Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [298]
31. See Noam Chomsky, Failed States (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 131.
32. See Thomas Donnelly et al., Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century, Project for the New American Century, September, 2000. Acknowledging the “long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to [this] region of vital importance,” the document added: “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein” (p. 14, col. 2).
33. See Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, Rev. Ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
34. As Thomas Friedman, then the Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, observed back in 1991, George Bush I “never supported the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions against Mr. Hussein, or for that matter any democracy movement in Iraq.” The reasons, according to Friedman, were that Bush I “felt that Mr. Hussein and his army were broken and no longer represented any external threat, especially since Mr. Bush contentedly assumed that his intelligence reports were correct and that all of Mr. Hussein’s nuclear capabilities had been destroyed. Sooner or later, Mr. Bush argued, sanctions would force Mr. Hussein’s generals to bring him down, and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.” “A Rising Sense That Iraq’s Hussein Must Go,” New York Times, July 7, 1991.
35. Juan Cole, “A Mixed Story,” Informed Comment (Weblog), January 30, 2005.
36. Farnaz Fassihi, “Hidden Power: Backed by Millions, Iraqi Cleric Pursues a Long-Held Ambition—Ayatollah Sistani’s Vision Of Islamic State Roils American Election Plans—Shifting Relations With Iran,” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2004.
37. “Winds of change in the Middle East: Call for careful reflection about causes and not triumphalism,” Editorial, Financial Times, March 5, 2005.
38. See, e.g., Hassah M. Fattah, “Syria Under Pressure: Worse Trouble May Lie Ahead,” New York Times, March 3, 2005. With reference to Lebanon, Bush stated that both the U.S. and French governments had “said loud and clear to Syria, you get your troops and your secret services out of Lebanon so that good democracy has a chance to flourish.” “President Participates in Job Training and Education Conversation,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, March 2, 2005.
39. On May 1, 2003, the White House staged an internationally televised event from the flight-deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, off the coast of the southern California city of San Diego. Returning to port from a tour in the Arabian Gulf, where its crew participated in “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” George Bush II landed on the deck, from which he spoke to the world. The White House’s intended imagery that day can be summed-up as George Bush II, the modern “great emancipator,” delivering the world from the threat once posed by Saddam Hussein. See Peter Hart, “The Great Emancipator,” Extra! May/June, 2005.
40. According to Friel and Falk, “Despite the fact that an invasion of one country by another implicated the most fundamental aspects of the UN Charter and international law, the New York Times editorial page never mentioned the words ‘UN Charter’ or ‘international law’ in any of its seventy editorials on Iraq from September 11 2001 to March 21 2003 . . . .” The Record of the Paper, p. 15.
41. In their study of word-usage in the MSM, Bennett et al. found that the word “abuse” was greatly preferred to “torture,” and used far more frequently. In news stories, “abuse” was used 81 percent of the time, versus 3 percent for “torture”; and in editorials, 61 percent versus 17 percent. See When The Press Fails, pp. 89–98.
42. In Matthew Rycroft’s legendary summary of a high-level meeting at the