Fault Lines Issue 2: The Real "Spin Factor"

The Real "Spin Factor"
By Scott Fleming

I don’t have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all . . . I think they’re a prehistoric group . . . We cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them. -- Bill O’Reilly, The Radio Factor, June 17

It was in Fallujah that they lost the plot. Or, perhaps, the plot lost them. Until March 31, when four American mercenaries – “private contractors,” in the official lexicon – were ambushed and mutilated in that rebel Iraqi town, the 24-hour news punditry had dutifully adhered to the script that said the vast majority of Iraqi people embraced the presence of their American “liberators.” Coalition Provisional Authority press flacks had admitted since the summer of 2003 that the US was being attacked several dozen times per day, but the resistance was always attributed to Baathist “dead-enders” and foreign fighters. That the Americans could produce few, if any, dead or captured foreign fighters rarely upset the fundamental assumption that the United States was welcomed by the people of Iraq.

Everything changed on the day the pictures of the charred mercenaries hanging from a bridge spread around the world. The images of cheering Fallujans belied the fantasy of masses of grateful Iraqis and made clear that large numbers of people supported the resistance. The Pentagon’s campaign to blame a small group of troublemakers was no longer tenable; the guerrilla uprising that swept through much of Iraq throughout April exposed the bankruptcy of American propaganda. Unfortunately for Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly – the most popular face on the most popular channel in cable news – and his corporate media cohorts, the White House PR machine failed to provide them with rhetorical instructions to address this new reality.

Left to their own devices, the talking heads had only one thing to fall back on: deeply ingrained racism. If the Iraqi people were no longer the grateful beneficiaries of American liberation, then they could only be Arab savages. After all, at least since the Lebanon war in the early 1980s, the U.S. media have cast Arabs and Muslims exclusively as terrorists and “towel-heads,” irrational enemies of Israel and America. If one were to ask most Americans to name a few famous Middle Easterners, the list would probably not extend far past “Saddam” and “Osama.” So, it should not have been surprising that O’Reilly responded to the Fallujah uprising with repeated exhortations to war crimes:

I don’t care about the people of Fallujah. You’re not going to win their hearts and minds. They’re going to kill you to the very end. They’ve proven that. So let’s knock this place down . . . We know what the final solution should be . . . This isn’t a big town. We’re not talking about Cincinnati here, right? . . . U.S. Marines are now in charge of the area and it is time, in my opinion, for drastic action. All citizens of Fallujah must be evacuated, every building searched for weapons. If there’s resistance, no more Fallujah. It must be neutralized one way or the other . . . When a town unites in killing U.S. soldiers, a town should pay a price.

Subjecting a civilian population to collective punishment is an archetypal war crime, although American disdain for the Geneva Conventions has preceded Abu Ghraib by many decades. Bill O’Reilly probably doesn’t know that the International Criminal Court for Rwanda recently sentenced two journalists to life imprisonment for using the airwaves to incite crimes against humanity; he has nothing to fear as long as he doesn’t use FCC-proscribed foul language when he advocates a “final solution” for Fallujah.

It remains to be seen how the media will spin the war in Iraq now that the U.S. has “transferred sovereignty” with the hope of bolstering George Bush’s flagging re-election campaign. So far, the press seems to be swallowing the notion that the new government, which was appointed by an occupying power and threatened martial law before it even "took over" , represents the birth of a democratic Iraq. There is every indication that the Iraqi resistance will continue its attacks with the twin intentions of expelling the U.S. and overthrowing the new government.

If the attacks continue at their present rate, the result will be an American occupation army defending a tiny ruling cabal against a guerrilla movement that has the tacit support of the majority of Iraqis. Bush’s platitudes about bestowing democracy at the barrel of a gun will be more nakedly implausible than they are now. We can expect the media, with a straight face, to parrot whatever version of reality Washington puts on offer. The question is whether the increasingly skeptical American population will continue to believe it.