Home Front 'Surge'

War Party's ad campaign will boomerang
by Justin Raimondo
In a disgusting display of mendacity not seen since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, a pro-war advertising campaign spearheaded by former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer is buying $15 million worth of 30-second television spots that repeat the lies linking 9/11 to Iraq - and explicitly threatening another terrorist attack in the US if we "surrender." It's the first storm in a season of fear.

The content of the ads - four of them, so far - is so completely dishonest that one wonders what the producers were thinking: do they really imagine the American people are going to swallow another round of complete fabrications? It's hard to believe, but there you have it. Even more surreal than the assertions tying the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the Iraqis is the blatant exploitation of US troops in Iraq: this one, for example, shows a soldier who has lost a leg declaiming that he will have lost it for nothing if we allow "politics" - i.e. the overwhelming majority of Americans - to influence our policy. Then "everything I've given and sacrificed will mean nothing." Here is the complete text:

"Congress was right to vote to fight terrorism in Iraq and I re-enlisted after September 11 because I don't want my sons to see what I saw. I want them to be free and safe. I know what I lost. I also know that if we pull out now everything I've given and the sacrifices will mean nothing. They attacked us and they will again. They won't stop in Iraq. We are winning on the ground and making real progress. It's no time to quit. It's no time for politics."

So the liars who lied us into war, who fabricated "evidence" of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," aren't to blame - oh no, of course not! It's those of us who oppose this monstrous and mistaken invasion who are to be targeted as advocating "surrender" in a conflict that cannot be won without murdering half the population of Iraq and enslaving the other half. Because we allowed the Scooter Libbys and the Ari Fleischers to lure us into a quagmire, we must remain submerged there forever - or the loss of this soldier's leg was all for naught.

What kind of morality is it that lets the perpetrator of a fraud off scot-free while blaming the victim who has been defrauded? It's called neocon morality - where the neocons are always in the clear, and the rest of us are dunned to pay the price of their immeasurable hubris.

This ad features a grieving mom who opines "we've already had one 9/11 - we don't need another," while giving out the administration-neocon line that we're "making progress" in Iraq, and can't "surrender" now. Yet how will withdrawing from the midst of the Iraqi civil war, where Sunnis fight Shi'ites and we are caught in the middle, result in an attack on the U.S.? Logic has nothing to do with the message behind this ad, which is all about pure fear, plain and simple. Again, the implication is that the fallen soldiers will have died in vain if we leave - not, you understand, because the war we started had no clear rationale, and was based on a series of carefully-forged lies.

Here is a vet in a wheelchair who glowers at the camera as he contemplates Congress "considering surrender." There is a vaguely threatening tone to his words, as if all the wounded veterans of this misguided war will descend on the Capitol and exact vengeance if we don't "emerge victorious."

Here the neocons - let's name the real enemy, after all - are quite explicitly pushing their "stab-in-the-back" theory, which blames our looming defeat in Iraq not on the inherent impossibility of winning over the Iraqis while we occupy their country and brutalize their people, but on the evils of "politics" (i.e. democracy, where the majority supposedly rules) and scheming politicians, who are somehow manipulating the popular will in order to betray our fighting men and women.

"They attacked us" avers the wounded vet, but that's not true: Iraq never attacked us, never had the capacity to attack us, and was never even a credible threat. We attacked them - i.e. the Iraqis, not al-Qaeda - and we're still attacking them, four years after the "liberation" of Iraq.

In this one, a woman talks about the tragic loss of her uncle and her husband - the former was a New York City fireman on 9/11, the latter a soldier fallen in Iraq - and warns that if we leave Iraq, "it will mean more attacks in America." Her husband died so that her children won't have to fight. Blah blah blah blah - it's just one lie after another, with sinister speed-freaky music playing in the background and all of it overhung with an all-pervasive fear. Logic, reason, and facts - all are absent from this emotive narrative, which simply reiterates the conflation of Iraq and al-Qaeda, and reinforces the urban legend that has Iraqi rather than Saudi hijackers ramming into the World Trade Center towers.

Here is the real face of the War Party: openly and brazenly peddling long-debunked myths designed to appeal to the emotions, rather than the intellect. This is classic war propaganda produced without respect for the facts of reality or the most basic human decency.

So what else is new?

What's interesting, aside from the crude content of these ads, is their funding: who's paying for this pack of lies? The Washington Post lists the major donors:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11498