December 15, 2006
by Stephen Lendman

Note: This is the fourth of a five-part series
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Cheerleading 101 - It's What the Dominant Corporate-Controlled Media Does Best, and They're At It Again

When in trouble, as the Bush administration clearly is, it can count on its corporate media allies to step up and help out just as they did it during the Johnson-Nixon years when they backed their "stay the course" and "Vietnamization" agendas. They're always out in front delivering the "proper message" and leading the cheerleading as they are now for what's highlighted above and the new Bush rhetoric of "success" however Henry Kissinger and others define it. It's highlighted in a November 16 article by media critic and columnist Norman Solomon titled The New Media Offensive to Prolong the Iraq War posted on Counterpunch. In it, he says the pro-war cheerleading is being featured on the front page of the New York Times (as it always is) by columnist Michael Gordon just like it was in the run-up to March, 2003 by the now-disgraced Judith Miller in her daily hawkish screeds practically pleading for hostilities and echoing the propaganda handed her by the White House and Pentagon.

This is the same Michael Gordon today who was the lead reporter on the Times front page in the lead-up to the Iraq war who wrote the false and discredited story (he never apologized for) about the threat of Saddam's aluminum tubes. Michael's back now and again doing what's expected of him as a paid propagandist for "the newspaper of record" that never met an act of US aggression it didn't support even when it turned out to be a hopeless debacle as is true now.

The Gordon piece on November 15 is certain to be followed by more. It's another in a long line of thinly-veiled NYT empire-supportive kinds of "journalism" leading the media pack with its cheerleading even when war crimes are committed or the public interest is being ignored or harmed. The Times, as always, knows what it's role is, and no journalist need apply for work there without being willing to be part of the same dirty business that includes supporting all imperial wars the nation pursues. So it is now. And Solomon goes on to say many other journalists are joining the chorus against the pullout option in Iraq the same way they did during the Vietnam era. They go even further warning Democrats that, despite strong public opinion to the contrary, not to go that far "if they know what's good for them," and, right or wrong, it's the president's call in all cases whether to go to war or continue one, and the Congress should stay out of it - even if they have lie to the public to do it the way the New York Times does.

These journalists need a lesson in constitutional law as that view is fraudulent on it face and contradicts what the founders stood for and put in the Constitution for those who care to read it. It's a further reckless endangerment of a democratic republic scarcely able to draw breathe anymore. It's the result of corrupted government officials and complicit corporate media journalists ignoring what Thomas Jefferson helped codify, teach us, believed in passionately and said: "The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people....Light and liberty go together.....Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

Jefferson added no nation can ever be free if it's kept ignorant, and no part of the corporate-controlled media is more guilty of that sin than the "paper of record" that's the closest thing in the country to an official ministry of information and propaganda that's leading the way for all the others. It functions to serve the interests of wealth and power violating the Jeffersonian spirit and the constitutional law of the land he helped draft in 1787.

It allows George Bush to sell his war agenda knowing it'll be supported in the echo chambers of major front page dailies and headlined on TV newscasts. It may be his last gasp, but he's at it again calling for a "last push" strategy for victory in Iraq in a futile attempt to refurbish his image and give Republicans time to regroup from their drubbing in the mid-term elections and prepare for the 2008 presidential campaign. It's hard to imagine how continuing what hasn't worked up to now and won't will accomplish anything more than raise the level of public anger wanting change and not getting it.

(Article Continues Below)

The Real State of Things in Iraq the Corporate Media Won't Report

To learn what's really happening in Iraq just read unembedded independent journalist Patrick Cockburn's November 28 column in the London Independent (and all his others there) called Slaughter House Iraq. In it he says "Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad, the police often pick up more than 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other." He goes on to explain the country is in an "ominous stage of disintegration" and may be approaching what the Americans call "the Saigon moment" when it's plain as day "the government is expiring."

Covering the region, freelance journalist and author Nir Rosen is just as ominous in his latest article in the Boston Review on November 27, 2006 called Anatomy of a Civil War - Iraq's descent into chaos. Rosen says: "Shia religious parties such as the Iran-supported Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) controlled the country, and Shia militias had become the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army, running their own secret prisons, arresting, torturing, and executing Sunnis in what was clearly a civil war. And the Americans were merely one more militia among the many, watching, occasionally intervening, and in the end only making things worse."

Almost everyone in Washington and Whitehall know all this except Bush and Blair and their most loyal acolytes who've lost all touch with reality and are in a state of denial that the longer the occupation continues the worse things will get. The human toll, according to Cockburn, is 1000 Iraqis killed each week and 1000 US forces killed or wounded every month, and these may be low estimates of even greater numbers unknown or carefully concealed preventing people at home from knowing how desperate things really are, what the human cost is, that the war in Iraq is lost, and the longer US forces stay in the country the worse things will get.

And consider what publisher and editor Bob Chapman writes in his November 29 edition of his long-running, well-respected online publication The International Forecaster. He says "the insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes the occupation has been unable to prevent." He believes they raise $70 - $200 million a year from these activities and concludes with the dramatic observation that the resistance groups can hold off the most powerful military in the world with that amount of money compared to $100 billion or more spent by the Pentagon with all their super-weapons trying and failing to defeat them. It can't and won't no matter how many more billions are spend or for how long.

That's the dilemma mandarins like Jim Baker and the heavyweights on his Commission have to deal with. The spillage of six disastrous years under the younger Bush is so immense, and the fallout from it so beyond repair, that two years from now or sooner the rule and influence of a family dynasty will end and whatever succeeds it will inherit less power than any US administration since WW II as the American empire heads into an irreversible decline that didn't begin under George Bush but was measurably accelerated under his discredited leadership that turned out to be none at all.

Read Part 5, "The Price of Imperial Overreach" on Monday, December 18th.

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Stephen Lendman [send him email] lives in Chicago, and maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com