anyone who moves becomes a target." This is near the the Imam Ali Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam (both Shia and Sunni).

It sounds like something very bad is about to happen.

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This audio file discusses the Imam Ali Mosque in more detail: NPR : Najaf's Holy Shiite Mosque and the 'Valley of Peace' (www.npr.org, 08/12/04). It is an interview with Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan.

Professor Cole maintains an excellent blog called Informed Comment at juancole.com. Excerpt from his 08/16/04 entries:

Likewise, CNN appears to have been the victim of a second-hand psy-ops campaign, insofar as it is referring to the guerrillas as "anti-Iraqi forces." The idea of characterizing them not as anti-American or anti-regime but "anti-Iraq" was, according to journalist Nir Rosen, come up with by a PR company contracting in Iraq. Nir says that they were told that no Iraqis would fall for it. So apparently it has now been retailed to major American news programs, on the theory that the American public is congenitally stupid.

I liked that comment for obvious reasons, but this one is even better:

The Allawi government forced all independent journalists to leave Najaf on Sunday, so that the only reporting we will have on operations there will come from journalists embedded with the US forces.

This week I watched the documentary film Control Room, which was filmed during the Iraq war. It provides an inside view of Al Jazeera, the most popular satellite channel in the Arab world, as it broadcast from U.S. Central Command.

The Bush Administration LOATHES Al Jazeera. The documentary provides clip after clip of Donald Rumsfeld, ranting, including a rant about how Al Jazeera must be planting women and children in front of homes bombed by U.S. air strikes to actually imply that women and children live in such homes in Iraq. Really. He said that. There's video. It's just amazing.

So it's worthwhile to see how the war looked from the people who worked at and ran the station that Rumsfeld (not the most credible person in the Bush Administration) loves to hate.

News flash: Arab people work there! And they have opinions! This includes those people who consider themselves to be or to have been Iraqis! THAT, in and of itself, is almost completely lacking from American reporting: what Iraqis thought about the war. (Aside from Ahmed Chalabi. (wikipedia.org) And he doesn't really count.) One reporter, who has a 'western' wife and previously worked for the BBC, tries to spread comprehension, using his experience in 'western' and Islamic cultures to explain to a young, go-team military official what the actual perception of U.S. actions is in the Arab world.

A senior manager of Al Jazeera is interviewed extensively. He comes across as somewhat arrogant, but provides some very interesting commentary. He remarked, for example, that once the war is 'won,' the details of exactly how it was 'won' will be shunted aside. History will be reduced solely to the fact of victory, and everyone will rush on to the next topic.

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My partner reminded me of my favorite John Madden quote, "Winning is the best deodorant." Madden meant it in a sport context, but it certainly applies here. Prior to the U.S. war in Vietnam (which the Vietnamese call 'the American War'), there was a generic assumption that all wars were won cleanly and fairly by the victor -- that famous truism about victors writing the history books notwithstanding. I've been waiting for the modern mass media, and especially the use of video, to change that.

I don't think I fully comprehended the nationalism of the available media outlets, however.

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'Control Room' provides a valuable point of view, and is worth seeing.

While the previous TMW link provides a link to the Washington Post article that inspired it's excellent diatribe, I should provide a link as well:The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story by Howard Kurtz (washingtonpost.com, 08/12/04), along with my personal favorite quote:

'We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power,' DeYoung said. 'If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said.' And if contrary arguments are put 'in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page, a lot of people don't read that far.'

Must read: This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow: August 08, 2004 - August 14, 2004 Archives entry entitled "No shit, Sherlock" on another media company's belated revelation that they shouldn't have been such zealous cheerleaders in the run up to the war based on untrue information.

There is strong language for well-deserved emphasis.

Favorite comment: " ...[the parrot-like media is] desperately afraid of being labeled 'unpatriotic' by a handful of fringe lunatics who not only don't deserve the attention they get, but in a sane world, would not deserve to be pissed upon if they were on fire."

It's intended as a sinister image, but I find it aesthetically pleasing: BBC's illustration for "US moves to crush Shia uprising". (bbc.com, 08/12/04).

The rocket propelled grenade gracefully echos the shape of the dome and minaret.

This Modern World (08/08/04): "Using the threat of terrorism to scare voters: all of September will be 'National Preparedness Month'":

It's three years after 9/11, and less than three months before an election, and now we get a National Preparedness Month.

And yes, let's ask Bush and Tom Ridge the simple question: what the hell do these people think the previous 35 months were?

Here's an excellent item that I failed to publish when it appeared back in mid-May: The Moral Case Against the Iraq War by Paul Savoy (thenation.com, 05/13/04), on the topic of belated rationalizations for the invasion of Iraq:

Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being 'better off' avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war. As the late Robert Nozick cautioned in his classic work on the moral basis of freedom, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, we should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.

(If you have an account with the Onion for "premium" services, see also "Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy", theonion.com, 03/26/03.)

When does a foreign government have the right to decided that YOUR death is an acceptable price for what it believes is the best interests of your fellow citizens in a sovereign nation? Never, obviously.

