by Christine Barie (artist) & Kathie Malley-Morrison
Category: Terrorism
Stoking Fear: We Must Remember How the Iraq War Was Sold, Part 2.
by Roy Eidelson
After the invasion of Iraq, when WMD stockpiles couldn’t be found, the Bush administration simply shifted gears a bit. It continued to feed the public’s fears by linking the war in Iraq to the larger “global war on terror.” Speaking at the National Lawyers Convention of the Federalist Society in Washington, D.C., in 2006, Cheney offered this: “On the morning of September 11th, we saw that the terrorists need to get only one break, need to be right only once, to carry out an attack. We have to be right every time to stop them. So to adopt a purely defensive posture, to simply brace for attacks and react to them, is to play against lengthening odds, and to leave the nation permanently vulnerable.”
When debate over the correct course in Iraq intensified even more the following year, the president yet again resorted to “It’s a Dangerous World” appeals. Bush warned of looming catastrophe with public statements like this: “If we do not defeat the terrorists and extremists in Iraq, they won’t leave us alone—they will follow us to the United States of America. That’s what makes this battle in the war on terror so incredibly important.” The fearmongering didn’t stop when Bush left office. In a 2010 Veterans Day speech in St. Louis, General John Kelly—most recently Donald Trump’s chief of staff—insisted: “Our enemy is savage, offers absolutely no quarter, and has a single focus, and that is either kill every one of us here at home or enslave us with a sick form of extremism that serves no God or purpose that decent men and women could ever grasp.”
Today it’s clear that Iraq did not have an active WMD program. Yet many Americans—including more than half of Fox News viewers—continue to erroneously believe that such a program was found. So too, in a 2011 poll almost half of Americans believed that Iraq either gave substantial support to al-Qaeda or was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Neither claim is true. The persistence of these false beliefs demonstrates the staying power of manipulative psychological appeals designed to exploit our fears.
But despite the devastation wrought, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that the Iraq War created its share of winners too. Consider the executives and largest shareholders in companies like Halliburton’s former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root; General Dynamics; Lockheed Martin; and ExxonMobil, to name just a few. These corporations garnered huge war profits through no-bid defense contracts, oil sales, environmental cleanup, infrastructure repair, prison services, and private security. Indeed, speaking to defense contractors at an August 2015 private event, the former president’s brother Jeb Bush—who failed to gain the 2016 Republican presidential nomination—explained, “Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.”
Sadly, the high-level machinations that produced the Iraq War are far from unique. History shows that fearmongering has long been a standard tactic used to rally public support and acquiescence for military interventions that are both unwarranted and unwise. It has happened many times before, it has happened since, and it will happen yet again—perhaps soon—unless we collectively learn to recognize, resist, and counter these false appeals from self-serving peddlers of war.
Roy Eidelson is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and was a member of the American Psychological Association for over 25 years, prior to his resignation. He is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 25 Mar 2019.
What brand will you settle for? Maybe not the “Made in America” Variety. Part II
Meeting hall where the armistice talks between the North Korean and Republif of Korea-USA-UN forces were held in 1953. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Author: Clay Gilliland.
by Kathie MM
Negative peace sounds pretty good, right? Signing truces and other agreements to end all the dirty little wars in which our government involves us, and putting a stop to terrorism, gang wars, domestic violence, and the other forms of violence haunting our lives today—wouldn’t that be heavenly? Yes, but wouldn’t it be even better to help peace endure at all levels of society?
Unfortunately, at the international and national levels, the history of peace treaties, ceasefires, nonaggression pacts, and truces is not very encouraging. Treaties and truces have been made and broken repeatedly, at the cost of millions and millions of lives, as greedy governments have used increasingly sophisticated armaments to seize land and resources from resistant others.
At the family level, despite innovative truce bells and family truce intervals, marital cease-and-desist agreements often fail to produce lasting marital peace, leading instead to the negative peace of separation, divorce, and angry children, with all parties smoldering with a sense of unfair treatment.
As for gang violence, truces among violent gangs are relatively commonplace, but like those between nations, also commonly broken. Some evidence indicates that while truces may work for awhile, gang warfare usually resumes in the absence of efforts to address fundamental political and social welfare challenges like marginalization, unemployment, and lack of equal opportunity.
Such concerns are very much the purview of positive peace advocates. Positive peace, by definition, addresses the roots of violence. As conceptualized by Johan Galtung and other peace advocates, positive peace means cooperation for mutual and equal benefit. It means reform of the political and social structures that create and reinforce inequality. It means genuine respect for human rights. It means that women’s voices matter, that people of color don’t need to fear entering their churches, that people of non-Christian faiths can walk fearlessly on our streets. It means that war profiteers are not enabled to put their pursuit of profits ahead of the well-being—indeed the lives—of everyone whom they can “other” for their differences.
Positive peace may sound like the impossible dream, the delusion of cockeyed optimists, but if we don’t strive for it, what kind of future will the world have?
For further reading, see Galtung’s Mini-theory of peace.
Enlightenment and Social Hope, Part 4
By Stefan Schindler
The recent triumph of anti-democratic Republican Party politics was made possible with the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the rise to political power of Christian fundamentalism.
In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes, and then appointed George W. Bush the winner, in what was nothing less than a judicial coup d’état.
The Cheney-Bush Administration then launched a lie-based war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of which now exceeds two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East, and widespread Muslim hatred of America. In 2008, the Cheney-Bush Administration climaxed its reign of deficit spending and global terror with a domestic economic meltdown which saw American citizens suffer the greatest recession since the Depression of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, America’s homegrown economic apartheid becomes more extreme with every passing week; the Pentagon budget blooms to finance more wars; fifty percent of university teachers are slave-wage adjuncts; more than fifty million Americans are deprived of healthcare; and the planet careens toward nuclear war and ecological apocalypse.
Hence we might conclude that Immanuel Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.
Hence also – as Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, I. F. Stone, Buckminster Fuller, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Dot Walsh, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis and Meg Randa, Howard Zinn and John Lennon would applaud – we should revise America’s Pledge of Allegiance to read:
“I pledge allegiance to the planet, and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, universally sacred, with nourishment and beauty for all.”