using the O-word

[pynchonoid]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16350
The New York Review of Books 
Volume 50, Number 10 · June 12, 2003

America Goes Backward

By Stanley Hoffmann

"[...] Indeed, a technique that the administration has
used brilliantly is the manipulation of fear.
Americans have been "shocked and awed" by September
11, and the President has found in this criminal act
not just a rationale, hitherto missing, for his
administration, but a lever he could use to increase
his, and his country's, power. All that was needed
was, first, to proclaim that we were at war (something
other societies attacked by terrorists have not done),
second, to extend that war to states sheltering or
aiding terrorist groups, and third, to allege
connections between Islamist terrorists and "rogue
states," such as Iraq and Iran, engaged in efforts to
obtain or build weapons of mass terror. When, a few
days before the war on Iraq began, the President
several times linked Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda at a
press conference, not one of the sixteen journalists
who asked questions about Iraq challenged him. 

The case against Iraq's regime was at first based on
stoking American fears about hidden weapons of mass
destruction (while downplaying fears that North Korean
nuclear bombs might provoke). When it became clear
that Saddam Hussein's ability to threaten American
security had been much exaggerated since the weapons
proved hard to find, and the possession by Iraq of
nuclear weapons was effectively denied by the UN
inspectors, the reason for the war was shifted to
human rights and democracy.

Another technique was a resort to Orwellian rhetoric.
The President told Americans that the war was not a
policy chosen among others, but a necessity imposed by
Saddam. Nations that resisted the administration's
rush to war were presented as hostile for reasons of
greed or of an incurable anti-Americanism. Colin
Powell stated that Jacques Chirac had said that France
wouldn't go to war against Iraq "under any
circumstances." In fact, as Powell must have known,
and as I have been told on very good authority, the
French President had earmarked French forces for war
if the inspectors, after a limited number of weeks and
after having followed a series of "benchmarks" not
dissimilar from those Tony Blair had demanded,
concluded that Iraq did have forbidden weapons and
could not be disarmed peacefully. French diplomacy
could be faulted for not making its positions clearer;
but Chirac's statement referred only to the text of
the second resolution drafted by the US and Britain
for submission to the Security Council, and then
withdrawn. On March 16, after the US turned down
Chirac's proposal to consider using force if the
inspectors reached an impasse in Iraq in thirty days,
he told Christine Amanpour on 60 Minutes that if "our
strategy, inspections, were failing, we would consider
all the options, including war." Equally Orwellian on
the part of the US was the talk about "the coalition,"
used even when a military move was made only by US
forces. [...] "

"Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten
history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of
which is benevolently termed 'spin,' as if it were no
more harm than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know
better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We
believe and doubt at the same time--it seems a
condition of political thought in a modern superstate
to be permanently of at least two minds on most
issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to
those in power who wish to remain there preferably
forever."
- --Thomas Pynchon, _1984_ Foreword, p xiii


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com