The article picks apart several of the pseudo-humanitarian war justifications belatedly asserted. It's worth a read.

Another excerpt from War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning on that last comment about history:

Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war. They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as lie. The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful. Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the lie that led to it.

It's just a darned good book.

As if history was made to be forgotten, not learned from

Several years ago, I read a great book by historian Gerda Lerner called Why History Matters. One of the intriguing chapters dealt with the historical revisionism that the Nazis engaged in after their rise to power. The story they were trying to sell the German people, of their hidden greatness and their culture's sabotage by outside forces, didn't mesh with available historical information. So the Nazis had to revise all the school textbooks to take out all the foreigners and German Jewish citizens who had contributed to the greatness of their culture. Through such purges, they were able to sell people on their story more completely.

The story gave me flashbacks to architecture history, in which Egyptian kings of the later eras had the names of their predecessors carved out of the monuments documenting their accomplishments, and replaced them with their own. Or of the Spaniards reaching the new world and burning the written Codices of the locals, and then insisting that the locals had no culture or civilizations because they had no books, a "problem" which the Spaniards could fix... by supplying books about how great the Spaniards are, while depriving the locals of means to recall their independence with historical detail.

History gives you legitimacy. We are here! We have been here! Textbooks in the U.S. are a political battleground for legitimacy: the groups that are overrepresented don't want to give up the space they monopolize, because it might give too much legitimacy to other groups who share this country. I bet you can tell me lots of details about the individual wealthy early leaders of the country, but have no idea how many native persons were already on this land at about that time.

Shaping history for self-serving ends works. We're told what's important in all media. We believe it. Less well documented truths are fuzzy, not widely enough shared to be jointly discussed and recalled, and don't take hold in debates.

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This seems like a long tangent, and it is. But it's also about the denial of history required to believe in war.

This morning I read Howard Zinn's essay, Artists in Times of War, about how people who often think independently and creatively often manage to resist the groupthink of wartime hysteria. This wartime hysteria requires a denial of history: toss out the bad and ambiguous parts and insist that one's home nation is the good victim of an evil villain, regardless of circumstances. As a good victim, our nation can engage in retributory actions which would only be evil if others so acted.

I've marveled several times at quotes from my fellow Americans which verged on completely senseless: comments about how other nations couldn't understand what we went through on September 11th, because no one else had ever suffered a serious terrorist attack. !?!?

Each time I've heard such opinions through the mainstream media, such comments are accepted completely, adding to the lack of connection to history. Plenty of other nations have suffered terrorism. Plenty of other nations have suffered, even at the hands of the U.S.! But the mass media plays into the new game, failing to provide context. They don't mention other attacks. They don't mention other nations, except as potential attackers. There is no history.

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Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy, and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us. Never mind the murder and repression done in our name by bloody surrogates from the Shah of Iran to the Congolese dictator Joseph Désiré Mobotu... We define ourselves. All other definitions do not count.

-- Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Hedges, a war correspondent, reflects on how individuals and nations twist history to make themselves look better and justify evil acts. He does a depressing, persuasive job in arguing that the nationalism just beneath the surface of most citizens could bring us to commit atrocities against innocents at the drop of a hat. In a fit of emotion, we could believe anything good about ourselves and anything bad about others, high on a shallow unity of panic which will leave us feeling alone and desperate to forget how dirty our hands are the moment the conflict of the day ends. His comments on the textbooks of recently warring nations, and the twisted, self-serving versions of events that makes them conflict with each other, shouldn't be surprising, but it is.

It's a good, yet discouraging read.

Context

The U.S. is still facing credibility problems abroad that it doesn't suffer at home, in its statements about wishing to liberate the Iraqi people to bring them freedom and democracy. A lot of this credibility gap isn't based on wacky information that the rest of the world is getting: rather, the gap would be narrower on the domestic side if Americans had any idea of the United States' support of non-democratic, non-liberating regimes throughout recent history.

The BBC's brilliant feature "Iraq: Conflict in Context" provides fabulous links and articles on the region's history and U.S. involvement there. This history is not well known to most Americans.

BBC - History - Crusades and Jihads in Postcolonial Times, by Dr. S. Sayyid tells us this:

The United States has tried to exert control by using regional powers such as Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as its proxies. By relying on these proxies the US has often become involved in the internal politics of these countries. US support has often increased the coercive resources available to the ruling elites of these countries while at the same time it has also tended to undermine the legitimacy of these regimes.

Thus, these regimes have to place a greater reliance on coercion - which further undermines the legitimacy of the ruling elites... It is this cycle of declining legitimacy and increasing repression that plagues the political order in the Middle East. Within this context political groups seek to close the gap between rulers and ruled by making rulers more accountable, and find themselves facing a repressive machinery that is often supported by western powers.

Those who have survived the U.S.' support for undemocratic regimes are unlikely to believe mere language invoking liberation. There just hasn't been enough evidence of it, and so the words are reduced to vague rhetoric. If freedom, liberty, and democracy are TRULY American values, our history in the region would have demonstrated this.

