Donald Trump speaks during the joint session of Congress to deliver his State of the Union Address in the Capitol on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2018. CQ-Roll Call/PA Images. All rights reserved.

George W Bush’s post-9/11 address launched sixteen years of war. Donald Trump’s sequel promises many more.     
 
George W Bush gave his first state-of-the-union address on 29 January 2002, just four months after the 9/11 attacks. Sixteen years and one day later, on 30 January 2018, Donald Trump delivered his own opening performance of the ritual. Where their rhetoric on international security is concerned, the overlap between the two presidential speeches is remarkable.

Just as Bush pro-claimed the “new American century”, so Donald Trump is “making America great again”. It is as if these tumultuous years have brought no change.

Just as Bush proclaimed the “new American century”, so Donald Trump is “making America great again”. It is as if these tumultuous years have brought no change. For both leaders, the United States is destined to just go on winning. Bush’s dream soon faced a hard landing in the world beyond Washington. Will Trump’s slogan meet the same fate? A closer look at the two speeches might offer a clue. 

The consequences of Bush’s address are all around. In the agenda it outlined, and the tragic outcomes it foretold, it may yet be seen as one of the most notable speeches of the 21st century. At the time his supporters were already hailing it as such. After all, it was akin to a victory celebration: in the previous weeks, the Taliban had been driven from Kabul and al-Qaida dispersed from its Afghan bastion. But the president, in between more than seventy bursts of applause from a rapturous Congress, made clear that his administration was already setting its sights on regime termination in Iraq and other rogue states:
“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.  They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

This threat demanded early action:

“We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as perils draw closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

The implication of Bush’s stance – the need for pre-emptive and if necessary unilateral action – was made more explicit in his graduation address to West Point army cadets in June 2002. The ease with which adversaries could now attack advanced civilised states was a key theme:

“Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger the American people and our nation. The attacks of September the 11th required a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and deluded men. All of the chaos and suffering they caused came at much less than the cost of a single tank. The dangers have not passed. This government and the American people are on watch, we are ready, because we know the terrorists have more money and more men and more plans.”

So in facing the threat, defending the homeland was simply not enough:

“[The] war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”
Furthermore, rogue states should be treated in the same way as terrorists:

“All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price. We will not leave the safety of America and the peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants. We will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world.” 

The world now knows how that played out. What followed Bush’s peroration was no one’s victory. His prospectus crafted not a new American century leading to a more peaceful world, but a wasteland: sixteen years of war, hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, millions of refugees fleeing their homes and livelihoods, states such as Afghanistan, Iraq and especially Libya wrecked, and expanding insurgency and insecurity across a vast swathe of territory.
 

A president on repeat

How far the impact of Donald Trump’s state-of-the-union address matches that of George W Bush’s, and how far it differs, will be seen in coming months and years. Its own style was, perhaps to be expected, bombastic and celebratory, with a heavy focus on the brilliance of his apparently groundbreaking domestic agenda. Its international component was less forceful than Bush’s post-9/11 arousal. But Trump’s view of the world as a nest of enemies carried echoes of his predecessor. This became explicit in his uncompromising approach to Iran and North Korea (un-toppled members of Bush’s axis of evil) and in his treatment of al-Qaida, ISIS and other Islamist groups:

“Last year, I also pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the Earth. One year later, I am proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated very close to 100 percent of the territory just recently held by these killers in Iraq and in Syria and in other locations, as well. But there is much more work to be done. We will continue our fight until ISIS is defeated.”

He went on:
“I am asking Congress to ensure that in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaida we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists, wherever we chase them down, wherever we find them. And in many cases, for them it will now be Guantanamo Bay. At the same time, as of a few months ago, our warriors in Afghanistan have new rules of engagement. Along with their heroic Afghan partners, our military is no longer undermined by artificial timelines, and we no longer tell our enemies our plans.”

