The U.S. is so often involved in armed conflicts, war is beginning to be seen as a sports event. For many Americans, starting with George W. Bush, the former owner of a baseball team, a war is a bit like a baseball or football game; the aim of this game is simply to be the strongest and to win. In doing so, the people are entertained and the media are occupied with subject matter to fill their pages and airtime. In the U.S., war is part of the entertainment industry.
Wednesday March 29th 2006, 2:33 pm
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
If you believe the line towed by the corporate media, a line manufactured in the deep recesses of the Pentagon, the United States stumbled into Iraq based on "intelligence failures." According to Vernon Loeb of the Washington Post, former CIA analyst and PNAC conspirator Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing under the pen name Edward G. Shirley, tells us the CIA has "grown intellectually dishonest" and the intelligence the agency produced is "often nearly worthless." Because of this, the neocons created the Office of Special Plans (OSP), managed by the Leo Strauss scholar Abram Shulsky, and offered up their own "intelligence," mostly gleaned from the overactive imagination of the convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi and the so-called "Iraqi chemical engineer" (and the brother of a top lieutenant of Chalabi) colorfully nicknamed Curveball. It is important to note that Chalabi's lies and fabrications were used by Shulsky's OSP-and subsequently fed to an eager shill, New York Times columnist Judith Miller, for wide dissemination-because a key tenet of the Straussian philosophy is the necessity of deception.
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts and which they interrupted at the briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pasters preached devotion to flag and country and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half-dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.