American actions have NOT demonstrated this.

The history of western powers demonstrates that it is perfectly possible to have democracy at home and exercise tyranny aboard. Both France and Britain maintained relatively free 'democratic' societies while exercising authoritarian control over their imperial possessions.

Americans, who experience significant freedom, assume inappropriately that their experience of American power is shared by others abroad. A conceptual gap exists in their experience.

Part of the reason the U.S. says one thing about freedom and democracy and does another, according to Dr. Sayyid, is that Americans cannot overcome our historical mythology that insists that we are the bearers of civilization, and that anyone else is barbaric. Many cultures suffer from this sort of egoism. But the United States is enforcing this belief with its military and intelligence services, deciding that the freedom of [barbaric] others is unimportant relative to U.S. interests. Our papers read this way daily, influencing the thoughts of ordinary citizens who might not come to such conclusions on their own.

This is a great article: I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism....

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

----Lt. General William Odom (Ret.), U.S. Army

This sensible quote is from Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9-11 by Nancy Snow. Snow's latest book, part of the Seven Stories Press Open Media Series of compact, concise books on vitally important topics, is a treasure. She cites voluminous source material to examine how propaganda has historically been used, and is currently being used by the corporate media in support of its owners' interests. The use of language to hide dissent and distort reality to create a docile populace during war is amazingly important right now, and we all need to be media-literate enough to know when we are being manipuated. Her dissection of commentary is graceful and sharp.

Her website is also an excellent and highly recommended resource for information on information manipulation.

You ARE reading the Thismodernworld.com blog every few days, aren't you? If you aren't, you must. It is ALWAYS full of intriguing news.

For example, this entry quotes from a Financial Times article which reports that Pakistani officials see no justification for the Orange Alert in the U.S. based on persons they have in custody, though the Pakistanis are being used as justification for the alerts.

Another recent entry cites The Secret File of Abu Ghraib: New classified documents implicate U.S. forces in rape and sodomy of Iraqi prisoners, by Osha Gray Davidson in Rolling Stone. While the title discusses more of the graphic abuses, day-to-day conditions were inhumane:

The prison was filled far beyond capacity. Some 7,000 prisoners were jammed into Abu Ghraib, a complex erected to hold no more than 4,000 detainees. Prisoners were held in canvas tents that became ovens in the summer heat and filled with rain in the cold winter. One report found that the compound "is covered with mud and many prisoner tents are close to being under water." ....

In a series of increasingly desperate e-mails sent to his higher-ups, Maj. David DiNenna of the 320th MP Battalion reported that food delivered by private contractors was often inedible. "At least three to four times a week, the food cannot be served because it has bugs," DiNenna reported. "Today an entire compound of 500 prisoners could not be fed due to bugs and dirt in the food." Four days later, DiNenna sent another e-mail marked "URGENT URGENT URGENT!!!!!!!!" He reported that "for the past two days prisoners have been vomiting after they eat."

The fact that this officer kept requesting assistance and had it ignored suggests that correcting the deplorable conditions were not a priority for anyone above him. Or, that these deplorable conditions were desirable and/or intentional. Which is worse.

And it's not just that the citations to other materials are great: TMW has great commentary of its own. See Bush manipulates the war for his own gain. Again.

Read it often! I had a link prior to my page formatting change: I'll (eventually) get this omission from the new format corrected.

[Week+ vacation interruption in posting. Posting will resume shortly.]

A Ted Rall comic points out that there are lots of people to feel sorry for.

Independent Media Center | www.indymedia.org | ((( i ))) "The Fightback Begins" has some reporting on the state of freedom here in the U.S. during the political conventions, which is a good indicator of the freedom and liberty our government always purports to be fighting for:

The summer is heating up as the Democratic National Convention(DNC) and the Republican National Convention(RNC) approach. Activists are being harassed in New York, Boston and the Midwest, but they continue to organize.

The police are doing their best to create a climate of fear in Boston, blanketing the city with surveillance cameras, preparing to arrest 2500 people, conducting random searches of passengers on public transportation and trying to make protesters gather in a "free-speech zone." The FBI is even claiming that a "domestic extremist group" is planning to attack news trucks. But local activists refuse to be cowed.

Anti-DNC action kicks off July 23 with the Boston Social Forum and continues with a "unwelcoming party", direct action and the "Really Really Democratic Bazaar."

Meanwhile, in New York, the NY Daily News ran an unsubstantiated front-pagestory claiming that "internet-using anarchists" are planning to cause chaos by fool bomb-sniffing dogs at Penn Station and major organizer United for Peace and Justice has been forced to hold their August 29 rally on the West Side Highway, instead of Central Park. But Still We Rise and the Poor People?s Economic Human Rights Campaign are still holding large demonstrations on August 30, the day of direct action is still (tenatively) planned for August 31 and various speaks-outs and conferences are still going ahead.

Live links and commentary (including lots of 'hey, you people, DO something!' and 'nothing can be done!' writing, which is always entertaining) at the link above.