How does these declarations relate to experience on the ground? Libya is one of ISIS’s “other locations”. Here, Cipher Brief reports:

“[ISIS]…maintains a strong presence in Libya and remains a potent regional threat, despite domestic and international efforts to oust the group from its stronghold. After losing their former base of operations along the Libyan coast, ISIS fighters have regrouped and established training centers and operational headquarters in the central and southern parts of the country. Unless Libya can make headway toward forming a unified government, its lawless border areas will continue to provide fertile ground for ISIS and other terrorist groups to foment instability across North Africa.” 

In Afghanistan, the Taliban is reported to control or have substantial influence over a least a third of the country. It remains dominant among a cluster of groups that includes ISIS and the Haqqani network. A recent wave of attacks has killed over 130 people, mostly civilians, while an ISIS attack on an Afghan national army base took the lives of twelve soldiers. Trump’s response is to send in another 4,000 troops, which would take the total to 15,000. The United States also deploys special-forces personnel and armed-drones, while the US airforce has even brought back the A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft.  

A wrong-headed strategy

On the eve of his set-piece, Trump had told reporters: “We’re going to finish what we have to finish. What nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it.” (Helene Cooper, “Attacks Reveal What U.S. Won’t: Victory Remains Elusive in Afghanistan”, New York Times, 31 January 2018).

It was another bold claim. But that’s the point: for it is only the latest in a long sequence of such predictions of imminent victory made by the Pentagon or White House over these sixteen years. Trump is now adding to that list without the remotest hint of new thinking or strategy. It’s as well to remember that five years ago, US forces in Afghanistan peaked at 100,000. They were joined by 30,000 military from other countries, and thousands of private-security contractors as well. The idea that barely a tenth of that number will make any difference, when the Taliban and other movements have such a grip, is just out of this world.

More fundamentally, Trump’s policies will stir up more animosity, resentment and deep anger towards the United States abroad. His speech itself demonstrated this. Detention without trial for years or even decades will continue at Guantánamo and probably elsewhere; military control will escalate, and quite possibly reach new heights of destruction; and in a decision that has huge symbolism in the Islamic and Arab worlds, the US embassy in Israel will move to Jerusalem.

This worldview has not worked since Bush’s address, and it won’t work in the future. Indeed, Trump’s speech highlights in stark form that he and his advisors really have no clue whatsoever of how the United States is perceived, not just in the Middle East and north Africa but across much of the global south.
Trump’s signal in 2018 is that nothing has been learned since 2002. “Making America great again” is from the same stable as the “new American century”: an epic delusion foisted on the American people and the world. Bush inaugurated sixteen years of war. Trump will extend that to thirty and more – unless there is a radical change of thinking.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/
 

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of the pro-war propaganda machine
 

IN THE former USSR, people knew that the country’s state-owned newspaper Pravda would peddle Moscow’s line, no matter how outrageous the lies. George W. Bush can’t boast that the Republican Party owns the country’s newspapers, television stations or radio networks. But he can still count on a press that’s nearly as obedient as Pravda.

No matter how many lies George Bush tells about Iraq’s "threat" to the US, the corporate media won’t ask him the hard questions. Bush and his administration know that they can count on the "patriotism" of the press — which will report on the coming war like a local sports reporter rooting for the home team. And Bush — unlike the rulers of the former USSR — won’t even have to issue any orders or appoint any news censors. That’s because the press in the US censors itself.

In May 2002, CBS news anchor Dan Rather acknowledged, "What we are talking about here —whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not — is a form of self-censorship. It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole… felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying: ‘I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it.’"

Of course, Rather said this to Britain’s BBC — and didn’t have the courage to say it at home, where he had been leading the patriotic charge in the media after the attacks of September 11. Predictably, almost no outlet of the US mainstream media reported on Rather’s comments.

No one in Washington had to tell newspapers to bury them – just like no one had to tell the press to ignore reports, published in Britain’s Observer newspaper, that the Bush administration spied on United Nations (UN) Security Council members during the debate on a new resolution to authorise war on Iraq.

