Iraq, Iran and the Two Year, 24/7 Media Campaign

While political junkies have enjoyed the extended pre-season for Election 2008, most voters say that the debates and other campaign activities so far have been annoying and a waste of time. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 56% of Likely Voters hold that view while only 29% say the campaign so far has been interesting and informative.
Rasmussen Reports, 09/19/07

Political advertising is now the major means by which candidates for the presidency communicate their messages to voters. As a conduit of this advertising, television attracts both more candidate dollars and more audience attention than radio or print.
Dr Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. 5/19/2004

National cable networks sold 301 ad units between January and Sept. 2, 2007. That compares with a mere 19 units sold over a 15-month period during the last presidential cycle-January 2003 to March 2004.... All told, at least $2.7 billion in political ad spending is expected to flood in the doors of media companies before election day in November 2008... That would represent a $1 billion bump above spending during the 2004 presidential election cycle.
Janet Stilson, MediaWeek, 10/15/2007

Judging from the information in the above quotes "the media" is benefiting greatly from the early start to the 2008 campaign season. Watching the 24-Hour cable news networks it's obvious they are relying on the the presidential race to provide material for the many hours of programming they need to fill. FoxNews, MSNBC and CNN have all hosted debates that they promoted heavily and all I think rebroadcast their debate(s) at least once with commercials. On their regular programming: Fox & Friends, Joe Scarborough, CNN'S American Morning, Tucker Carlson, Wolf Blitzer, Keith Olbermann, etc. there are interviews with some of the candidates a few days before or after the debate, discussions with partisan pundits regarding every minor issue that might affect the campaign as well as pre and post-debate comments. So far the only good thing to come out of this intense coverage is more exposure for the lesser known, but interesting candidates especially, Ron Paul, but also Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich. Ron Paul has raised in excess of $5 million during the last quarter and has sparked a growing grassroots campaign. His online "Speeches and Statements" , especially those on Iraq, are worthwhile reading. (Too bad he's a Libertarian/Republican and not a conservative Democrat, maybe along the lines of Harry Reid who is a pro-life Democrat but at least his heart is in the right place.)

Yesterday on one of CNN's Sunday morning shows the pundits were speculating on the current status of the presidential race and the "accelerated campaign season", is I think what they called it, without exploring their possible complicity in it. Of course, there are other factors at play, for instance, the Republican candidates' desperation to win despite the odds being against them and the longer the campaign season, the more time unknowns like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee have to build up their name recognition. Romney has already spent millions on TV ads and the election is still over a year away. And Hillary Clinton needed time to overcome the deepseated mistrust if not outright dislike of many Democratic and Independent voters. Another factor is the Iraq War: the anti-war voters are anxious to make sure whoever they elect will end the war but sadly enough an end to the war seems as unlikely as ever no matter who we vote for, Dem or Rep. At the last Democratic debate, the lead candidates backed away from earlier promises to end the war as soon as they took office.

Coincidentally Republicans are now pushing for military intervention in Iran. One wonders if they have completely lost their minds or are just trying to back their feeble attempts at diplomacy with the threat of a limited nuclear strike. Or even more cynical are they trying to draw attention away from the war in Iraq and provide themselves an opportunity for a successful military action in Iran? Are they that nuts?

MSNBC online reprinted a London-based Financial Times article which stated that Iran had replaced Iraq as the "hot" issue for U.S. voters. The article quoted Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and one of the most, in my opinion, clear-sighted critics of Bush's foreign policy, as saying: "There has been an effort to change the subject. It is not so much that Iraq has been replaced by Iran as that the Bush administration has successfully broadened the Iraq debate to include Iran."

