Begin forwarded message: Date: July 1, 2005 11:14:16 PM PDT To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], Lib <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, o <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, om <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED], quiche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], ctrl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ctrl] Baiting, Not Debating By Robert Parry
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Baiting, Not Debating
By Robert Parry A few years ago as the Iraq War loomed, I had breakfast in Washington with a prominent out-of-town liberal thinker who was expecting a Great Debate about war and peace, between the merits of invading Iraq and finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. I stifled any overt sign of disbelief so as not to be rude, but I had worked in Washington for a quarter century. I had watched the rise of the neoconservatives in the 1980s and the consolidation of conservative media power in the 1990s. It was painfully clear that the nation was headed for a Great Baiting, not a Great Debate. There should have been no doubt what would happen to anyone who questioned George W. Bush's case for war. The dissenters would be baited, ridiculed, marginalized, and drowned out by accusations of disloyalty as well as epithets about "Saddam sympathizers." Which is, of course, what happened. War critics were treated like fringe nut cases, while nearly every major Washington pundit fell for the Bush administration's deceptions about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Just look at the editorial pages on Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations. Now, amid the rising death toll in Iraq, a hopeful new line from some pundits is that the nation is on the cusp of a serious debate about the war's future - as Bush finally levels with the American people, regains their trust and enlists them in the sacrifices ahead. In one of these columns, published by the Washington Post, The New Republic's editor Peter Beinart observed that "a plurality of Americans now believe they were 'deliberately misled' before the war. When the president talks to the country about Iraq on Tuesday night, he needs to address that. "Otherwise, he'll never have the credibility to tell Americans the harsh truth: that Iraqi troops won't be ready to defend their government for two years or more. And until they can, brave young U.S. soldiers will have to keep doing the job." [Washington Post, June 26, 2005] No Exit Of course, Beinart, like other leading pundits, rules out any substantive debate about withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. He calls that suggestion "breathtakingly irresponsible." So, presumably, the only permissible outcome of this latest Great Debate must be a consensus to "stay the course" and make Bush's Iraq policy succeed. But even that truncated debate, with Bush leveling with the American people, surely will not happen. Does anyone believe that Bush will "address" how he "deliberately misled" the country to war? Or that if he did so, that would somehow earn him the credibility to explain how thousands of additional U.S. soldiers must die in Iraq because Bush and his advisers can't think of a way out of the mess? Rather, Bush has already signaled how he intends to deal with the growing doubts about both his pre-war rationalizations and his foundering war policy. The American people can expect another round of baiting, not debating. That was the significance of Bush's unleashing his deputy chief of staff Karl Rove to mock "liberals" for supposedly demonstrating a cowardly naivety in the face of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said in a speech to the Conservative Party of New York State on June 22, 2005. "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the Twin Towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble," Rove said. Demonizing Durbin More-http://issuesandalibis.org/ __________________________________________________
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