NP? news from reliable sources: Rich white male non-combattants on TV urge wider war

[Doug Millison]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11952

A rabidly pro-war cadre of journalists and pundits have become
cheer-leaders for an aggressive and expansive war, and increasingly
draconian domestic policies, following the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11.
As the Bush administration rapidly expands law enforcement power and
national security authority, a phalanx of white male commentators with
magazines of opinion like the New Republic and the Weekly Standard have
become a steady bellicose chorus, flirting with macabre doomsday scenarios.
Their voices urge the administration to escalate the battle beyond
Afghanistan and to use more force.

By calling for Bush to step up the war effort, curtail civil liberties,
consider torture, and imagine the deaths of tens of millions of Muslims,
these writers and TV personalities have dominated the intellectual debate.
By grossly distorting the positions of critics, they have helped to give
Bush a free ride and undermine healthy discourse. This pundit group has
upped the ante for the Bush administration, either pushing it further to
the right, or providing it with cover to keep pushing the envelope -- no
matter how far the Bush administration goes in expanding security power and
remaking the international landscape, the war boys will still be calling
for more.

Surprisingly, the Washington Post Op-Ed page has become what may be the
friendliest environment to many of these writers. It used to be that the
Wall Street Journal's Op-Ed page was the most reactionary and predictable
of the national print press. But it now has stiff competition, as Michael
Massing notes in the Nation: "Since September 11th, the Washington Post
Op-Ed page has been a playpen for columnist-commanders. No fewer that seven
regular contributors compete to offer the toughest, manliest views on the
conflict. William Kristol has used the page to attack Colin Powell, George
Will to thumb his nose at the State Department and Robert Novak to deride
the CIA."

Massing adds that the most ferocious of the bellicose boys writing for the
Post is Charles Krauthammer, who expresses "contempt for the
administration's food drops and concern for civilian casualties." "Why have
we not loosed the B-52s and the B-2s to carpet-bomb Taliban positions?"
Krauthammer asks. Evidently six weeks of relentless bombing is not enough.
War expansion is a major goal of the belligerent bunch, and now a defacto
goal of the Post, "since the paper has run at least a dozen columns
demanding the overthrow of Sadaam Hussein, yet not a single one has
bothered to consider how daunting the task might be," writes Massing. Nor
has the Post considered what an attack on Iraq's impact might be on
civilian populations.

[...]

The far-right hysteria put forth by these militants of the chattering class
strengthens the position of the right in the Bush administration. One
result, for example is Bush's support of the Ashcroft plan for the
establishment of kangaroo military courts to jail or execute non-Americans.
President Bush admitted that this plan would involve "dismissing the
principles of law and the rules of evidence" that provide the foundation
for the U.S. legal system. As conservative columnist William Safire
explains in the NY Times, the Bush kangaroo court can conceal evidence by
citing national security and make up its own rules. It can find a defendant
guilty even if a third of the officers disagree, and execute the alien with
no review by any civilian court. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls
this Soviet style abomination : "a full and fair trial."

Fox News Network the most conservative of the cable news operations has
also sounded a steady pro-war drumbeat. Here's their star prime-time "go to
guy," Bill O'Reilly: "The US should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to
rubble -- the airport, the power plants, their water facilities, the roads.
The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target
civilians, but if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they
starve, period."

Perhaps the most disturbing of the B-Boy habits is their uncontrolled lust
for revenge -- revenge for the actual events of 9/11 and for theoretical
future attacks. In fact, doomsday scenarios, like terrorists exploding a
nuclear bomb in D.C. seem to have been conjured up by the writers
themselves to instill fear and justify their positions. The rabid
Krauthammer's revenge fantasies are primarily focused on Iraq. As Jonathan
Scchell reports in the November 26th issue of The Nation "In a 'total war'
Krauthammer offered that the distinction of civilian casualties was a
'nicety' that the US could no longer afford. He wanted to know 'if we (the
U.S.) were still ready to 'wipe Iraq off the face of the earth.'"
Krauthammer believes that "if we are not prepared to wage total war we risk
disaster on a scale we have never seen and can barely imagine."

[...]

It is difficult to grasp the depths of pent-up, vengeful emotions that have
been unleashed by the terrorists attack in September. It is astonishing,
that these pundits can make no meaningful distinction between criminal
terrorists and suspected terrorists without a portfolio, or between hated
despots and the population they oppress. "If the terrorists are Muslims,
then all Muslims must pay," seems to be the credo.

The more-militant-than-thou epidemic has even spread to the news weeklies:
The normally liberal Jonathan Alter (Newsweek) has apparently caught the
disease, raising the spectre of torture as a way to address the problem of
terrorism. "OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses," Alter writes, "at least
not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled
investigation of the greatest crime in American history"  [...]

As with Alter pouncing on "reactionary left-wingers," pundits and
columnists have red-baited critics, distorting their positions. With their
belligerence, and with the cooperation of their editors , they have shifted
the debate so far to the right that any sensible critic gets labeled a
pacifist or even a traitor. A prime example of this is Atlantic Editor,
Michael Kelly, writing in the Washington Post: "American pacifists are on
the side of future mass murders of Americans," they are "objectively
pro-terrorist," "evil" and "liars."

The disease isn't limited to the predictably conservative Rupert Murdoch
controlled Weekly Standard, either, or even to the newly belligerent Post.
The third hot bed of militance is the historically liberal New Republic
(which has always been a unswerving supporter of Israel) . Under editor
Peter Beinart's stewardship, The New Republic "has enthusiastically and
rather unconditionally supported the new patriotism," according to Marc
Cooper, writing on Working For Change. "As ardent a militarist as he
(Beinart) has become, his favored target seems be the American Left."

Beinart has kept up a stream of steady attacks on dissidents, arguing that
the Left's professed concern over maintaining civil liberties in times of
national emergency is disingenuous. In another of his signed columns,
Beinart writes: "What distinguishes leftists from other Americans, then,
isn't their commitment to civil liberties, but their lack of commitment to
the anti-terrorism efforts with which those civil liberties may conflict."

It truly seems like a dark time for debate and dissent in America. Many
patriotic critics, who offer complex, nuanced responses, have been shut out
of the discourse, despite their willingness to promote military response.

In their war-hungry screeds, the belligerent right seem to be responding to
an imaginary leftist drive to sit quietly and do nothing. None of them seem
to have heard voices like Texas populist Jim Hightower, who writes:

"On the military front, the United States has no choice but to go after the
bastards. Terrorism ain't beanbags. The ruthless mass murderers smacked our
nation and all of civilization right in the face, and turning the other
cheek only means we'll get smacked again.

[...]

Military action does not have to mean killing innocent Afghanis, who are
clearly overjoyed to be freed from their Taliban oppressors. Civilians,
whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, are not a "nicety" to be dismissed as
inconsequential "collateral damage." And any thinking dialogue should
accept the premise that a significant difference exists between "blaming
America" and trying to understand how American policies have affected the
situation that created this threat. The current public debate needs more
light and far less heat, as the future of the globe is at stake. Policy
makers need to hear from and understand the wide range of thoughtful
patriotic opinion that tends to be able to think short-term and long-term
at the same time, a useful skill that is sorely misssing among the
impulsive rants currently distorting public debate.