Rewriting
history in the Gathering Fog of War
LINDA
DIEBEL
WASHINGTON�Beware the Iraqi
navy. Watch out for fake U.S. soldiers in Iraq. And take note, the "Mother
Of All Bombs" is really a psychological device.
The weirdness of war is upon us.
Just one harebrained notion after another. We're left shaking our heads.
But in the gathering fog of this
particular war with Iraq, there's a new twist: flexible history.
Recent history is being rewritten
on the fly, and with born-again vigour, by White House briefers, Pentagon
spin doctors and U.S. military analysts.
These novel versions of events
are not only irritating, they increasingly challenge our Canadian history
on everything from World War II to the 1999 military intervention in
Kosovo.
"There was never a war more easy
to stop," U.S. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz indignantly told
U.S. war veterans Tuesday about World War II. He compared the failure of
the world community to stop Germany's Adolf Hitler to today's indifference
to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and applauded the American sacrifice.
"Many of you served in that
terrible war," said Wolfowitz.
"You know firsthand what it cost
the U.S. in terms of lives and treasure. You saw what it cost the world �
40-50 million dead, cities destroyed, great nations laid waste."
True. The world did dither
through the 1930s. But what Wolfowitz failed to mention was that
the United States did not get involved in that war until more than two
years after Canada was fighting it, and then only after Pearl Harbor was
bombed by the Japanese on Dec. 7, 1941.
Washington ignored pleas from its allies, including Canada,
as Britain was pulverized by German bombs, beginning in 1939.
"Well, we weren't allies
then," U.S. security analyst George Friedman told the Star when asked
about World War II. The Star brought up the subject because Friedman was
lecturing Canada on how to be a good ally.
The fog of war is nothing new. In
every conflict, one gets hyped "psyop" stories, head-scratchers and
fast-breaking scenarios, usually difficult to check and later proving to
be false.
In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the
most infamous example was the story about Iraqi soldiers ripping babies
from incubators in Kuwait City hospitals. There were eyewitnesses,
including a young woman � actually the daughter of the ambassador
to the U.S. � who broke hearts around the world with her tearful accounts.
It took congressional hearings
after the war for the story to be proven untrue. This time, we have seen
White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer argue that NATO launched military
intervention in Kosovo in 1999 in order to oust Serbian dictator Slobodan
Milosevic and effect "regime change."
It's clear such rewrites annoy
Prime Minister Jean Chr�tien. On ABC's This Week Sunday, he
dismissed "this notion in the United States that I find a bit surprising"
and pointed out that Milosevic's defeat in elections was a later
by-product of military intervention.
Fleischer compares Security
Council inaction on Iraq to its failure to intervene in Rwanda when
thousands in the African country were being slaughtered.
But he does not mention the
widely held view that Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the
U.N., led the charge for the United Nations to abandon Rwanda, leaning on
Security Council members not to use the word "genocide."
The problem is that "White House
speak" can become conventional wisdom. People have busy lives; they don't
always have time to really think about every item in the onslaught of
information.
Most often, spin can be funny.
Last week, for example, the U.S.
military tested its new 9,000-kilogram bomb, which White House and
Pentagon officials refer to as the "Mother Of All Bombs." In military
lingo, it's dubbed MOAB, for "Massive Ordnance Air Burst."
"They could have picked a better
name," Mayor Dave Sakrison � of Moab, Utah � told CNN Tuesday. "Everyone
around town is pretty much appalled."
With a straight face, Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to convince a Pentagon briefing that the
main focus of the biggest conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal is its
"psychological component."
"It's not small," said Joint
Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Richard Meyers, about a bomb that could
probably flatten a good part of Baghdad.
There were guffaws.
Then, there was President George
W. Bush's assertion earlier this year that Iraq could load smallpox onto a
pilotless aircraft "launched from a vessel off the American coast" and
reach "hundreds of miles inland."
The Iraqi navy consists of a few
obsolete vessels.
U.S. military spinners also
insist Saddam is having fake U.S. military uniforms made � "identical down
to the last detail," according a Central Command official � so he can
blame atrocities on American soldiers.
The Pentagon assures troops that
its chemical warfare suits won't leak, despite news that the military lost
track of some 250,000 potentially defective Battle Dress Overgarments,
according to the New York Times.
"If the eventuality ends up that
we have to issue (other suits), although we've done extensive checks into
our inventory, we will inspect each one of them prior to them being
issued," said Maj.-Gen. John Doesburg.
Finally, there's the "we're
bombing them so they won't know when the war starts" scenario. In recent
weeks, U.S. and British jets have doubled air patrols over Iraq's northern
and southern "no-fly" zones and repeatedly bombed surface-to-air missile
sites.
The object, military officials
told reporters, is to disguise the real start of war.
As if it will be hard to miss.
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