The War With Iran
‘All options — including the military one — are on the table’
Donald Rumsfeld, US Defence Secretary
‘There is only one thing worse than military action, that is a nuclear armed Iran’
John McCain, Republican senator for Arizona
‘Obviously we don’t rule out any measures at all’
Tony Blair
The recipe of war is well proven, take a large dose of irrational fear, add to the international press to simmer for several months, sprinkle same press with half-truths, mis-truths, and outright lies, then allow public to stew on a low heat for several months. Once they have developed the correct taste for fear, add hysterical threats of weapons of mass destruction, mix with war on terror, and garnish with rotten diplomacy.
However, is this all really neccesary? How much does the public actually care what the government does?
There is no sign of intelligence or accurate reporting on Iran in the newspapers, on television or even over PBS radio. It is never made clear that Iran’s “defiance” is one orchestrated by the U.S. government, or that the “defiance” is limited to Iran’s development of nuclear energy, not a weapons program. When Americans hear “nuclear defiance” over and over, they conclude that Iran is making nuclear weapons. Instead of informing the people, the media drive them toward acceptance of another war.
This quotation may be about America, but it is equally apt to describe the standard of reporting here in the UK. The simple fact is that newspapers appeal to the base instincts of the UK populous, the public are not the passive receivers of any given news message, they are the active seekers of a message that matches their own outlook. The sad thing is people want drivel, they want trivia, they want a political outlook that is clearly defined in black and white, good and bad, with us or against us.
For the average person, admitting that black and white can mix to form numerous shades of grey, is to question their whole existence, and they’d rather just shove their fingers in their ears and watch another program on celebrities’ ice-skating/ballroom dancing/trapped in jungle/trapped on an island/trapped in a house. The majority of people in Britain don’t care, and they never will.
It is only the government and social elite who stand to profit from war, and therefore it is the role of the media to justify and glorify Britain’s involvement in foreign countries. Papers such as the Sun have become virtually a state controlled paper, whilst papers such as the Daily Mail may dislike the government, but they have a rabid distaste of anything foreign.
Americans are in many ways more in tune with the media message, more interested in war. Americans do care, but for all the wrong reasons. Patriotism in America fuels the ignorance of the masses that have to make all the sacrifices when Bush and friends decide to go to war. It is easy to get the American public excited and backing a war, and each speech Bush gives goes through all the basics:
mention that America is a ‘great nation’
praise the armed forces, and the sacrifices they make to ‘protect’ this ‘great nation’
pretend that America is under attack
say it will be just like the Second World War
and finally god bless America
Americans care about being Americans, and more often than not patriotism serves to deflect any criticism of the state that they might be pondering deep down.
However, these are of course sweeping generalisations, each country has its share of lights in these dark times, and some people are prepared to speak out, although this is usually in vain. The main problem is that war is so sanitised; the war on terror is fought in distant lands, and this foreign interventionism that is so rife today (but has always been a staple diet of power politics, and economic dominance) is seen as taking the war further away, protecting the homeland.
The only link that Blair and Bush will identify is that the war abroad ‘secures’ our ‘freedom’ at home: every sacrifice made, every innocent foreigner dead is justified as being necessary to secure the rights of the people living in the ‘free world’. The majority of us won’t have to fight this war; the majority of us won’t even know anybody who has to fight this war. As far as we are concerned the only sacrifice we have to make is accepting the loss of a few civil liberties.
It is this that is the real irony of the ‘war on terror’; the whole war is based on protecting the civil liberties that we all come to expect; yet the basis of the war on terror is the restriction of civil liberties. We have therefore been left with a war that is fighting civil liberties, in the name of protecting them – something so idiotic, so unbelievable, so very ‘Bush’, that of course the majority excepts that this is just the way things are.
The main thing is that the people who supported the war in Iraq - and those that still do - believe that we have some higher moral purpose, that death and destruction can be justified if it is in the cause of freedom and hope. But have they considered what freedom and hope actually is, and whose freedom and hope it is that we are actually fighting for?
The war in Iraq started in order to protect freedom and hope in the West – as Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction and was just 45 minutes away from killing us all. So we went to war to protect ourselves. Then of course we realised that the reasons for going to war were entirely false, so a change of tack was needed – and provided. We now realised that we weren’t going to war to protect ourselves, but rather to give freedom and hope to the oppressed Iraqis – never mind that it was Western politics that had enslaved them to Saddam Hussain in the first place (or that it was Britain that originally drew up the very borders of Iraq as we know it).
So in the end we had to fall back on the belief that the greater purpose was a war to export democracy, freedom, and perhaps even a little bit of Western modernity to those poor desert dwellers. This gave the enormous benefit of being a justification for further wars, if you export democracy once, then you can export democracy again and again and again.
But the truth is we only export violence, and we will only get back violence in return. Most rational people realise this, but rational people are firmly in the minority, and definitely are not involved in running the world. 9/11 cost the lives of over 3000 people; its response has cost the lives of over 100,000 people.
This is the tragic demonstration of the real value of human life in this world, we value our own lives immeasurably, a mixture of racial arrogance, and blind ignorance. Whilst we view the ‘unpeople’ – that is anyone not Western, not one of us, them – with contempt, if we even consider them as part of the equation. We view them largely as the enemy, millions of people that need to be placated in order that we may live our lives, rich, greedy, increasingly obese, and evermore paranoid.
The war in Iraq, and Afghanistan, still ongoing with fierce fighting, and many deaths and casualties, has led to Tony Blair and George Bush’s constant downplaying of the economic cost of the war. An estimation as to the economic cost of war has been made in a study by Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, who estimate that the conservative figure (including direct costs and macroeconomic costs) of just over $1 trillion, with a moderate estimate of over $2.2 trillion. Taking the conservative figure that means that if 3000 people died as a result of 9/11 each one of those lives is now valued at $342,000,000.
Or put another way if 100,000 innocent people have died as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then we have spent $10,260,000 to kill each one.
Perhaps life is not so cheap after all. It will be even more expensive, yet paradoxically more worthless, once Iran is attacked; and most of us will be too busy watching shit TV to even care.