This view no doubt favors the Republicans who have alot more to lose than the Democrats if the Iraq war continues to be an issue throughout the campaign season. Though no other news outlets have voiced this opinion so directly they are covering the Iran issue extensively which allows the Republican candidates to shift the dialogue away from Iraq and lets them talk tough militarily which apparently appeals to Republican voters. But I hope that the majority of U.S. voters aren't going to be fooled by this neocon slight-of-hand to take their attention away from the "hot" war in Iraq and direct it onto the currently "cold" war in Iran which may, in reality, only be a political opportunity for the Republicans to save face in light of their failure in Iraq. Unfortunately at this point in time we ordinary citizens have little power to influence either the existing conflict or the one that might exist at any moment.

But if Bush/Cheney are serious how do they plan to deal with Iran politically if we actually bomb them? Do they really expect that some sort of military victory over Iran will make the Iraq fiasco seem somehow worth it? Iran is no Iraq. With the escalating tough talk and new economic sanctions against Iran we seem to be going down the same path as we did before we invaded Iraq. One gets the impression that even if Bush's real aim in Iraq was to try to create a democratic, U.S.-friendly regime, if that wasn't possible, he would settle for weakening the country to the point where it was no longer a threat to the U.S. or its friends in the Middle East. If we try the same tactic in Iran the result will make the fiasco in Iraq look like a success story. When we invaded Iraq in 2003 the country had suffered under very oppressive U.N. economic sanctions ever since the first Gulf War -- over a decade. If Bush plans to bomb Iran before he leaves office the sanctions won't have been in effect long enough to have done much as far as weakening the country. There is no way we can attack Iran and not expect them to retaliate in some way. If we are fighting the war on terror in order to protect the "homeland" from being attacked, bombing Iran is not the best way to prevent that from happening.

Whatever scenario actually becomes reality, as the extended campaign season grinds on it becomes clear that our troops and innocent civilians are caught up in the high stakes fight over the U.S. Presidency. The Republicans are not going to give up without a tooth and nail fight to the finish and they obviously don't care who they sacrifice in their effort to win the election. In what comes off as a desperate attempt to appeal to their base and therefore have a better chance of winning their party's nomination, all of the Republican candidates except for Ron Paul are eager to tell anyone who asks that they are all for bombing Iran and staying in Iraq as long as it takes "to win" the war. And Hillary Clinton, gambling that she has the Democratic nomination all but sewn up is trying to appeal to the Independent swing vote by acting like hawk: voting for sanctions against Iran and pulling back on her promise to redeploy troops out of Iraq.

We and the media are so focused on the election that we seem to have forgotten that lives are being lost in Iraq every day as we listen to the campaign rhetoric that may be completely abandoned by whichever candidate is ultimately elected. The 2008 Presidential race has turned into a two year campaign for a four (possibly eight) year job (and some of the contenders are still on the government payroll while running for President full-time). Would this lengthy campaigning be possible without the 24-hour news media to provide an outlet for ads, debates and partisan punditry? Probably not, but part of the problem is that we are allowing it to happen.

The Racism of Torture in Iraq and the War on Terror

In two separate legal opinions written in 2005, the Justice Department authorized the C.I.A. to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

The memorandums were written just months after a Justice Department opinion in December 2004 declared torture "abhorrent."

Administration officials have confirmed the existence of the classified opinions, but will not make them public, saying only that they approved techniques that were "tough, safe, necessary and lawful."
NYTimes, 10/05/07

In this new war, which is an unprecedented war, facing an enemy unlike we've ever faced before, sometimes -- oftentimes the best information that you get is from the terrorists themselves. They know where the other terrorists are hiding and what the other terrorists are planning. And to win the war on terror we must be able to detain them, interrogate them, question them, and when appropriate, prosecute them -- in America -- when we capture them here in America and on battlefields around the world. The policy of the United States is not to torture. The President has not authorized it, he will not authorize it.
Dana Perino, 10/04/2007

The movie "The Lives of Others", which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006, is about the Stasi, the secret police of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the former East Germany, and the vast network of citizens they coerced to spy and inform on one another. They primarily monitored people who they suspected might be disloyal to, were plotting against or were trying to leave the GDR. The film deals in part with how the Stasi blackmailed and forced people into turning against their loved ones and friends. What it doesn't get into is that many people also gave false information to save themselves or to simply to discredit enemies. People weren't necessarily tortured: sometimes just the prospect of detention or imprisonment alone is enough to frighten some of us. It's hard to imagine what any of us would do if we were actually threatened with actual physical torture or with death.

