What Media Credibility? (Page 1 of 3)

The most encouraging thing I heard as the House of Representatives debated the recent resolution (non-binding of course), was one Congressman saying something to the effect of “I am sick of the same people who were wrong four years ago lecturing me about loyalty, suggesting I am giving comfort to the enemy, or undercutting the morale of the troops over there. It’s about time they acknowledge that we were right then, and we are right now.”

Three thousand women and men, our neighbors, are dead. They died in Iraq—some of them never knew what hit them, they were gone in an instant, along with their dreams, their hopes, their Fathers’ Day cards, their unborn children. Others died slowly, in insufferable pain, but they suffered it. Some were executed after being tormented and tortured; others were anonymously blown up.

Our dead, three thousand and counting, are a small fraction of those who died because of the immoral and illegal invasion of Iraq. Our country, the United States of America, broke international law and violated our most fundamental commitment under the United Nations charter; we were the aggressors—what we did to Iraq in 2003 was exactly what Iraq did to Kuwait in 1990, only it has ended up being much worse. Because we have become Occupiers. We tortured prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions. We ignited a sectarian civil war; we destabilized an entire region; we strengthened our enemies immeasurably; we established the precedent of pre-emptive attack. This is who we are, United States of America.

I believe it is time for true patriots to begin to reclaim some standards for our country. Since 2001, our leaders have clothed us in arrogance and violence; before the rest of the world, we are bathed in shame. During the anti-war march in Washington, DC, in January, I was standing on a corner when four young men with close-shaved heads and fatigues came out of a building and down to the corner to cross the street. One nodded toward a marcher in the street who carried a pole with the American flag suspended upside down. “Look at that,” he said, spitting out the words. “What the hell is that about?”

I wanted to engage him, but I was trying to keep track of my two daughters and four other young women in the crowd. I wanted to say, “Surely you know what that is about. Flying the flag upside down is a sign of extreme distress. It says our nation is in grave peril. It’s not an insult; it’s a sincere distress signal, and it calls all who love their country to respond.”

Well, the street corner is rarely the time for productive conversation unless it’s a low-pressure, one-on-one, no-playing-to-an-audience conversation. So I said nothing.

But I have thought about it. And I believe we need people who love their country, or who just want to live in a country that is anchored to some moral code of conduct, to declare themselves and begin to reclaim this country.

Where to begin?

Everyone can have a favorite place, I suppose. Maybe you want to restore habeus corpus, maybe you want the US to rejoin the community of nations. Maybe you want to restore civil liberties, maybe you want to reaffirm the rule of law. Maybe you want to bring the troops home alive, now. They are all important things to do. Go for it.

Here’s another important thing. Last week, as I drove across Missouri, I heard our new Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, accuse the government of Iran of providing material support to the insurgents in Iraq. The NPR reporter—not Fox News, mind you—passed on the assertion that serial numbers on unexploded pieces of bombs could be traced to Iran. In the course of the questioning that followed, Gates allowed as how he couldn’t divulge specifics because he didn’t know them.

Now this information, as much of it as we were told, rang as bogus to my ears as the WMD blather before the Iraq invasion. Hilary Clinton may have found the government’s case persuasive, but there were lots of us who were rock solid certain it was crap; Scott Ritter, US Marine and UN weapons inspector, was traveling the country saying so—he spoke in Knoxville. But most people were happy to swallow the half-baked lies of the Administration, and we all see now where it got us.