The Common Ills: Hejira

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Hejira

Medea Benjamin has a lot of nerve.

She's written a column castigating the mass media for re-selling the Iraq War.

We're supposed to applaud her for that and pretend like her past record doesn't matter.

And she probably thinks this is the height of bravery:

Certainly it wasn’t due to the persuasive powers of President Obama, who seems to have been reluctantly dragged into a conflict that he once acknowledged has no military solution.
The credit for selling Obama’s war on Isis must go to the mainstream American media.

For her, it probably is.

But whores don't impress me.

And she's whored non-stop worse than the media she's slamming.

She's covered for Barack. She's diverted attention from him.

This while writing 'about' The Drone War. She's managed to write about The Drone War without ever calling out Barack by name.

How did this latest wave of the Iraq War get sold?

Through fear.

Which we called out in real time.

While Medea was silent.

And now she wants to show up and offer what is clearly her strongest statement yet -- she actually (in the quoted section above) places some blame on Barack.

It's just not enough.

Even with the above, she can't show the scorn and outraged she regularly hurled at Bully Boy Bush.

Notice how she writes about two Republican Senators in the piece -- neither of whom had the power to deploy troops to Iraq.

She's spineless and she's a coward.

So she's useless.

Maybe she'll get a spine transplant?

Who knows what will happen.

But Iraqis are suffering and they don't have time to continue to wait for Medea to find a comfort zone from which she can criticize a sitting president who is bombing their country.

In "All Systems Go: The Elite's View of the new Iraq-Syria War" (OpEd News), Chris Floyd notes:

For example, there is now a great deal of liberal handwringing about the "tragedy" of Barack Obama being "sucked back" into the morass of Iraq. "He wanted change, he wanted to lead us away from this kind of thing, but now look! Despite his best intentions, here we are again." In most of these cases, Obama's predecessor gets the blame -- "Bush made a mess of Iraq, and now Obama has to clean it up."
(I don't recall seeing any commentary along these lines noting that Bill Clinton -- the husband of the next president of the United States -- also did yeoman service in making a mess of Iraq, having killed some 500,000 children with his pointless, punitive sanctions. He killed those children because Saddam wouldn't give up his WMD -- you know, the WMD he didn't have. Oh, how we rightfully scorned Bush for "going to war over false pretenses" about that phantom WMD; but the good old Big Dawg killed half a million children for the same knowing lie, and left Iraqi society in chaos.)
Anyway, we are now told that thanks to Bush, Obama is between a rock and a hard place, trying his dee-diddly-darndest to deal with those extremist beheaders of ISIS (with the help of the extremist beheaders of Saudi Arabia) without putting "boots on the ground." He wanted to change the system -- but it looks like the "Deep State" was too much for him. What a tragedy for him -- and for us.

Can we dispense briefly but decisively with this oleaginous bulls**t by making a single observation? A man who hand-picked George Bush's Secretary of Defense to serve as his own Master of War knew exactly what the system is -- and did not have the slightest intention of changing it. In fact, Obama has been phenomenally successful in expanding the system of violence and domination, extending it new areas, with new tools (Oval Office death squads! Assassinating innocent teenagers!) -- and bringing it all back home with hi-tech surveillance, whistleblower persecution and journalist prosecutions his predecessor could only dream of.

Medea, Robert Parry, David Corn and so many others who've made themselves useless for the last six years should read those words carefully.

At this late date, it's not enough that Medea tiptoes near courage by naming Barack. She has to call him out. She has to call him out or she has to stop pretending she gives a damn about ending wars or holding War Mongerers accountable.

If you can't use your strongest voice to call out a sitting president who is launching one war after another, stop pretending you're part of the peace movement.

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
-- "Hejira," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album of the same name

The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4491.

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