Did you catch any recent speeches by George Bush? He's been giving quite a few lately, ramping up for his 2004 election campagin. First stop - Baghdad. <a href="http://www.whitehouse.org/news/2003/031703.asp" title="President's televised address granting Saddam Hussein 48 hours to stop mistaking this George Bush for that other sissypants chicken quitter">President's televised address granting Saddam Hussein 48 hours...</a> on <a href="http://www.whitehouse.org/">WhiteHouse.Org</a> has a translated transcript of one of them, for those of you that have trouble understanding the US President. <bq>For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have successfully crushed Iraq into the ground with crippling economic sanctions and almost-constant bombing of nearly half their worthless desert landscape. ... Twelve years ago, another American President named George Bush stormed into Iraq on a noble mission of political expediency and petrochemical liberation. Today, Saddam Hussein had better stop mistaking this George Bush with that one.</bq> I really think the translation brings out the true meaning much better. Mark that as one of my sources for the upcoming war. If my news is going to be fake, it might as well be funny, too. <a href="http://canada.com/national/story.asp?id=2857FA87-21EF-4E1B-9019-F1E0637ED0FE" title="45 nations back war, U.S. says - Americans 'disappointed' Canada won't join coalition: Thousands of troops take up positions for invasion that could come tonight">45 nations back war</a> on <a href="http://canada.com/">Canada.com</a> notes that the number of countries supporting the US in their unilateral action has magically risen 50% overnight, according to a statement by Colin Powell. <iq>The list of countries supporting war includes 15 that do not want to be publicly identified</iq>. Let's see ... they aren't going to pay for anything, they aren't sending troops and they don't want to be identified. Wow, those are pretty staunch allies. Let's take a look at the list of countries that are willing to be identified (from <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,917268,00.html">US claims 45 nations in 'coalition of willing'</a> from the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/">Guardian</a>): <bq>Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan</bq> Again, wow. An impressive list of leading lights in the world. About half weren't even countries until the Soviet Union broke up (lucky for Bush that happened, eh?) and we've got some nice client states (El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Phillipines) and human rights violators (Colombia, currently #1, and Turkey, also with some 10s of thousands of Kurds killed per year). Of these, the troop breakdown is: UK - 45,000, Australia - 2,000 and the US coming in with the rest at about 250,000. That's quite an evenly-divided coalition - certainly not indicative that the US is spearheading the war. Perhaps the proof offered just wasn't convincing enough. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents/">Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S.</a> on <a href="http://www.cnn.com/">CNN</a> mentions the <iq>obviously fake</iq> evidence with with Colin Powell attempted to convince the UN that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Afterwards, he was quoted as saying: <iq>It was the information that we had. We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine.</iq> What? Fine? No, not fine. Very wrong. Your justifications for war just went up in smoke, but you plunge ahead anyway? <iq>President Bush even highlighted the documents in his State of the Union address on January 28.</iq> Those convincing numbers he rattled off, with names and makes and quantities of munitions? All from that admittedly fake documents. He's not too worried about it though. In <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20030319_1037.html">Gov't Prepares Americans for Casualties</a> on <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/">ABC News</a> reports that Bush has given the Congress official justification for the war: <bq> In two separate documents, Bush said diplomacy has failed to protect America's security, linked Saddam's regime with the al-Qaida network and laying out a new rationale for war said captured Iraqi officials could identify terrorists living in the United States.</bq> He's still using the non-existent evidence of Saddam's links to Al-Qaida. I hardly need to point out that the Bush administration's actions so far do not meet even an impossibly flexible definition of <iq>diplomacy</iq> or that <iq>America's security</iq> is in no way threatened by Iraq (unless we're officially counting Israel as the 51st state now). Of course, once Iraq is attacked, the whole Muslim world will bristle and will heavily increase the odds that there will be terrrorist attacks. Our security is <i>decreased</i> by this war. In a salute to Orwell, however, the administration will apply its perverse logic and use these attacks to retroactively justify the war. John Pilger writes in a <a href="http://pilger.carlton.com/print/132823" title="The Blair Government has known, almost from the day it came to office in 1997, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly destroyed following the Gulf War.">March 13</a> article that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction that the US claims to have was obtained from one <iq>Iraqi general Hussein Kamel</iq>. In fact: <bq>Bush, his officials and leading American commentators, have frequently lauded General Kamel as the most reliable source of information on Iraq's weapons.