How To Starve a War Fever

The slippery slope to war is finally getting some much-needed sand thrown on it by the media -- even by some of the same newspapers and pundits who so unquestioningly cheer-led the last Iraq invasion.

Perhaps most important, the press is revealing the long-suppressed Saudi connection to 9/11, and exposing the Saudi elites' funding of ISIS,which is at least partly composed of remnants of their own private army. The Saudis have recently balked at putting their own "boots on the ground" to essentially fight against themselves, and that was one of Obama's prerequisites for America getting dragged back in.

Matt Stoller has written an especially illuminating piece which lays out Saudi Arabia's outsized influence on American foreign policy, and the role of petrodollars in financing various shadow wars and other secret machinations by the global ruling class.

The latest sabre-rattling is clearly aimed at toppling the Syrian government, long an aim of both Saudi Arabia and Israel and their neocon counterparts, still led by the unindicted Dick Cheney. The CIA and special ops have been fomenting this overthrow battle for awhile now, but Obama would "prefer" that the Congress now openly fund and back his efforts so as to spread future blame to all of us who never bothered to call our congress critters in futile protest. It's getting kind of hard to keep this secret war a secret any longer. And the beheading of two American journalists provides what they think is the perfect excuse to bring all their aggression out into the open. Obama himself was so rattled by the first murder, of James Foley, that he immediately had to calm his nerves by playing another round of golf, a big grin plastered on his face.

And there was bonhomie galore in the Oval Office last week as the president convened with his Republican frenemies and got their enthusiastic approval for what promises to be a very successful enterprise for the profiteers of the oil and "defense industries."

While some journalists are finally doing their jobs, there's still a vibrant propaganda machine whirring away and pumping its exhaust fumes through fiber-optic cables and into American homes. CNN, for example, has obviously been completely taken over by the Pentagon and the various intelligence "communities," whose bloviating is underwritten by the same oil and gas cartels and arms industry think tanks so desperate for more tax-sheltered cash. I wrote last week about one former ambassador, under criminal investigation in Europe for money-laundering his war profits, but still appearing on CNN to howl about ISIS coming to America to murder us all in our beds.  Lee Fang of The Nation names even more names.

CBS, whose news division president is the brother of Obama national security advisor Ben Rhodes, can also be relied upon to feed the fever. Veteran pundit Bob Schieffer did his bit on Sunday by shrilling that "we'll all get killed" unless we kill a whole bunch of people. The FAIR Blog has more examples of media quacks trying to feed the fever.

How then to starve the war fever? Hefty dosages of that tried and true antipyretic known as investigative journalism. Before you know it, millions of people will break a sweat, wake up from their fever dreams, and realize how badly they've been conned by the original political snake oil treatment. Hopefully it's still not too late to stop World War III in its tracks. 

As Charles Blow wrote in a recent excellent column,

When we invaded Iraq in 2003, about three out of four Americans approved of President Bush’s handling of the situation, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll. Three years later, that approval had fallen by half.

We don’t want to look back three years from now and ask, “What have we done?”

An ABC News poll in early March of 2003 found that most Americans believed the Iraq war would last several months at most — it officially lasted nearly nine years — and nearly eight in 10 thought Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States at the time.

And the cost of that war, particularly in death toll, was staggering.

According to the website Iraqbodycount.org, more than 4,800 members of United States and coalition forces were killed between 2003 and 2013, as well as 468 contractors.

How to break a war fever? As I responded to Charles Blow, the immediate release of that long-suppressed Senate report on CIA torture would immediately knock some sense into people clamoring for revenge over the recent decapitations. So would the release of the whole cache of still-suppressed photographs documenting horrific abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American forces. So would those censored pages of the 9/11 Commission report, which allegedly tie the Saudi royal family directly to the attacks.

Secrecy is the enemy of democracy. Transparency from our public "servants"  and our right to know are every bit as crucial to our survival as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Joe Biden said "we must follow ISIS to the very gates of hell, because hell is where they reside."

 Actually, what we really must do is relentlessly pursue our own elected leaders and expose the shadowy moneyed forces controlling them before we all fall into the inferno.