Cutting piece by Saul Landau; an excerpt:
On November 12, as US jets bombed Fallujah for the ninth straight day, a Redwood City California jury found Scott Peterson guilty of murdering his wife and unborn child. That macabre theme captured the headlines and dominated conversation throughout workplaces and homes.
Indeed, Peterson "news" all but drowned out the US military's claim that successful bombing and shelling of a city of 300 thousand residents had struck only sites where "insurgents," had holed up. On November 15, the BBC embedded newsman with a marine detachment claimed that the unofficial death toll estimate had risen to well over 2000, many of them civilians.
As Iraqi eye witnesses told BBC reporters he had seen bombs hitting residential targets, Americans exchanged viewpoints and kinky jokes about Peterson. One photographer captured a Fallujah man holding his dead son, one of two kids he lost to US bombers. He could not get medical help to stop the bleeding.
A November 14 Reuters reporter wrote that residents told him that "US bombardments hit a clinic inside the Sunni Muslim city, killing doctors, nurses and patients." The US military denied the reports. Such stories did not make headlines. Civilian casualties in aggressive US wars don't sell media space....
Retired Marine Corps general Bernard Trainor declared that: militarily "Fallujah is not going to be much of a plus at all." He admitted that "we've knocked the hell out of this city, and the only insurgents we really got were the nut-cases and zealots, the smart ones left behind- the guys who really want to die for Allah." While Pentagon spin doctors boasted of a US "victory, Trainor pointed out that the "terrorists remain at large."
The media accepts axiomatically that US troops wear the "white hats" in this conflict. They do not address the obvious: Washington illegally invaded and occupied Iraq and "re-conquered" Fallujah -- for no serious military purpose. Logically, the media should call Iraqi "militants" patriots who resisted illegal occupation. Instead, the press implied that the "insurgents" even fought dirty, using improvised explosive devices and booby traps to kill our innocent soldiers, who use clean weapons like F16s, helicopter gun ships, tanks and artillery....
Banality and corruption arise from the epic evil of this war, one that has involved massive civilian death and the destruction of ancient cities....
That [Nazi] doctrine [of "Total War"] became practice in late April 1937. Nazi pilots dropped their deadly bombs on Guernica, the ancient Basque capital like what US pilots recently did to Falluja. A year earlier, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted. General Francisco Franco, supported by fascist governments in Italy and Germany, led an armed uprising against the Republic. The residents of Guernica resisted. Franco asked his Nazi partners to punish these stubborn people who had withstood his army's assault....
Almost 1700 people died that day and some 900 lay wounded. Franco denied that the raid ever took place and blamed the destruction of Guernica on those who defended it, much as the US military intimates that the "insurgents' forced the savage attack by daring to defend their city and then hide inside their mosques. Did the public in 1937 face the equivalent of the Peterson case that commanded their attention?...
In Germany and Italy in 1937, the media focused on the vicissitudes suffered by those pilots who were sacrificing for the ideals of their country by combating a "threat." The US media prattles about the difficulties encountered by the US marines. It never calls them bullies who occupy another people's country, subduing patriots with superior technology to kill civilians and destroy their homes and mosques. On November 15, an embedded NBC cameraman filmed a US soldier murdering a wounded Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. As CNN showed the tape, its reporter offered "extenuating circumstances" for the assassination we had witnessed....
The reporting smacks of older imperial wars, Andrew Greely reminded us in the November 12, Chicago Sun Times. "The United States has fought unjust wars before -- Mexican American, the Indian Wars, Spanish American, the Filipino Insurrection, Vietnam. Our hands are not clean. They are covered with blood, and there'll be more blood this time." Falluja should serve as the symbol of this war of atrocity against the Iraqi people, our Guernica. But, as comedian Chris Rock insightfully points out, George W. Bush has distracted us. That's why he killed Laci Peterson, why he snuck that young boy into Michael Jackson's bedroom and the young woman into Kobe Bryant's hotel room. He wants us not to think of the war in Iraq. We need a new Picasso mural, "Falluja," to help citizens focus on the themes of our time, not the travails of the Peterson case. The Bush Administration sensed the danger of such a painting. Shortly before Colin Powell's February 5, 2003 UN Security Council fraudulent, power point presentation, where he made the case for invading Iraq, UN officials, at US request, placed a curtain over a tapestry of Picasso's Guernica, located at the entrance to the Security Council chambers. As a TV backdrop, the anti-war mural would contradict the Secretary of State's case for war in Iraq. Did the dead painter somehow know that his mural would foreshadow another Guernica, called Fallujah?
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