</bq> However, a recently released <iq>transcript [of a] debreif[ing] by senior officials of the United Nations inspections team</iq> quotes this reliable source as saying that when he left Iraq <iq>[He] ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed</iq>. Since Kamel was killed in 1996 (when he returned to Iraq), it was quite simple to only use portions of his debriefing to serve as evidence, leaving out the less useful parts. Pilger goes on to mention how both the start of the Vietnam War (Gulf of Tonkin) and the start of North Vietnamese bombing were justified with faked attacks. The administration thinks that we are so detached from reality that they felt the need to have Ari Fleischer remind us that <iq>Americans must be prepared for loss of life</iq>, as if we need to be reminded of such basic things in our fog of affluence. Perhaps we should be happy for at least that little bit of honesty, as last night CNN treated me to a report cheekily titled <i>Moving Day</i> and showed some undetermined desert folk packing the back of a truck with all of their possessions. CNN made sure to ease my conscience by letting me know that they were doing so in <iq>an atmosphere not of fear, but of calm</iq>, and then panned the camera to catch the many <iq>smiles and laughter</iq>, despite the greatest fear that loomed over their heads - <iq>Saddam's poisonous gasses</iq>. No mention made of the bombs or war or notoriously racist US military coming to pay them a visit, which is also only obliquely mentioned, as if half a city has decided to move out because they just needed to try something new. Since we can easily see that the media is only too-ready to treat us to a soft-focus (think Elizabeth Taylor ca. 2000) version of war, perhaps it's handy to have a bunch of glossaries available which we can use to look up the real meanings of those delectable code-phrases we've grown to know and love. <a href="http://www.alternet.org/">AlterNet</a> has the <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15372">The Dubya War Glossary</a> by Geov Parrish with more classic definitions, like collateral damage: <bq>The hapless schmucks that happen to be in the way when the U.S. bombs civilian facilities or residential neighborhoods. When they do it to us, it is called terrorism. No longer commonly used; such deaths are now ignored entirely.</bq> or the one for disarm: <bq>To blow to smithereens. E.g.: 'Saddam Hussein's destruction of his missiles is an impediment to U.S. plans to disarmSaddam Hussein.'</bq> or the one for peace: <bq>[t]he mythical state achieved when the United States has a complete global monopoly on the use of military force. Not to be confused with "democracy," "freedom," or "justice."</bq> <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/rooij03132003.html">A Glossary of Warmongering</a> on <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/">CounterPunch</a> by Paul de Rooij has a long list of terms with in-depth descriptions, covering some of the more obscure, but still useful, terms, like the US definition of <iq>democracy</iq> when applied abroad (<iq>A useful dictatorship of the remaining banana republic</iq>) or the popular <iq>[f]ailure to comply</iq> when applied to Iraq (<iq>Foregone conclusion: Iraq will never be able to live up to the US's high standards</iq>). Whereas those will help in general in extracting meaning from your nightly broadcast/bombardment, there are also some who have envisioned scenarios of what the reporting will be like in general. It will be interesting to compare the actual events against these predicted ones. <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0316-04.htm">The War of Misinformation Has Begun</a> on <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/">Common Dreams</a> by Robert Fisk envisions the first few weeks of the war: <bq>Within hours, they will enter the city of Basra, to be greeted by its Shia Muslim inhabitants as liberators. US and British troops will be given roses and pelted with rice ? a traditional Arab greeting ? as they drive "victoriously" through the streets.</bq> Watch out for that one...it's probably coming up relatively soon. It is proof that this is a war of liberation. It will get heavy coverage by the US press and will be closely followed by a George Bush appearance. Following this will be: <bq>...the macabre discovery of torture chambers and "rape-rooms" and prisoners with personal accounts of the most terrible suffering at the hands of Saddam's secret police. This will "prove" how right "we" are to liberate these poor people. Then the US will have to find the "weapons of mass destruction" that supposedly provoked this bloody war.