Beyond the Green Zone; excerpt of introduction at Foreign Policy in Focus

In 2002, while winter began to settle across the United States, the drumbeat for war became deafening.

Living in Anchorage, Alaska, I spent much of my free time reading the news from abroad or getting it via alternative online outlets such as Media Lens, Democracy Now!, and Media Channel. The cheerleading for war feebly disguised as "journalism" that corporate media television stations and newspapers in the United States spewed was intolerable. The overwhelming evidence was already available. There were not and had not been "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq for years. The make-believe link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 was a chimera. The excuse given later, that of "liberating" the people of Iraq, held even less truth.

Nevertheless, illusions were maintained by a media in the United States that had sunk to being little more than state stenographers giddily scribbling and announcing the diktats of George W. Bush and his administration. Thousands of years of Iraq's rich history were cursorily omitted from the media and replaced by the graphic of a U.S.-installed dictator with a bull's-eye on his forehead.

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