When George Bush began trying to justify the occupation of Iraq by invoking the “lessons” of Vietnam, I had the urge to send him a copy of the new documentary “War Made Easy” featuring Norman Solomon. That’s hardly surprising — no doubt we’ve all had the occasional desire to try to educate our president.
War Made Easy
Then as I read and listened to the responses from mainstream pundits — most of whom missed the real insights to be gained by analyzing the U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia and the relevance of that history to our invasion and occupation of Iraq — I realized a whole lot of allegedly smart people need to see the film.
But the real mark of the film’s value is that everyone — even those of us who think of ourselves as well-informed with a critical framework — can learn much from Solomon’s analysis in the film and his book by the same name. At a time when it’s more crucial than ever to understand the post-World War II era in which the United States became a permanent warfare state, Solomon’s film and book hone in on one of the key features of that project: The propaganda aimed at us in the United States is as important to that military-industrial project as the guns trained on people in the Third World.
The goal of that propaganda is to get people to believe a claim that is contradicted by all of history and contemporary experience — that the objective of the United States in its military interventions around the world has been not to expand and deepen economic domination (which has been the goal of all other empires) but to bring peace, freedom, and democracy to the world. U.S. officials are not the first in world history to assert such noble motives for such inhuman policies (just ask the Brits), but never has that claim been made so relentlessly, with so much help from allegedly independent journalists.
“War becomes perpetual when it’s used as a rationale for peace,” Solomon says in the film, and then goes on to provide ample evidence of how the justification for perpetual war has been manufactured, packaged, and sold. If it weren’t such serious business, the producers’ collection of sound bites from presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike, all mouthing some version of “We seek peace” — would be comical. From Korea through every conflict up to Iraq, the rhetoric is remarkable similar, as are the real aims and the deadly consequences of the policy.
Solomon’s target is not just the politicians, however, but the
journalists who become the vehicle for selling that story. His work
reminds us that even when journalists seem to be reporting critically
about failed war policies, they almost always implicitly endorse U.S.
officials’ underlying claim about the desire for peace and democracy.
While the film covers all the conflicts in the post-WWII period, it is
the Vietnam/Iraq parallels that are most chilling. One of the most
crucial to remember — in defiance of the distorted revisionist history
that suggests the U.S. public lost its will to support the Vietnam War
because of relentlessly critical news coverage — is that journalists
were largely supportive of the war in the early years. Not until the
failures on the battlefield were too obvious to ignore did the media
coverage abandon the administrations’ propaganda line.
The producers of this film have used archival footage brilliantly, and
one of the most illustrative clips is of Walter Cronkite in 1965
climbing into a B-57 to go along on a bombing run. In the breathless
fashion typical of so much war reporting, Cronkite extols the virtue of
the airplane and the thrill of the mission. Viewers see him get off the
plane and say to the officer he’s about to interview, “Well, colonel,
it’s a great way to go to war.”
After the Tet Offensive in 1968 Cronkite would declare the war “mired
in stalemate,” and so he’s remembered as a critic of the war. But like
most of the press corps he first was enthusiastic about U.S. power, and
even in that famous 1968 broadcast he didn’t challenge the basic
propaganda story about the so-called Communist threat.
That segment also reminds us that journalists have long expressed a
giddy, almost childlike, fascination with the increasingly high-tech
weapons with which these wars have been fought. Journalists, it seems,
are always suckers for machines that go fast and blow things up.
Solomon suggests that there’s “a kind of idolatry there. Some might see
it as a worship of the gods of metal.” This technology fetish reached
unimaginably sick levels in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the news
media flooded us with high-tech graphics and retired military officers
offering commentary.
Solomon reminds us that for all the talk about precision weapons, the
percentage of deaths that are civilians has climbed steadily from 10
percent in World War I to almost 90 percent in Iraq. He describes how
“an acculturated callousness” to the effects of massive bombardment has
built up in our society, facilitated to a large extent by journalists
who are more likely to focus on how a weapon works than what it does to
victims. One of the film’s most poignant scenes comes when images of
those victims are shown over the voice of former Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld waxing eloquent about the unprecedented humanitarianism
of this “precision” bombing.
But back to Vietnam and Bush’s bizarre analogy, in which he suggested
that the United States’ mistake was not invading another country to
block a popular leftist government that had been on the verge of
winning a fair election. No, it turns out that our mistake was leaving
an immoral and unwinnable war too soon.
When I asked Solomon last week for his reaction to Bush’s comparison,
he pointed out that Bush was invoking a familiar “stab-in-the-back
theme” to assert that a lack of resolve at home undermined the military
effort, to bolster the idea that with continued support, “this time the
USA can, and must, see the war through to its appropriately triumphant
conclusion.” But the possibility of such a victory in Iraq is about as
likely as it was in Vietnam, in large part because each war was morally
bankrupt from the start.
It was the same game during the Vietnam War, Solomon said, pointing to
news footage from “War Made Easy” of a network TV announcer saying,
“Appealing for public support for his peace policy, Mr. Nixon said,
‘The enemy cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only
Americans,’ he said, ‘can do that.’”
Perhaps we have not really been defeated and humiliated by either the
enemy or ourselves, but by leaders who have created this warfare state
and journalists who have helped sell it to the public. “War Made Easy”
is a useful tool for progressive educators and activists who want to
redefine peace and end a state of perpetual war.
*******
“War Made Easy” was produced and distributed by the Media Education Foundation. For their entire catalog, go to: http://mediaed.org/
The film is available for home viewing and for use as an organizing tool. For details on ordering, go here.
The film is also playing in select independent theaters. For information on locations, go to:
Solomon is also the author of the recently released book Made Love Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State. For more information on that book, go to http://www.madelovegotwar.com/.
Jensen is also the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang). He can be reached by email here and his articles can be found online.
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