</bq> I don't think we have to worry that the evidence will be 'found', whether it exists or not. Don't forget the plans for nuclear weapons that were 'found' in a cave in Afghanistan (that never came up again, did it? Seems like a pretty important thing if true, no? Or maybe it was just something to say to keep the fear running high.) The torture rooms are a foregone conclusion, Saddam is known to have them and he is a known ruthless monster. The weapons of mass destruction will be trickier because there are a lot of people who have gone over the country with a fine-toothed comb and will be ready to refute and 'evidence' the US finds. So be ready for discoveries that can only be announced, but have to remain secret otherwise, to protect the lives of people in the field (or something like that ... like all the other evidence the Pentagon can say they have, but can never show). <iq>Bunkers allegedly containing chemical weapons will be cordoned off ? too dangerous for any journalist to approach, of course</iq> (much like the 'weapons stores' found in Afghanistan). If real ones are found, they'll have to work quickly to rub out the US or British flags that may still adorn the parts we sold them. It won't actually be necessary to let independent investigators verify though because enough people will believe to make it true, and doubters can conveniently be labelled terrorists or anti-American. Sprinkled liberally throughout will be interviews with people in the States and their fears about war (as if the fears of people not under attack are far more important than those of people wondering whether they'll be dead in the morning due to an errant or not-so-errant bomb). The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/">NY Times</a> seems especially fond of describing the wait and uncertainty of war as far worse than war itself, e.g. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/international/worldspecial/20BAGH.html?ex=1048827600&en=ce3561636fb80ef7&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE">Wait Over, Americans Voice Relief and Anxiety</a>. They interview people who are <iq>relieved, almost, that the long buildup to war has ended, that the excruciating wait is over, that the diplomats will at long last step aside and allow the nation's military to do what needs to be done.</iq> Not a lot of spin in that sentence, is there? It implies that the Times thinks diplomacy was doomed to fail (a point they spent months hammering into their readers) and that the military action is necessary, but even the Times has no idea what they're going to do or why. For people who don't expect to be bombed, I'm sure <iq>[t]he uncertainty of what is going to happen is the worst part of it.</iq> Baghdad citizens currently under strike will disagree. If they still can. The New York Times disagrees and reports that <iq> the extraordinary friendliness with which Iraqis faced with an American-led military attack have continued to greet visitors, especially from the United States and Britain</iq>, with only <iq> isolated incidents that confirmed that for some people here, America truly is the Great Satan</iq>. Carefully examine the message the Times is funnelling into your brain: Iraqi citizens welcome US attack (though it will destroy their city as a sad consequence of <iq>American bombs and missiles sent to topple [Saddam]</iq>), those that don't think the US should attack are isolated loners, and the indecision, the waiting for all the useless diplomacy to die off, is far worse than war, which <iq>needs to be done</iq>, though no justification is given. There will also be plenty of footage of soldiers writing home, playing some sort of sport in the desert or attending pep rallies. Explosions will also be featured heavily, but only as clinical and clean, never actually showing anyone dying because of one. We will see much repeated footage as the Pentagon censor swings into place. The preceding barrage of information is intended as a bulwark against the flood of propoganda that will continue to wash across your senses. Remember these things: <ol> All evidence or legal justifications for war in Iraq have been refuted or revealed to be fake. The coalition of the willing are mostly not willing and are, for the most part, not admirable allies. Any and all weapons of mass destruction Saddam has were sold to him by the British of the US. When Saddam gassed the Kurds, the British and US were his allies and remained so until the invasion of Kuwait 2 years later. The embargo against Iraq doesn't let in medical supplies of any kind (since they might have dual-use as biological weapons). Every iota of information received from Iraq is filtered by the Pentagon. Period. </ol> Enjoy the show.