UPDATED - ColdType

miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to
war.” Now, I don’t know about the forced part,
but the failure is there for all to see. (Daschle
himself was no profile in courage; he said he
would vote for war all over again if he had to.)
The problem is that for many of the ideologues
who think for this President – who pushed for
this war before they were in power and continued
to press now that they are in – this was not
a failure, but a success. Their cabal has prevailed,
steering the United States on to what
amounts to a Superpower dominates all, preemptive
power rules, imperial relationship to the
world. In New York, a town where reality is
spelled realty, I can believe that there are brokers
ready to start converting the U.N. Secretariat
Building into East River condos.
Dissecting the speech
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
ON MSNBC (“NBC ON CABLE”) this morning,
after a jam forced the network to rerack the
tape, one analyst spoke of the President’s speech
as grounded in fact. Not one network subjected
the speech’s claims and assertions to any analysis,
much less criticism or refutation.
Assertion No. 1: “The only way to reduce harm
and duration of war is apply full force.” The only
way? Surely someone might point out that the
majority of the Security Council and the General
Assembly, if polled, would disagree. Were there
no journalists who could assess this claim and at
least point to the specific alternatives that have
been proposed?
Assertion No. 2: “In a free Iraq, there will be no
more wars of aggression against your neighbors.”
Couldn’t have anyone pointed out that the
U.S. government supported and encouraged Sad-
80
dam’s war on Iran, and told him that they would
not object to his “solving” his longstanding dispute
with Kuwait. (The films by Frontline airing
on PBS carried the scene in which the foremer
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq signaled no objection to
Saddam. It also showed that the U.S. government
aided his rise to power.)
Assertion No. 3: “War criminals will be punished.”
No reference to the U.S. refusal to support
the International Criminal Court.
Assertion No. 4: “The United States of America
has the sovereign authority to use force.”
Says who? Couldn’t the networks have asked
some law professors about this and noted that
Kofi Annan clearly challenged this notion?
Generals in residence
ON and on, it went, assertions that went unexamined,
while anchors endlessly recapped and
went to their reporters in the field to see how the
soldiers felt or what the military analysts in the
field thought. Like NBC’s General in residence
Barry McCaffrey, the ex-Drug Czar who Seymour
Hersh exposed as a war criminal in a documentation
of his unit’s massacre of Iraqis during
Gulf War I. Speaking of General M, Elizabeth
Jenson reports in the Los Angeles Times that
these military men are helping to shape the arc
of coverage: “When a tip comes in, some of the
ex-military men will get on the phone – in private,
out of the open-desk chaos of a standard
newsroom – to chase it down, calling sources,
oftentimes old buddies, whom even the mostplugged
in correspondents can’t reach. Gen.
Barry McCaffrey likes his NBC job because it lets
him maintain influence on policy, being able to
speak to these issues,” Jensen wrote.