And few media outlets have focused on Newsweek magazine’s revelation that Iraqi Gen. Hussein Kamel, a prominent defector, testified in 1995 that Iraq had already been significantly disarmed. Bush and other administration officials have regularly cited Kamel’s testimony as evidence that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction.

The fact is that the media will support this war, despite the restrictions that the government will place on their ability to report freely — and despite the administration’s open manipulation of information.

The image presented of the new Gulf War will be totally sanitised. During the US bombardment of Afghanistan, Walter Isaacson, the chief executive of CNN, told his staff that it was "perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan." And during the 1991 Gulf War, the media quickly buried images of the horrific slaughter carried out against retreating soldiers and civilians on the "Highway of Death" at the end of the war.

The media lines up with the government on fundamental matters not because of any conspiracy or backroom deals, but because the media themselves are huge corporations that share the same economic and political interests with the tiny elite that runs the US government. In some cases, they’re the same people.

It’s now common practice for the Big Three networks to put former military officials, politicians and government bureaucrats on the payroll. "The media has simply become a branch of the war effort," the Palestinian author Edward Said wrote recently. "What has entirely disappeared from television is anything remotely resembling a consistently dissenting voice." As if to underline the point, in February, the cable news network MSNBC cancelled Phil Donahue’s show – and announced that it was hiring Republican hack Dick Armey as a commentator.

Current and former government voices dominate the "debate" in the media about war and other questions of foreign policy. "Unnamed government sources," press spokespeople, Pentagon officers, White House officials, and ideologues close to the administration make up most of the "experts" and "reliable sources" that we hear from.

The corporations that dominate the media are getting more and more concentrated. Ben Bagdikian, author of Media Monopoly, estimates that six inter-linked corporations dominate the US media today. NBC is owned by major military contractor General Electric. But even news media that aren’t directly tied to the military-industrial complex have a stake in the system.

That’s because the media are in the business of making profits from selling advertising. Print, television and radio media all make their money by selling audiences to advertisers – and they know that their bottom line will suffer if they pursue stories that might damage advertisers.

The economics of reporting also shapes the news that we see. For example, rather than spend large sums to send an investigative reporter to uncover human rights abuses against detainees being tortured at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, for next to nothing, the media can cover the latest White House press conference denying the crimes.

That means independent media are a crucial source of information that the mainstream media won’t report – or will bury in a sea of pro-war coverage. We need to support independent media efforts where we can and build our own newspapers, like Socialist Worker, that will tell the truth about this war. But we also need to directly challenge the corporate media outlets – to force their hand and shame them into covering the stories that we know they would rather not touch.

After months of downplaying the size of demonstrations against the war on Iraq, major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post were forced to give front-page coverage to the massive February 15 international demonstrations against the war. The main reason was that the participation of more than 10 million people around the world meant the demonstrations were simply too big for editors to bury. But activists also directly targeted National Public Radio, the Times and other elite media — and shamed them into acknowledging that they had ignored the story of earlier protests.

February 15 showed the power of protest to reach millions of people who share our anger about this war – and who will be more likely to join us on the streets at the next demonstration. We can also look to the example of the Vietnam War to see this power. The media backed the brutal war against the people of Vietnam from the moment that the US began to send in its "advisers." But the anti-war movement forced the reality of the war into public consciousness – and pressured the US establishment, including the media, to open up the issue to debate.

Reporters were able to file stories that exposed the brutality of the war and challenged the government’s lies – a process that led millions of people to turn against the Vietnam War, and eventually helped bring it to an end.
 

Wag the media lapdog

Nothing exposed the Washington press corps as lapdogs as much as its gutless behaviour at George Bush’s White House press conference two weeks ago. Bush got away with mentioning September 11 eight times during the press conference — even though, to date, no one has offered any evidence that there’s any connection between Iraq and the hijackings.

