Politics > Politics-USA > Rove's keepin' AWOL Georgie and his mob away from slain troops funerals. Figures.
| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
10 Dec 2003 04:56:09 PM |
| Object: |
Rove's keepin' AWOL Georgie and his mob away from slain troops funerals. Figures. |
http://www.thedailystar.net/2003/12/11/d31211020330.htm
Thu. December 11, 2003
Why does President Bush avoid funeral ceremonies of US soldiers?
Harun ur Rashid
There was a time when the US presidents or very senior members of the
administration used to share the sorrow of the families of soldiers,
killed in war, by attending memorial services.
President Bill Clinton was on the tarmac to receive the dead from the
bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
Presidents Reagan and Carter attended services for the 241 killed in
Beirut and for the troops killed in the failed hostage-rescue in Iran.
The Bush administration departed from this traditional practice.
Neither the president nor any of his senior members of the team such
as Vice President ***** Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or
the Secretary of State Colin Powell attends the funeral ceremony of
the deceased US personnel killed in Iraq.
President Bush and his senior members of his administration have
fenced off themselves from funeral ceremonies and banned cameramen
entering the central military morgue at Dover, in Delaware state where
hundreds who died in Iraq were received.
It is also difficult for the photographers to get past security at the
Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, where thousands of the
wounded in Iraq are being treated.
The question is: Why?
The American dead and the injured from Iraq are being ignored by the
Bush administration so as to give the impression to the public in the
US that nothing wrong has been happening in Iraq.
The administration wants to claim that it is the US soldiers who are
winning the game in Iraq and everything is going on as planned.
Many consider that this behaviour of the administration is compared to
that of "Comical Ali" of Iraq ( Information Minister Mohammad Saeed
al-Sahaf) who assured reporters, even as US tanks rumbled in Baghdad,
that:
"There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!"
One of the reasons for such callous regard for the dead soldiers
appears to be that the Bush administration knows at its heart that
Iraq war was unprovoked and illegal under international law.
The war began with illogic: false intelligence used to bolster a false
"imminent threat" to the US.
The same illogic continues today: the more Americans die, the more it
is a sign of US progress in Iraq.
The illogical conclusions led the administration to conclude that it
is desirable not to meet the reality of war, the dead soldiers coming
in bags to the US.
It seems that they do not understand the political implications of
sidetracking truth.
As the columnist Maureen Dowd in the New York Times recently wrote:
"No juxtaposition is too absurd to stop Bush officials from insisting
nothing is wrong. Car bombs and a blitz of air-to-ground missiles
turned Iraq into a hideous tangle of ambulances, stretchers and dead
bodies, just after Paul Wolfowitz, arrived there to show-case
success."
It is reported that some Republican commentators have begun to
question the President's aloofness.
But asked about the remarkable Presidential silence that greeted the
death of 15-soldiers in the downing of a Chinook helicopter in Iraq
early last month, Dan Barlett, the president's communications
director, defended :
"If a helicopter were hit an hour later, after he (the President) came
out and spoke, should he come out again? The public wants the
commander-in-chief to have a proper perspective and to keep his eye on
the big picture and on the ball."
This seems to be the classic statement of spin-doctors to protect the
president.
Many political observers have commented on the Bush administration's
ongoing war with the media.
The administration is attacking them for using the term "resistance
fighters" in Iraq and for not reporting "good news" out of Iraq.
It is surprisingly noted that majority of print and electronic media
have become subservient to the US administration in a country known
for its objective and fair reporting.
No nation is more replete with patriotic imagery in word, in song and
symbol than America.
This is inherently nothing wrong.
However patriotism is being fully exploited to advance the ideology of
the administration.
The more uncritical the kind of patriotism that rules popular
imagination, the more insulated and different the American people
feel.
As Dr. Samuel Johnson famously noted in 1775, on the eve of the
American Revolution, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
After the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration has not only
told the stories from its own perspective but also attempted to
influence the rest of the world.
However the Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV has come out boldly with real
stories in Iraq.
As Lewis Lapham, Editor of Harper's Magazine, put it in 1997:
"I wonder how a society can long endure by defining truth as the
acceptance of untruth, or by passing legislation incapable of being
enforced, or by thinking that freedom is a trust fund inherited at
birth and certain to a lifetime."
Commentators in the US have pointed out that while families and
communities grieve about their losses in Iraq, the President storms
the country with his hand out for tens of millions of dollars in
donations for his forthcoming re-election campaign.
But does he avoid photo-opportunity with the mothers of the dead from
Iraq?
No wonder the public in the US is being disillusioned by the rhetoric
of the Bush administration.
For the first time since the opening attack on Baghdad on March 20,
most Americans -- 51% -- reportedly disapprove of the president's
handling of the war.
In a Washington Post/ABC News opinion poll taken before the Chinook
helicopter disaster, 87% of respondents said that they feared the US
would be bogged down in Iraq and 62% regarded the death toll as
unacceptable.
Meanwhile George Soros, one of the world's richest men, reportedly
told the media that he had a new project in his hand: beating
President George Bush.
He said, "It is the central focus of my life and the presidential race
in 2004 is a matter of life and death . . . America under Bush, is a
danger to the world. I am willing to put my money where my mouth is."
With the passing of each week, the war touches thousands more American
families in the most direct way.
But the President moves on with rhetoric of "progress" in Iraq and the
spin doctors within the administration seem to distance the President
and the families of the dead from Iraq.
The Bush administration's change of heart to transfer power to Iraqis
by the end of June next year is propelled by the fragile security
situation and the mounting death toll in Iraq.
During the Vietnam War it took two years from 1963 to end of 1964, for
American combat deaths to reach 324.
The US has surpassed that figure in Iraq in only seven months where at
the time of writing 398 American servicemen died.
The last exit strategy in Vietnam was Vietnamisation, training South
Vietnamese to fight the North Vietnamese and guerrillas.
Now the buzzword is Iraqisation.
Just as President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair began
joint a press conference in London in November, the bombers hit the
British targets in Istanbul with utter devastation and turned the
conference into somber reality that their efforts to contain terrorism
had miserably failed in attacking Iraq.
Both of them perhaps realize that the two countries under their
leaderships have been sucked into escalating cycle of violence.
The president's avoidance of attending funerals of the American dead
soldiers brings to mind one story that during the Vietnam war when the
then US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara was told :
"Mr. Secretary, we have got serious problems here. You ought to know
what they are." And McNamara replied:
"I don't want to hear about your problems. I want to hear about
progress."
It seems that same story is repeated now in the case of American
occupation in Iraq.
Barrister Harun ur Rashid is a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN,
Geneva.
__________________________________________________________
Hard to avoid the truth, eh?
Harry
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| User: "Roedy Green" |
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| Title: Re: Rove's keepin' AWOL Georgie and his mob away from slain troops funerals. Figures. |
10 Dec 2003 06:51:16 PM |
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On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 22:56:09 GMT, Harry Hope <rivrvu@ix.netcom.com>
wrote or quoted :
It is also difficult for the photographers to get past security at the
Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, where thousands of the
wounded in Iraq are being treated.
The question is: Why?
Perhaps Bush is afraid some family member will take out their anger at
their pointless loss on him personally, and either kill him or spit on
him, or say something loud enough for the TV cameras to hear.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.
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