Not long ago I noted in
an article entitled Big Bully that although the United States claims to be
the “home of the brave” it has not exhibited national bravery when it comes
to combating foreign powers since 1812. Indeed, precisely the opposite
has been the historical rule. The US has plundered, pounded, polluted,
and impoverished tens of millions with all the empathy and sympathy of a
gangster garroting a garrulous gumshoe. One can’t help but wonder when
the US is going to take on someone its own size or larger. No doubt
many will say in response that that is no longer possible because the US
is the sole remaining superpower. Oh, but there is an opponent that
makes the American imperialist generals and colonels cringe and tremble with
real trepidation. Why don’t they take on that adversary if they are
as brave as advertised? That should be a real battle and I have no
doubt the generals and colonels will come up short, despite all their military
hardware and superior technology. They fear it now more than ever and
have no intention of engaging in any kind of battle worthy of the name with
this potential adversary. Who is this enemy that is so feared by the
American brass? Is it China? No. Is it Russia? No.
Is it a potential combination of nations? No. Then who is it?
Well it’s a legion of men armed with motion picture cameras who are free
to roam and film at will throughout the scenes of conflict and mayhem.
The scenario is quite simple. Allow the media of the world to send
their reporters and cameramen to wherever desired in the arena of combat
to shoot whatever they want to shoot and allow imperialist troops to shoot
whatever they want to shoot in any part of the arena of conflict. At
the same time each side is to have no restrictions on what it can report
back to headquarters with respect to what occurred. Soldiers can move
and behave as they desire or are so commanded and reporters/cameramen can
do the same with all film footage being immediately reportable without censorship
to media headquarters for dispensing to hundreds of millions. Let’s
let both sides shoot it out.
Suggest to the generals this
kind of battle in which both sides are free to shoot and report as they desire
and see what kind of response is forthcoming. They would quake at the
thought and that is no exaggeration, since people are continuing to be tried
for alleged war crimes. The international uproar would be stupendous
if defendants in the Hague were convicted without film footage and eyewitness
reports while imperialist generals were allowed to evade conviction, despite
exposing and convicting film footage and eye-witness testimonies.
The imperialist commanders
would be prime candidates for conviction and they know it. Even more
importantly, watch whose prospect of winning grows the longer this kind of
battle actually continues. The more prolonged the battle becomes the
more the outcome becomes that which the generals would fear because convicting
evidence would arrive in other nations in increasing amounts.
The American
people and world opinion can accept scenes of battle in which unavoidable
collateral damage can be invoked as a defense but other acts will be quite
unacceptable and generate pressures and forces beyond anything the military
can endure. We all saw the picture of the nude teenage girl running
down the road burning after her village was napalmed in Vietnam. We
saw the pictures of civilian bodies lying in the streets of Saigon after Tet
was over in Feb. 1968. We saw the pictures of American planes dropping
the defoliant Agent Orange and other planes bombing Hanoi with photos subsequently
emerging of civilian destruction and casualties. Although denounced
by thousands, the American populace can accept these acts as acts of war
and in war innocents suffer and perish. These can and will pass the
critical test. But there are hundreds of acts that won’t pass that
test and will not be accepted by any civilized populace regardless of the
cause. When millions see a bound guerrilla prisoner being shot in the
head with blood squirting out on a Saigon street before the cameras of the
world in a case of pre-meditated first degree murder by a South Vietnamese
police chief no less or women, children and the elderly (no men) being blown
to pieces by machine gun fire at close range because of their support of
the enemy or bound prisoners being shoved out of helicopters thousands of
feet up in the air in order to terrorize those beside them into talking or
prisoners being viciously tortured and executed, when atrocities of that
nature are seen by the world’s millions that will not be accepted or condoned
because the overwhelming mass of humanity realizes that horrific acts of
that nature are beyond the pale. That is not war but cold-blooded murder
or torture executed by fiends. A backlash with huge political and ultimately
military repercussions would be a foregone conclusion as would be the war’s
outcome.
This is an extremely important
topic because hundreds of millions of people nowhere near the scene of conflict
only know what they are told by the media and can only act on what they learn
through the media. The generals and military planners are acutely aware
of this fact and the lessons they learned in Vietnam account for the fact
that during the invasions of Panama, Grenada, Somalia, and especially the
Gulf War reporters and cameramen were kept as far from what was occurring
as was possible and expedient. It was not for nothing that Walter Cronkite,
the CBS news anchor for years and the dean of American reporters , if they
have a dean at all, said Gulf War press coverage was “abominable.”
How right can one be! Abominable it most assuredly was. It was
nauseating because no reporters were allowed within 50 miles of unfolding
events, making them about as qualified to report on what was happening as
a pedestrian walking down the streets of Paris. So if the American
imperialists are determined to have a war in Iraq or elsewhere let’s make
it a war in which all can shoot as they please, because an American defeat
is long overdue.