Rehabilitating George Bush and Tony
Blair
By David Edwards
March 24, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- YOU have to marvel at the
audacity of corporate journalists as
they switch between damning
“official enemies” to hell while
finding it within their hearts to
forgive members of the 1-per-cent
club literally anything.
George W Bush, the 43rd president of
the United States, bears
responsibility for the destruction
of an entire country, the killing of
one million Iraqis, the wounding and
displacement of countless millions
more.
Before “Dubya,” there had never been
a suicide bomb attack in Iraq — the
car bombs, the mass executions, the
disappearances, the endless
tortures, the bombs in London and
Madrid, the rise of Islamic State,
all began with him.
About this war criminal, Britain’s
leading “left-liberal” newspaper
wrote last month: “The Guardian view
on George W Bush: a welcome return.”
The fact that the paper was using
Bush to attack the execrable Donald
Trump did not justify the assertion,
however tongue-in-cheek, that “Bush
can be seen now as a paragon of
virtue. He sounds a lot better out
of office than in it.”
And so “the 43rd US president should
be applauded.” The Guardian had not
one word to say about his millions
of victims.
The New Statesman commented: “It
sounds flippant to say that compared
to Trump, Bush is starting to look
good, and this sentiment has become
a popular online joke within itself.
Nonetheless, the claim is grounded
in some reality.”
In similar vein, the Guardian last
month also gave space for
hard-right, former Spectator editor
Matthew d’Ancona to explain that
Tony Blair is speaking out on Brexit
because he “profoundly believes in
the power of human agency,” which
inspires “a sense of
responsibility.”
The rehabilitation of Bush and Blair
follows the deeper rehabilitation of
the US brand under Barack Obama.
After the Iraq disaster — too
drenched in blood and lies for even
the propaganda system to deny —
Obama’s task was to reassert the
myth of US benevolence. Corporate
media adulation duly followed.
Two Guardian titles from 2016 give
an idea: “Listening to Obama makes
me want to be American for a day.”
And: “Barack Obama: He has such
power... yet such humility.”
This moral whitewashing played a
vital role in reassuring the public
that, with Obama at the helm, the US
was under new, compassionate
management.
Presented as the pacifist president
who refused to “act” on Syria, the
truth of Obama was very different.
Arms sales analyst William Hartung
commented: “Many Americans would be
surprised to learn that his
administration has brokered more
arms deals than any administration
of the past 70 years, Republican or
Democratic.”
Having already destroyed Libya,
known in Washington as “Hillary’s
War,” Obama generously spent $1
billion on Syria-related operations
— about $1 of every $15 in the CIA’s
overall budget.
The US media watch website, Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting, supplied
some detail: “In addition to this,
the Obama administration has engaged
in crippling sanctions against the [Bashar]
al-Assad government, provided air
support for those looking to depose
him, incidentally funnelled arms to
Isis, and not incidentally aligned
the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army with
al-Qaida.”
It ought to have been impossible for
the same powers that lied their
way to catastrophic regime change in
Iraq to lie their way to
catastrophic regime change in Libya,
and to attempt the same yet again in
Syria.
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Exactly the same strategies were
employed: manufactured or hyped
crisis and the manipulation of the
United Nations in an effort to
achieve the real goal — collapse of
the enemy government at whatever
human cost.
Obama’s carefully protected image
allowed propagandists to sell the
West’s “responsibility to protect” —
it’s not that the United States and
Britain wanted anything from Libya
or Syria; they just wanted to
protect civilian life.
The affectation of compassionate
concern is crucial to the war
machine: “we” make “mistakes” but
“we” care; “we” mean well and “have
to do something.”
This is why members of the
executive, 1-per-cent club are so
readily forgiven — they have to be
presented as fundamentally benign.
Unless of course they harm the wrong
interests.
By tragicomic contrast, enemies of
the 1 per cent can never be
forgiven, even when there is
precious little to forgive.
In the Guardian, Catherine Bennett
responded to news that George
Galloway is planning the first in a
series of children’s books, Red
Molucca the Good Pirate.
Dripping with vitriol, Bennett
wondered “which of his talents,
along with the revelation of his
goodness,” “the Saddam [Hussein]
supporter” would “foreground” in the
opening adventure of his book: “Will
the focus be on Molucca the champion
cat imitator, or Molucca the
rascally rape apologist, or Molucca,
loyal friend to silly Saddam and
barmy Bashir?”
Galloway has never waged war and has
not destroyed millions of lives.
But like Julian Assange, Hugo
Chavez, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky,
Jeremy Corbyn and others, Galloway
is loathed by a liberal press so
receptive to the loveable, endearing
sides of Bush the artist and Blair
the principled defender of
“centrism.”
In the Observer in 2002, columnist
Nick Cohen poured scorn on Chomsky
and Pilger for opposing the Iraq
war, and then mocked the EU for
refusing to back the Libya war.
Heroically undeterred, Cohen then
penned an article titled: “The West
has a duty to intervene in Syria.”
Not only is Cohen forgiven his role
in facilitating these disasters, he
is allowed space to damn Corbyn for
“excusing the imperialism of
Vladimir Putin’s gangster state, the
oppressors of women and murderers of
gays in Iran, the IRA, and every
variety of inquisitorial and
homicidal Islamist movement.”
Ultimately, the corporate media is
so keen to excuse their political
masters because the media is itself
deeply complicit in the same
atrocities.
In recklessly agitating for
intensified war on Serbia, Andrew
Marr wrote in the Observer in 1999:
“I want to put the Macbeth option:
which is that we’re so steeped in
blood we should go further.
“If we really believe Milosevic is
this bad, dangerous and
destabilising figure we must ratchet
this up much further. We should now
be saying that we intend to put in
ground troops.”
As Harold Pinter said so well: “Who
is this ‘we’ exactly that you’re
talking about? First of all: Who is
the ‘we’?”
Marr claimed Western nations had
been “feminised” by the Cold War,
with “the war-hardened people of
Serbia, far more callous, seemingly
readier to die,” and in fact “like
an alien race.”
If this was awful, his comments on
the main BBC evening news on April
9, 2003 were even worse.
As Baghdad “fell” to US tanks, Marr
noted of Blair that “tonight he
stands as a larger man and a
stronger prime minister as a
result.”
This open vindication of a war of
aggression, the supreme war crime,
was considered completely
uncontroversial, and Marr has since,
of course, established himself as a
“national treasure.”
David
Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens.
For more on Media Lens visit
medialens.org.
This article was first published at
the
Morning Star
