This universal complicity is the symptom of a terminal malaise. The upper echelons of American society are hopelessly corrupted and morally decayed.

Even as thousands of marines poured into Fallujah in an attempt to eradicate the Iraqi resistance fighters, American commentators blandly spoke of the action as the most natural and uncontroversial of events. Here is a city, surrounded and cut off, whose male population between the ages of 15 and 50 faces being “put to the sword” by the US military, and no one in the media can stir himself to raise an objection.

The deliberate demolition of a major urban center by a great power is unlike anything since World War II. The phrases used by the media—warplanes and tanks are “softening the defenses;” the city of 300,000 is being “cleansed” of insurgents—are meant to conceal from the American public the true character of the assault: a homicidal operation aimed at destroying a major source of opposition to the colonialist US occupation and its puppet regime.

Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian (“Screams Will Not be Heard”) notes the foul and unreal character of the American propaganda war: “The city is being ‘softened up’ with precision attacks from the air. Pacifying Fallujah has become the key to stabilising the country ahead of the January elections. The ‘final assault’ is imminent, in which the foreigners who have infiltrated the almost deserted Iraqi city with their extremist Islam will be ‘cleared,’ ‘rooted out’ or ‘crushed.’ Or, as one marine put it: ‘We will win the hearts and minds of Fallujah by ridding the city of insurgents. We’re doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy.’”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/fall-n09.shtml