American hawks' plan sounds chilling today

American hawks' plan sounds chilling today

VINAY MENON: Toronto Star

Did you know the F-14 Tomcat can simultaneously strike six different enemy targets with Phoenix AIM-54A missiles? Or that there's a little Kurdish boy in northern Iraq named Dick Cheney?

No? Well, you probably haven't been watching CNN lately.

As the war in Iraq gets murkier and more intense, coverage on U.S. cable news stations is, astonishingly, becoming quite simple: This war is all about "weapons of mass destruction." Saddam Hussein is a despicable tyrant. The Iraqi people must be freed from their shackles.

Elsewhere in the world, however, discussions are entangled with more provocative theories. Never before have so many climbed into the underbelly of U.S. foreign policy and left holding their noses.

So, as each day of carnage and devastation is beamed back in real time, complemented by a swish array of on-screen gimmicks, something else is happening: The U.S. cable networks are hemorrhaging credibility.

Watch BBC World for a couple of hours, then switch on MSNBC. The sensory experience is not dissimilar to leaving a university lecture and then jumping on a roller coaster.

MSNBC, like CNN, has obviously decided to forgo anything that might: 1) Require more than 10 minutes; 2) Involve serious discussion; 3) Use up time anchors can spend drooling over the killing capacity of a Bradley tank.

But in other media, most notably newspapers and the Web, one emerging subject to crystallize around the Iraq war is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a Washington think tank founded in 1997.

The group's mandate was clear, according to its statement of principles: "We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad."

PNAC might have become an inconsequential footnote in political history had it not been for some of the names on that document: William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

At the time, most of the signatories had no political power. Today they form a nexus of influential neo-con ideology and boast representatives in the highest chambers of the current administration.

The hawks have ascended. And the entire world order must be radically reshaped if the U.S. is to retain its global hegemony.

Tonight, a commercial-free edition of the fifth estate (CBC, 9 p.m.) looks at the Iraq conflict and deftly explores the PNAC story. In one 2000 paper entitled "Rebuilding America's Defences", PNAC authors wrote that "the process of transformation" requires "some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor."

A year later, 9/11 entered the popular lexicon and a "War on Terrorism" was launched. But, as it turns out, plans for military action in the Middle East have been incubating for years. So what is going on right now? Is this war a pretext for a larger objective? And what comes next? Iran, Syria, Lebanon or North Korea? Then what?

The implications are so profound it's almost absurd. And yet the American cable news stations have generally stayed clear of this, focusing instead on a tick-tock narrative while relying upon a visual short-hand to fill in the rest.

A March 5 episode of ABC's Nightline was one of the few prime-time exceptions. In addition to featuring William Kristol, the group's ultra-conservative chairman, viewers also heard from Ian Lustick, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

"After 9/11, (PNAC) was able to benefit from the gigantic eruption of political capital, combined with the supply of military preponderance in the hands of the president," he said. "And this small group, therefore, was able to gain direct contact and even control, now, of the White House."

That his comments have generally gone unnoticed is not surprising, given television's well-documented shortcomings.

At a Pentagon press briefing, commenting on the war's unprecedented real-time coverage, Donald Rumsfeld said, "It tends to be all accurate, but not in an over-all context."

Exactly.

Source

Join our Daily News Headlines Email Digest

Information Clearing House

Daily News Headlines Digest

HOME