For me the prospect is frightening and I can't imagine that I would be especially courageous. I would probably be so terrified I would sell out my best friends and admit to anything true or not. I would probably say whatever I thought would save me. The idea that the average human would be able to withhold any information under the threat of torture is absurd and something that happens more often in Hollywood movies: the superhuman hero who can withstand torture and courageously not give up his country or fellow soldiers. In real life even the most courageous crack. John McCain admitted to twice providing information to the Vietnamese after being tortured.

During the Spanish Inquisition (15th to 19th century) torture was not only a means to get information but also a means of intimidation. If one person was tortured for having the "wrong" religion others would be frighten into renouncing that religion and adopting the one that wouldn't get them tortured. And in the GDR one of the functions of the Stasi was to frighten and intimidate people into following the policies of the state; the persecution of individuals was in part a means to that end.

That the U.S. is naive enough to think that any information that they are getting as a result of torture is more important than the extreme amount of bad faith that they are generating in the Islamic world is pathetic. Or could it be that the U.S. is intentionally using torture to intimidate the Islamic world? Our government hasn't exactly gone out of their way to convince the Iraqis that the torture at Abu Ghraib, the misdeeds of Blackwater and what amounts to home invasions by U.S. soldiers have been especially abhorrent to them. These are the type of tactics used to scare and intimidate people into following the rules of an oppressive state. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it is not a tactic that always works. In fact, I think it is only a tactic that works if there is a large, well-entrenched and organized military force oppressing a weak and mostly unarmed populace. And even then it isn't a particularly effective long term tactic. Whenever a group of people is oppressed there is a huge danger of creating an enemy that will remember the injustice for generations.

If I remember correctly, some of the most successful conquerors of the ancient past, for instance in South America, absorbed the people they conquered into their empire through intermarriage and commerce using economic and cultural incentives to gain the favor and goodwill of former enemies. And one reason that in the past the U.S. has been so well thought of around the world is that immigrants from around the world have come here and found success and peace that was not possible in their country of origin. You do not make friends by bombing and torturing a person's family. You do not gain favor by being as much of a tyrant as the regime you depose.

The CIA has utilized and researched torture for decades. Why it is only becoming really controversial now is due to a large extent to the unpopularity of the war in Iraq and because of the abusive treatment of innocent prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. If the U.S. government had managed to restrict the use of torture to known terrorists like al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed most of us might have turned a blind eye, but there has clearly been a pattern of abusive treatment of prisoners after 9/11 starting in Afghanistan. The Bush administration seems to have a blood lust that they don't comprehend is not shared by the majority of us. In the past the CIA has simply lied about their use of torture. However in this digital age, when pictures and videos can be easily and widely distributed, the CIA is having much more difficulty keeping their activities secret.

I was watching CNN this morning while I was writing this and they ran a piece on lynching narrated by Rick Sanchez. It included a brief history and the great Billy Holiday song about lynching, "Strange Fruit". It had very graphic pictures, mostly from the early 20th Century, of African-Americans who had been hung by the neck until they were dead. Anyone who didn't understand the significance of the nooses found recently on high school and college campuses should after seeing this. Like torture, lynching, in part because it was often done very publicly, had a far-reaching effect as a form of intimidation not to mention terror.

Bush has said many times since 9/11, that his actions are necessary to "save innocent lives" and to prevent another attack on the "homeland". This reference to 9/11 still strikes a chord with many people and many are still so fearful of the terrorist threat, that they don't stop to think that killing and torturing innocent Iraqis and Afghanis to save innocent American lives isn't right and is certainly not the Christian thing to do. And they also don't stop to think that there might be a racial or religious basis for our lack of interest in their innocent lives.