Empire vs. Republic

George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive wars is creating a new deep divide in U.S. politics. On one side, Bush and his backers see the Iraq War as the start of an American global empire built around unparalleled military power. On the other, a scattered grouping of skeptics dig in for what they see as a fight for the soul of the American republic.


Without doubt, the Bush side now owns the strategic high ground, asserting vindication in the U.S. ouster of Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein. Bush also can claim near total mastery of a U.S. news media that shed any pretense of “objectivity” as it flooded the nation with heroic images of American soldiers and heart-warming scenes of grateful Iraqis, while downplaying civilian dead and growing signs that many Iraqis resent the U.S. occupation.

The anti-empire side finds itself pinned down, too, by accusations that its opposition to the three-week war was naïve and even disloyal. Plus, it's a disorganized mix of political interests, ranging from old-time conservatives to traditional liberals, from the likes of Pat Buchanan to Howard Dean. Yet as imbalanced as this struggle now appears, both sides agree that it holds in its outcome the future of the American democratic experiment.

The pro-empire side argues that only a militarily assertive United States can address what Bush calls “gathering dangers” facing the nation – even if that means tighter constraints on liberty at home and freer use of U.S. troops abroad. The pro-republic forces say Bush’s imperial strategy is a sham – false security that cedes life-and-death national decisions to the dictates of one man.

Shallow Media

To the pro-republic side, part of the price for empire is the increasingly shallow U.S. news media that largely sanitized the war. Rather than troubling Americans with gruesome images of mangled and dismembered Iraqi bodies, including many children, the cable networks, in particular, edited the war in ways that helped avoid negativity and gave advertisers the feel-good content that plays best around their products.

Fox News may have pioneered this concept of casting the war in the gauzy light of heroic imagery, where Iraqi soldiers were “goons” and interviews with Americans at war were packaged with the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the soundtrack.

But the supposedly less ideological MSNBC may have carried the idea to even greater lengths with Madison-Avenue-style montages of the Iraq war. One showed U.S. troops in heroic postures moving through Iraq. The segment ended with an American boy surrounded by yellow ribbons for his father at war, and the concluding slogan, “Home of the Brave.”

Another MSNBC montage showed happy Iraqis welcoming U.S. troops as liberators and rejoicing at the toppling of Hussein. These stirring pictures ended with the slogan, “Let Freedom Ring.”

Left out of these “news” montages were any images of death and destruction. For instance, there was no scene of a newly orphaned 12-year-old Iraqi boy waving the stump of what’s left of his arms. No sense either of the unspeakable pain of a father who was injured in a U.S. bombing and was about to learn that his three young daughters, who were the center of his life, were dead.

The happy montages also sanitized out the horror of a mother who found her 20-year-old daughter in the ruins of a bombed-out restaurant, first her torso and then her head. The U.S. had bombed the restaurant in a residential area thinking Hussein was there.

Cable news also downplayed evidence that many Iraqis, while glad to see Hussein gone, were angered by the U.S. invasion and its aftermath, which brought widespread destruction, arson and looting, including the loss of priceless antiquities of Mesopotamia dating back more than 5,000 years. The reaction to the U.S. occupation has included marches by thousands of Iraqis demanding withdrawal of U.S. troops and calling for an Iran-like Islamic state.

The Wall Street Journal took note of the dueling coverage presented by domestic CNN and its CNNI Networks, which broadcasts to international viewers. While domestic CNN focused on happy stories, such as the rescue of U.S. prisoner-of-war Jessica Lynch, CNNI carried more scenes of wounded civilians overflowing Iraqi hospitals.

“During the Gulf War in 1991, [CNN] presented a uniform global feed that showed the war largely through American eyes,” the Journal reported. “Since then, CNN has developed several overseas networks that increasingly cater their programming to regional audiences and advertisers.” [WSJ, April 11, 2003]

Left unsaid by the Journal’s formulation of how CNN’s overseas affiliates “cater” to foreign audiences was the flip side of that coin, that domestic CNN is freer to shape a version of the news that is more satisfying to Americans and to U.S. advertisers.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/042103a.html