Life mirrors art. If you’ve seen the film “Gladiator”, you’ll
remember the opening scene where General Maximus calmly orders the superbly
armed and trained Legionnaires to “unleash hell.” As the Germanic tribes
continue to charge the Roman killing machine, a war-weary Roman commander
observes, “some people don’t know when they’re conquered.” Fool Saddam didn’t
know, either. After Gulf War One, UN inspections, and sanctions wiped out his
fighting capability, including the WMD that initially justified the recent
invasion, he was a paper tiger -- brutal to his own, but no match for an
American military that now spends more on war prep than the rest of the world
combined.
The Iraq War is using the best of Hollywood hype, in the Wag
the Dog tradition. Consider the “defining image” of the Saddam statue pulled
down by masses of joyous Iraqis, evoking the liberation of East Berlin.
Reality: it was phony, for the most part a staged media event, with fewer than
150 people involved (in a city of millions), *including* Marines and reporters.
See the big picture at www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm.
In Gladiator, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s cowardly son
Commodus stages a triumphant chariot ride back into Rome, posed as a war hero.
President GW Bush is a much nicer guy than Commodus, but is posing nonetheless,
in the interests of the empire. Bush Jr., who used his father’s political clout
to avoid bloody Vietnam by getting an assignment to the Texas Air National
Guard (and then skipping a year of duty to work on political campaigns),
created his own version of the phony heroic homecoming. In what Time Magazine
called “the perfect presidential photo-op,” Bush had the aircraft carrier
Lincoln (as in “another-great-wartime-President Lincoln”) positioned so he
could stage a dramatic “out at sea” jet landing and speech (where he again
invoked the fictitious link between September 11 and Saddam.) His military
garb, breaching the Presidential tradition of avoiding military affectations,
evoked actor Bill Pullman in “Independence Day”, where a former fighter pilot
President shoots the ultimate bad guy out of the sky.
So Bush exploits the war-hero image, supplementing his $300
million re-election budget with this taxpayer-funded million-dollar event.
Showing no limits on their shameful willingness to exploit the September 11
tragedy, his image-makers have planned the 2004 Republican convention for early
September in… you guessed it: New York City.
Hey, so what if the President misled us about Osama and WMD…
the Iraqis are free! Free? At what cost? We’re paying over $100 billion to
depose a dictator we empowered two decades ago. For Iraqis, the hell will
continue to be unleashed from undetonated cluster bomblets and
toxic-radioactive depleted uranium munitions. Meanwhile, Iraq is free to become
a corporate colony, governed by the privatization mandates of the World Bank
and IMF. They can join countries like Ethiopia and Ecuador, and States like
California, which have seen their economies looted by the monopoly capitalists
who fund, and are funded by, the Bush administration and friends. For the
sickening details, read Greg Palast’s
“The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.”
If the President was motivated by human rights, he’d get far
more bang for the buck by pressuring Disney CEO Michael Eisner to pull his
garment contracts from the nightmare sweatshops of Southeast Asia. But that’s
not the neo-con view of free trade in the “New American Century.” Another
Roman, lacking a Karl Rove spinmeister, described it bluntly, using the F word:
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of
state and corporate power." Mr. Mussolini would agree with, and be
delighted by Mr. Palast’s observation: “Corporations used to lobby the government;
now they are the government.” Bush’s ex-CEO cabinet unabashedly proposed the
“Haliburton oil-coal-nuke energy plan”. Now, recognizing they need even tighter
control over the infotainment network, they’re proposing the “Clear Channel
plan” for further communications deregulation-monopolization.
Don’t be fooled by imperialism’s friendly new face.
Democracy’s at risk, right here in America, from the loss of news media
diversity and independence. Visit www.moveon.org/stopthefcc
to see how you can help.