Untruths and Consequences

Give Donald Trump a little credit. He is succeeding where Barack Obama failed: he has single-handedly reanimated this country's moribund antiwar movement, inspiring spontaneous weekend street protests against imminent war in at least 80 American cities.

Thanks to Trump, the assassinated Quassam Soleimani is now a household name. Tbanks to Trump, politicians on both sides of the War Party aisle are scrambling to either defend the indefensible drone attack against a foreign leader visiting another foreign country (Iraq) at the express invitation of that country, or to complain they weren't properly kept in the assassination loop as is their god-given right as co-equal warmongers.

Besides joining the anti-war protest or strike nearest you, now is also the perfect time  to dust off your copy of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"to help you parse both the pro-war propaganda and the pretend anti-war propaganda.

The pro-war propaganda is especially prevalent in the reactionary tabloid press. The New York Post, for example, published a graphic photo of Soleimani's severed hand on its front page with the descriptor "Dead Ringer" to explain how his ring helped identify him. Whether this kind of coverage unites Trump's fan base into the desired frenzy of Islamaphobic solidarity remains to be seen - especially given that it's the children of his fan base who will be importuned into fighting Trump's war.

The more staid establishment media are much more nuanced and subtle, or at least they're making a half-hearted attempt at nuance and subtlety. It must be really hard out there for the liberal interventionists and pundits who previously had never met a war they didn't like. They find themselves in the unaccustomed position of suddenly hating United States-sponsored murder and terrorism only because they hate Trump so much. If only he weren't our current murderer and terrorist-in-chief! War was so much easier to sell when the discreet and eloquent Barack Obama and the genial, goofy, dry-drunk George Bush were in nominal charge.

Obama, especially, was able to project a modicum of sanity and balance in public as he acted out his inner Trump, holding his weekly Terror Tuesday assassination club meetings and dropping his bombs on eight different countries throughout his "no drama" presidency. He played by the rules. He adhered to the norms. The media rarely challenged him. He mastered the fine art of political-speak to defend the indefensible. Per George Orwell:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

And as Janet Malcolm more recently explained this delicate deadly rhetorical balance in her critique of the access-hungry complicit media, "The Journalist and the Murderer":

Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way.

Just because Trump is a bombastic liar doesn't mean that his phony anti-war concern-troll critics are telling the truth themselves.

Take Susan Rice, national security maven in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and now a Netflix board member and contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times. After helping to orchestrate the ill-planned, disastrous regime-change war in Libya highlighted by the gruesome murder of Moammar Qadaffi, Rice now has the chutzpah to chide Trump for his own recklessness.

The Big Lie in Rice's sanctimonious Times column is that longstanding US-sponsored Middle East chaos didn't start until Trump came along to ruin all their hard diplomatic work:

How did we get here? What are the consequences of these targeted killings? Can we avoid a worse-case scenario?

 The escalatory cycle began in May 2018, when President Trump recklessly ignored the advice of his national security team and the opposition of our allies in unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal- despite Iran's full adherence to its terms and its efficacy in rolling back from a nuclear program. Since then, the Trump administration has had no coherent strategy to constrain Iran's nuclear program or to counter other aspects of its nefarious behavior.

After getting the obligatory Orwellian rhetorical question-begging out of the way, Rice doesn't even call war with Iran a potential worldwide disaster, but only a "worse-case" scenario. She does, however, add the common, group-thinking, passive-aggressive caveat that Suleimani was a "terrorist" because he led the military of another country that is not allied with or beholden to the United States. 

In deciding to eliminate General Suleimani, Mr. Trump and his team argue they were acting in self-defense to thwart imminent attacks on Americans in Iraq and the region. That may be true, as General Suleimani was a ruthless murderer and terrorist with much American blood on his hands. Unfortunately, it's hard to place confidence in the representations of an administration that lies almost daily about matters large and small and even, in this critical instance, failed to brief, much less consult, bipartisan leaders in Congress.

In other words, if you're going to assassinate somebody, you must have a proven track rcord of skillful, confidence-inspiring obfuscation. After all, it has taken two whole decades and three whole administrations for the serial lies about the Afghanistan war to finally come to public light.

Meanwhile, Rice doesn't bother explaining whose blood Suleimani had on his hands, other than it was pure red-blooded American blood. It would never do to admit that the ruthless killing was done to ruthless killers and/or invading armies and/or corporate colonizers.

Trump not only lies in real time and is caught lying in real time, he avoids the usual platitudes about spreading democracy and human rights throughout the world by way of massive death and destruction. He brays the truth about the real purpose of these wars: land-grabbing for oligarchic fun and profit.

And he is so nasty and humorless about it. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at least, was gracious enough to laugh and lighten things up a bit with a friendly complicit network TV reporter after Qaddafi was sodomized to death by a bayonet:

Meanwhile, the Media-Political Complex wrings its hands over Iran's resulting threats to the thousands of aggressive land-grabbers and mercenaries ("American interests") who will now be less safe in the vast, resource-rich geographical spaces which they have so nobly invaded and colonized in the name of free market capitalism.

The literal ring of military bases surrounding Iran actually might get a dent or two put into it!

My published response to Susan Rice's arrogant little New York Times sermon:

The stage for catastrophe was set nearly two decades ago with the invasion of Iraq, a war which the author of this op-ed did not oppose. She joined in the fear mongering propaganda over the non-existent WMDs, even joining with the Bushies in claiming that the invasion did not need permission of the U.N. Security Council.

And then there was Ms. Rice's pivotal role, with Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, in the Obama administration's ill-fated Libya "humanitarian" intervention - which remains to this day a humanitarian catastrophe.

 Those in power never learn that America's aggressive meddling has never had one single happy ending. If Trump is reckless and acts with impunity, it is through the unitary executive powers bequeathed to him by his predecessors. And absent a few principled representatives like Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders, Congress has oceans of blood on its hands for just having gifted Trump more billions for war. They even awarded him his very own Space Force, even as the House voted to impeach him over his sleazy Ukraine extortion scheme. Given his insane attempt to start World War III with the assassination of one of Iran's highest ranking officials, that incident now seems rather pathetic.

Presidents under siege and/or facing re-election have a tendency to start wars and drop bombs as diversionary tactics. That Trump would react to impeachment like a cornered senile wolverine is no big shock to anybody - except to the experts who never seem to learn.