But the media have given Bush a free pass to use September 11 as a pretext for a war against Iraq. "As a bogus rallying cry, ‘Remember 9/11’ ranks with ‘Remember the Maine’ of 1898 for war with Spain or the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964," Nation journalist William Greider recently wrote.

Greider points out that, according to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. And 55 per cent believe that Saddam directly supports Al Qaeda, according to an ABC News poll.

There’s no evidence for either belief. But here’s one question that you won’t hear the media asking: How have we contributed to spreading these myths, which we then report as evidence of people’s support for war?

As veteran journalist Tom Wicker wrote recently, "Bush administration spokesmen have made several cases for waging war against Iraq, and the US press has tended to present all those cases to the public as if they were gospel." We are seeing, Wicker concluded, "an American press that seems sometimes to be playing on the administration team rather than pursuing the necessary search for truth, wherever it may lead."
 

‘Just tell me where I should line up’

Dan Rather is sometimes pointed out as an example of liberal bias in the media. It’s hard to understand why, though, when you look at what Rather has had to say about the "war on terrorism."

"George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where."

"Whatever arguments one may or may not have had with George Bush the younger before September 11, he is our commander in chief, he’s the man now. And we need unity, we need steadiness. I’m not preaching about it. We all know this."

"I would willingly die for my country at a moment’s notice and on the command of my president."

The ‘liberal bias’ hoax

Of the many myths about the US media, the two most common are that we have a "free press" and that we have a "liberal" media. In its ads for the aggressively right-wing Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman, sums up these two myths in a single quote: "America guarantees a free press… Freedom relies on a fair press."

The implication of Ailes’ idiotic statement is that Fox is providing a right-wing balance against the liberal bias of the mainstream press. But is there a liberal bias?

Nation columnist Eric Alterman recently did a study of newspaper articles and found that since 1992, the word "media" appeared close to the phrase "liberal bias" 469 times. The words "media" and "conservative bias" were linked only 17 times. As Alterman notes, "If people are disposed to believe that the media have a liberal bias, it’s because that’s what the media have been telling them all along."

Likewise, right-wing "watchdog" groups have orchestrated well-financed campaigns to squelch any deviation in the mainstream media. "We are training our guns on any media outlet or any reporter interfering with America’s war on terrorism or trying to undermine the authority of President Bush," said L Brent Bozell III, founder of the Media Research Center (MRC). Or, as the MRC’s director of media research Rick Noyes put it: "What we were looking for was home-team sports reporting."

The truth is that the media is far from "liberal"—and far from free. The press is free only for those who own the press — that is, individual billionaires and huge corporations. And those gatekeepers of who can and cannot appear on the news or in the editorial pages overwhelmingly share the assumptions of the tiny elite that runs this country.

Far from liberal, they share a narrow worldview that accepts the "right" of the US military and the free market to dominate people’s lives around the world – and this is what we see reflected in the corporate media. What "debate" we see in the media is overwhelmingly between people who agree on the fundamentals – but occasionally disagree on how best to sell their right-wing agenda.
 

Why Donahue got canned at MSNBC

Veteran television talk show host Phil Donahue had his show pulled by MSNBC in February. Why? A leaked internal report says that his show presented "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."

"He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and sceptical of the administration’s motives," the report said. Of course, you won’t see any leaked reports about how notorious right-wingers, such as Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume at Fox News, consistently present pro-war, pro-Bush voices.

The leaked NBC document describes Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace." In fact, Donahue’s show averaged more than 4,46,000 viewers and was the top-rated show on MSNBC, outperforming Hardball with Chris Matthews.

But NBC is in a race to the bottom with Fox – to see which network can wrap itself in the largest flag. Cutting out Donahue was part of NBC’s strategy for shedding anything that might make it seem like a "liberal" network. 

(Socialist Worker, March 19, 2003)
(http://www.zmag.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 12

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