If you can't do it, Just make it up

Has any conflict since the Spanish American War been so much a fantasy of the yellow press and government hawks as the Iraq War?

The Independent has gotten hold of some of the black psy-ops "newspaper articles" peddled by the Lincoln Group to Iraqi newspapers (it paid $2000 an article to plant them, disguising them as real news). This operation is the ultimate in warfare. Instead of actually winning the war, the Pentagon substitutes itself for the journalists and paints the new Iraqi army as the eighth wonder of the world and declares we are winning.

The illusions are so circular and self-referential that when corporate media went looking for someone to comment on the Lincoln psy-ops operation, they quoted Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute as saying it was all just fine. Turns out that Rubin is a paid consultant of . . . The Lincoln Group (and quite dishonestly didn't let the NYT know it.) So the American Enterprise Institute, which helped manufacture the fantasy of a victorious Iraq War in the first place, now has its staff help manufacture the illusion of success on the ground and then lie about it to the MSM.

Meanwhile, Michael Schwartz at Tomdispatch.com explains why the media gets the Iraq War wrong. HIs message: It's the economy, stupid.

People who want to be in Congress should know the difference between Istanbul and Baghdad. Howard Kaloogian's website tried to prove that everything was just fine in Iraq by posting a picture of Bakirkoy in downtown Istanbul and characterizing it as a Baghdad street scene!

I just remembered this issue. Kaloogian spearheaded the move to cancel a CBS mini-series about Ronald Reagan, and to keep Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 out of the theaters! He not only is creating imaginary Iraqs, he has tried to prevent us from seeing in the media other accounts of reality than his own!

Kudos to the gang at Daily Kos for outing this fraud. Markinsafran kindly posted my comment there,

' Dear Mark:

It is all a false issue, not a matter of forged photographs.

In unconventional or guerrilla wars, ordinary life goes on in most of the country most of the time. You can't tell by looking that there is a war. But then one day you send your child to get ice cream and she gets
blown up by a carbomber.

The violence is not constant or omnipresent. It is here and there, every once in a while. But it is hugely disruptive of the economy and sets people's nerves on edge.

So a photograph of a street scene tells us absolutely nothing. Millions of such photographs from Saigon in 1968 could be put on the Web. It wouldn't look like there was a war.

It is a stupid piece of propaganda for the ignorant and easily led, unworthy of a democratic representative in the Republic of Jefferson and Madison and Franklin.

Cheers Juan

Saigon 1970