The Spinning Grounds

By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet. Posted April 9, 2004.

On April 9, 2003, after President Bush's troops marched triumphantly into Baghdad, one of the war's most memorable media moments took place; the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square. As staged and phony as the event actually was, at the time it appeared to symbolize massive Iraqi support for the U.S.-led invasion.

But as Newsweek reporters Christopher Dickey and John Barry report in the April 12 edition of the magazine, this year's memorable images are not nearly as triumphant: "Last week a mob in the dusty Iraqi town of Fallujah gave us a new and horrifying image to remember this war by, murdering four American civilian security men, burning them, butchering them, dragging them through the streets, then hanging pieces of them from power lines and the girders of a bridge."

In response to the horrific incident in Fallujah, the U.S. launched a major military operation aimed at rounding up and routing the city's resisters.

The Fallujah incident, combined with the rampaging al-Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has brought Iraq to the brink of chaos. While U.S. troops are engaged in Fallujah, the "Coalition of the Willing" is taking heavy hits: Polish, Bulgarian and Japanese soldiers have all come under attack, and Ukrainian troops were forced to withdraw from the eastern city of Kut.

Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed and the U.S. is taking casualties at a daily rate higher than any month since the beginning of the invasion (for details, see the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count Web site.

Despite the chaos, bloodshed, death and destruction, the administration's spin-doctors are trying to manage the news. The cable news networks that brought the sanitized invasion into America's living rooms a year ago are on board with obligatory banner headlines, keyed-up news anchors, scrolling updates, and rooftop reports from Baghdad. And, of course, the parade of retired military officers continues unabated.

David Miller's description of an unquestioning media during the run-up and early days of the war in the introduction to "Tell me lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq," rings as true today as it did when it was written in September 2003: "Much of the media continue to assume that the statements of government officials and politicians are characterized by what [author] Mark Curtis calls a 'basic benevolence.' They may lie here or there, or they may act in a foolish or misguided way, but to advance the proposition that they are calculating liars...is beyond the pale."

As the resistance continues to unfold on the streets of a half-dozen major cities in Iraq, it is not "beyond the pale" to question statements from administration spokesperson.

L. Paul Bremer, the beleaguered top US administrator in Iraq, would have you believe that the situation is unfolding about as anticipated: He recently told ABC's "Good Morning America" that "We have problems, there's no hiding that, but basically Iraq is on track to realize the kind of Iraq that Iraqis and Americans want, which is a democratic Iraq."

Bremer declared that "We have got some groups who don't agree with that vision -- they are terrorists and former regime guys. ... Instead they think power in Iraq should come out of the barrel of a gun and that is intolerable and we will deal with it." He claimed that U.S. forces were still in control: "There is no question we have control of the country."

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the deputy chief of military operations in Iraq, appeared side-by-side with Dan Senor, the main US spokesman in Iraq, on several news programs on Wednesday, April 7. Looking very uncomfortable, Kimmitt talked about the "large casualty toll taken by the enemy," and attacking mosques "when there is a military necessity." A wooden Senor claimed that "Life is improving for Iraqis. Things are getting better for them. The general trend is positive."

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