Iran: Another bit of information to consider if Bush is allowed to continue with a subservient and cowardly congress unable to play its checks and balances role"

*ZNet | Iran*

*Media Tall Tales for the Next War*

*by Norman Solomon; September 26, 2006*

The Sept. 25 edition of Time magazine illustrates how the U.S.

news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran. The

headline over the cover-story interview with Iran’s president,

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is “A Date With a Dangerous Mind.” The

big-type subhead calls him “the man whose swagger is stirring

fears of war with the U.S.,” and the second paragraph concludes:

“Though pictures of the Iranian president often show him

flashing a peace sign, his actions could well be leading the

world closer to war.”

When the USA’s biggest newsweekly devotes five pages to scoping

out a U.S. air war against Iran, as Time did in the same issue,

it’s yet

another sign that the wheels of our nation’s war-spin machine

are turning faster toward yet another unprovoked attack on

another country.

Ahmadinejad has risen to the top of Washington’s -- and American

media’s -- enemies list. Within the last 20 years, that list has

included

Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, with each

subjected to extensive vilification before the Pentagon launched a

large-scale military attack.

Whenever the president of the United States decides to initiate

or intensify a media blitz against a foreign leader, mainstream

U.S. news

outlets have dependably stepped up the decibels and hysteria.

But the administration can also call off the dogs of war by

going silent about

the evils of some foreign tyrant.

Take Libya’s dictator, for instance. For more than a third of a

century, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi has been a despot whose overall

record

of repression makes Noriega or Milosevic seem relatively

tolerant of domestic political foes. But ever since Qaddafi made

a deal with the Bush administration in December 2003, the

silence out of Washington about Qaddafi’s evilness has been notable.

When Qaddafi publicly celebrated the 37th anniversary of his

dictatorship a few weeks ago, he declared in a speech on state

television: “Our enemies have been crushed inside Libya, and you

have to be ready to kill them if they emerge anew.” The New York

Times noted that Qaddafi’s regime “criminalizes the creation of

opposition parties.”

Today, while the human rights situation in Iran is

reprehensible, the ongoing circumstances are far worse under

many governments favored by Washington. Here at home, media

outlets should be untangling double standards instead of

contributing to them. But so many reporters and pundits have

internalized Washington’s geopolitical agendas that the mainline

institutions of journalism continue to rot from within. That the

rot goes largely unnoticed is testimony to how Orwellian

“doublethink” has been normalized.

These are not issues of professionalism any more than concerns

about public health are issues of medicine. The news media

should be early

warning systems that inform us before current events become

unchangeable history.

But when the media system undermines the free flow of

information and prevents wide-ranging debate, what happens is a

parody of democracy. That’s what occurred four years ago during

the media buildup for the invasion of Iraq.

Now, warning signs are profuse: The Bush administration has Iran

in the Pentagon’s sights. And the drive toward war, fueled by double

standards about nuclear development and human rights, is getting

a big boost from U.S. media coverage that portrays the president

as reluctant to launch an attack on Iran.

Time magazine reports that “from the State Department to the

White House to the highest reaches of the military command,

there is a growing sense that a showdown with Iran ... may be

impossible to avoid.”

The same kind of media spin -- assuming a sincere Bush desire to

avoid war -- was profuse in the months before the invasion of

Iraq. The more that news outlets tell such fairy tales, the more

they become part of the war machinery.

______________________________

The paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made

Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, was

published this summer. For information, go to:

www.warmadeeasy.com