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The pattern of Amerika's involvement in Iraq today
follows a decades-old Amerikan prescription. When
no Amerikan lives face direct threat, the U.$.
public swallows whole anything that the State
Department and mega-corporate media throw their way. The first to
bother with anything different than the media
perception built by a handful of spinners and
deceivers at the top of gigantic government and
media bureaucracies are military intelligence and
business officials.
When responsible military officials become upset enough, they release information to the public to give it a more accurate picture. This is part of factional fighting within the ruling class, but it is also part of manipulating the public into new directions. The ordinary picture of Chinese in Amerika before the 1930s was a people running laundries in the united $tates worthy of racist scorn. That all had to change at least somewhat as real political contests broke out across Asia. In the 1930s, when landlord dictator Chiang Kai- shek partially ruled China, the U.$. media lavished incredible praise on him--much the opposite of what the same media did to Saddam Hussein in 2002 and 2003. Time Magazine in 1937 named Chiang Kai-shek and his wife "Madame" Chiang Kai-shek the "ablest of leadership" worthy of "Man and Women of the Year."(1) Actually, wild oscillations in Amerikan opinion of China started even before that. It's just that by 1937, thanks to a war brewing and a communist threat led by Mao Zedong, Amerikan policy-makers started to judge that Chiang Kai-shek was their man in China. The praise was so fulsome, authors said that the Chiang Kai-shek couple had been made into "plaster saints" at the time. All that changed as soon as Amerikan lives were at stake in China during World War II. One Graham Peck of the U.S. "Office of War Information" said, "'I think every American who came to Kuomintang territory on war duty has bitter memories of the do-nothing attitudes, and the profiteering which ranged from the prices the U.S. had to pay for air fields to the prices GI's were charged in restaurants.'"(2) Amerikan military men who thought they were flying Madame Chiang Kai-shek on an important mission found instead that they were transporting her luxury baggage, at risk to themselves. Previously, if the press had reported that she was doing politico-military work, they would have believed it, but with their own lives on the line in the flying, the pilots' attitude was different. After World War II, something else reminiscent of Vietnam and Iraq happened. Chiang Kai-shek's party and generals told the Amerikans that "'The Communists are babies; they don't know how to fight.'" "'The war will be over in three months,' Chiang's top-ranking general declared." That all went into the Amerikan media. Nonetheless, based on World War II experience, Amerikan generals, pilots and soldiers knew better. Even though most U.S. military forces went to Europe during World War II, there were some who dealt with the Chinese and Vietnamese attacking the Japanese. When Mao liberated all of China in 1949 instead of collapsing in three months, much of the U.S. military knew exactly why--that Chiang Kai-shek was a hopelessly backward and corrupt man heading a useless and corrupt party. While Chiang Kai-shek's money came from the united $tates, he still found ways to lobby Amerika after being booted onto Taiwan by the Chinese Revolution. Among other things that Chiang Kai-shek's government did was give money to Richard Nixon's campaign for Senate in California and egg on Senator Joe McCarthy.(4) The same thing happened with Vietnam. The U.S. military officials who dealt with the regime in southern Vietnam knew it to be corrupt and inefficient in every way--not promising material for the development of "freedom." Nonetheless, the dominant media-created perception was that sending a few more thousand troops would wipe out the communist threat and Vietnam would be on the road to "democracy." This belief continued for several years until Lyndon B. Johnson had 500,000 troops in Vietnam in 1965. Even then, it took till 1969 for a majority of U.S. public opinion to swing against the war-- but not before tens of thousands of U.$. deaths. The process of thought in the Amerikan mind started with debunking what it thought were "lies." For example, in the spring of 1964, the outgoing general in Vietnam named Paul Harkins told the incoming military leader William Westmoreland and a civilian official that the United $tates would win in six months.(5) As early as a January 1963 battle at Ap Bac that the media observed, the U.$. media knew that the U.$. government lied about winning a battle that the U.$. puppets lost. President John F. Kennedy tried to get a reporter reassigned for knowing the truth.(6) So it is today in Iraq. When the war started, a majority supported it. In fact, in March, 2003, only 20% of U.$. whites opposed the war.(7) Then Bush declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" on May 1, 2003. Since that time, more U.S. soldiers died than during the official fighting. The soldiers themselves learned on the scene that contrary to the neo-conservatives, the Iraqi people did not "throw roses and rice" to the "liberators." Some military police have learned up close that Amerikans are no better in imprisoning Iraqis than Saddam Hussein was. Above all, the petty-bourgeoisie has decided that the war was not "worth it." The costs are too high according to 52%-62% of the public today. (A May 21-23 Gallup poll showed 52%.)(8) The public remains evenly divided on whether the war should have started in the first place, but the "costs" question is bringing out the vacillating petty-bourgeoisie which has been convinced that filling up the SUV in Iraq won't be as cheap as they thought. An example in the oscillation of petty-bourgeois opinion is California. In April 2003, 58% said the war was "worth it." Now 63% say it is not "worth it." (9) By the way, we are happy to report that the Spanish- speaking population is vacillating against the war even more extremely than the rest of the population inside U.S. borders, with 75% now saying the Iraq war was not worth it. MIM believes this vindicates our strategy opposing the Martin Luther King road with revolutionary nationalism. (10) In Alabama, 52% of the population still thinks that the invasion of Iraq "was the right thing to do." The poll from the third week of May also shows that 66% of Alabamians do not think Rumsfeld should resign. Nonetheless, even the population of Alabama has shown a dramatic drop-off in the percentage of people who think the war is going "well," falling by 30 percentage points since January. 78% said that the prison torture will make things harder in Iraq. When we think about how Alabama learned about Iraq, it's once again a vindication of the same old pattern. U.S. soldiers, many from Alabama went to Iraq and took some photographs. Those photographs found their way back to the united $tates.(11) It's not that Amerikans of the last 100 years have opposed imperialism in principle. Amerikans are much more impressed by whether stated objectives can be achieved easily or not. They would rather learn from direct experience, including being shot at--whether a war is "worth it" to their class interests. Nations that can inflict severe material and global public opinion damage will find that petty-bourgeois opinion in Amerika swings their way as petty-bourgeois doubts about particular imperialists and particular imperialist strategies grow.
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