Remember the Maine?
There are other consequences Clark didn’t mention. In war citizens give up privacy and civil liberties to government in favor of security. Domestic needs go begging as military expenditures soar. Most importantly, while the prosecution of crime may lead to justice--a necessary precursor of lasting peace--the prosecution of war frequently sows the seeds of the next conflict. Its resolution is based on might, not right.
Differences between U.S. and world media coverage
In watching U.S. news media cover the aftermath of these terrorist atrocities and comparing it with coverage in other nations, much was the same--the shock and horror. But there was also a salient difference. The tone of U.S. coverage was surprise that the nation’s symbols of military and economic might were so savagely attacked. It was as if an innocent bystander had been caught in the crossfire.
Media elsewhere explored why so many people around the world--and particularly in the Middle East--believe their misery is a result, at least in part, of callous American power.
Paul Chilton, a professor of linguistics in England has been following American coverage. He writes: “The intifada has been raging, Palestinian anger mounting, and American policy in the Middle East increasingly criticized. Iraq is bombed almost daily by British and American planes. The extent to which the US is perceived as a regional and global perpetrator of economic and political injustice is simply ignored.”
A recent visitor to Egypt spoke of daily newscasts there showing the most graphic violence in Israel and the cognizance that American-made tanks and warplanes are engaged with unarmed or lightly armed Arabs. Israel used an earlier generation of these weapons to subdue Egypt within the memory of most Egyptians. And though the United States rebuilt Europe and showed compassion to a defeated Japan, its more recent cold-war history of siding with anti-democratic forces in Central America, in Chile, in Iran, rankles. And there’s the ironic legacy of the U.S. shipping weapons to the Afghani Mujahadeen--when they were fighting the Soviets--with whom it now contemplates going to war.
A little history
In 1964, an uncritical Congress and national media rushed to escalate the Viet Nam war after a minor incident in the Tonkin Gulf. (Two U.S. destroyers attacking the North Vietnamese coast apparently sparked retaliation by several torpedo boats and radioed for air support--which couldn’t locate any attackers.) Afterwards, tens of thousands of young Americans died along with more than a million Vietnamese.
In 1898, New York’s biggest newspapers beat the drums of war to enlarge their circulations. “Remember the Maine” their headlines shouted as they blamed Spanish treachery for the catastrophic explosion on the U.S. battleship, Without any evidence, (the Navy in 1976 determined that the Maine exploded from spontaneous combustion in its coal bunkers), Hearst and Pulitzer papers goaded the nation into a war that claimed the lives of 5,000 American servicemen, tens of thousands of Spaniards, and as many as 600,000 Filipinos--killed or starved when the U.S. crushed its independence movement.
American news media will serve us best in the long-run, if they balance the viewpoints of those who would take us to war with others. And they would do well to be wary of adopting the Administration’s metaphors as their own.
-- commentary by John McManus
