The River

Thursday, December 07, 2006


It's Happening Again!

by Norman Soloman

Global Research, December 5, 2006
Uruknet

The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq has become notorious in the annals of American journalism. Even many reporters, editors and commentators who fueled the drive to war in 2002 and early 2003 now acknowledge that major media routinely tossed real journalism out the window in favor of boosting war.

But it's happening again.

The current media travesty is a drumbeat for the idea that the U.S. war effort must keep going. And again, in its news coverage, the New York Times is a bellwether for the latest media parade to the cadence of the warfare state.

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Which is why there has been little discussion of the withdrawal and reparations idea put forward by George McGovern and William Polk in the Harper's article The Way out of War, which was adapted from their book Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now.

Much like universal healthcare, withdrawal and reparations is eminently sensible from not only a moral but a financial standpoint:

The monetary cost of the basic set of programs outlined here is roughly $7.25 billion. The cost of the “second tier” programs cannot be as accurately forecast, but the planning and implementation of these is likely to cost somewhere in the vicinity of $10 billion. Seventeen and a quarter billion dollars is a lot of money, but assuming that these programs cut short the American occupation by only two years, they would save us at least $200 billion. Much more valuable, though, are the savings to be measured in what otherwise are likely to be large numbers of shattered bodies and lost lives. Even if our estimates are unduly optimistic, and the actual costs turn out to be far higher, the course of action we recommend would be perhaps the best investment ever made by our country.

Comments:
"Much like universal healthcare, withdrawal and reparations is eminently sensible from not only a moral but a financial standpoint:"

Bruce, that's exactly why it shouldn't be done. Bear with me now! We'd lose all the hard earned respect we've gained from the enema commando squads, the transparent lies, the genocide-lite invasion and the efforts at economic self-immolation. People would see us as weak. That, in turn, would encourage the French, who would have us all eating cheese off stained burkas. Gubble, gubble. Do any of us really care to live like that?
 
thank you for the view from bizarro world, which makes sense to me in the same way as the official 9/11 story.
 
What was it 70%, 80% of people polled think the official version is bullshit? An extraordinary number. Outside the punditocracy and their emulators, no one is buying it. That's usually the case, FWIW, when government is engaged in a blatant criminal conspiracy. Spartacus has something worth reading on a few of the financial angles.

Similarly with healthcare. Very few people doubt that economy of scale would apply to the financing of it.

So why, when push comes to shove, do people act against everything they know, with greater or lesser degrees of certainty, and continue to prop up bizarro world? Like I said in my previous comment, I think it's based on constantly stoked fear.
 
true, but financial reparations put needed weight behind the moral. I take your point, though, that discourse is so bankrupt that no one can tell up from down.
 
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