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In September 2004, the International Herald Tribune reported: “Nearly 18 months after U.S. forces demolished Saddam Hussein’s government, pledging to create a prosperous, free-market democracy, Iraq remains in some ways the world’s ultimate welfare state.” The article described how, since 1991 when their country was being debilitated by United Nations Security Council sanctions, most Iraqis have been given a monthly survival ration of food by their government. An estimated 60 per cent of Iraqis are now dependent upon this handout for an important part of their diets. However, the report continued, “The system has enormous costs, direct and indirect…. It has fostered bureaucratic corruption, creates a culture of dependency and, by relying almost entirely on imported goods, suppresses domestic farming and industry.” Yet, fearing a backlash if it were discontinued, Iraq’s interim government has pledged to leave the program in place through 2005 at least. 1
However, at the beginning of the 1990s, “the world’s ultimate welfare state” was actually quite advanced and prosperous. According to John Field of Tufts University:
By the end of the 1980s, 92% of the population had access to safe water, somewhat less enjoyed modern sanitation, and an impressive 93% lived in the catchment areas served by modern health facilities…. Iraq had converted oil wealth into enhanced social well-being with considerable success…. Education expanded, child mortality declined, and life expectancy increased all quite impressively. 2
Iraq had an impressive standard of women’s rights. By the early 1990s it had more female professionals in positions of power than virtually any other Middle Eastern nation. Unicef reported in 1993: “Rarely do women in the Arab world enjoy as much power as they do in Iraq… men and women must receive equal pay for equal work. A wife’s income is recognised as independent from her husband’s.” 3
In my previous article “Making Iraq into a Baby: Defense Policy as a Defense Mechanism,” I examined this issue of how, since 1991, the actions of Western nations—particularly Britain and the U.S.—have devastated a once-prosperous country, making Iraq the ‘welfare state’ it now is. This destruction began with the massive damage inflicted in the 1991 Gulf War. As a mission led by UN Under Secretary General Martti Ahtisaari reported:
The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now, most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology. 4
Why did we wreck the entire infrastructure of Iraq, when our supposed goal was to remove its invading troops from Kuwait? Even the Iraqi city of Mosul was bombed, despite being more than six hundred miles from Kuwait. My conclusion was that this destruction in fact served a psychological purpose, which was to turn Iraq and its people into a symbolic baby. I wrote: “By severely reducing Iraq’s capacity to survive and function independently, we rendered it weak, helpless, needy and dependent—just like a baby. And we became like its parent, with its well being at our mercy.” 5
Following Iraq’s forced withdrawal from Kuwait, by continuing the crippling economic sanctions we severely limited its ability to rebuild itself. These sanctions were the most severe in history and, according to the international law expert Marc Bossuyt, were “unequivocally illegal under existing international humanitarian law and human rights law.”6 I concluded that their underlying purpose was, again, psychological: to keep Iraq as a ‘baby’—weak, helpless and dependent—and ensure it did not ‘grow up.’
I suggested the reason we turned Iraq into a symbolic baby was to protect ourselves from an unbearable truth:
That, unconsciously, we ourselves feel like helpless, dependent, needy little babies. For us to acknowledge and become conscious of this truth would be unbearably painful. We therefore have to disown our babyish feelings and project them into something outside of us. Turning Iraq into a baby was thus a defense mechanism that allowed us to feel stronger, more grown-up and more independent in ourselves. 7
The reason, I wrote, that we (unconsciously) feel like babies is that when we actually were babies, our needs were not adequately met. These needs include such things as having a natural, non-traumatic birth8; receiving plenty of physical closeness; receiving emotional warmth and caring; being allowed to develop at our own pace; receiving an appropriate level of stimulation, etc. Because our early experiences of neglect would have been too painful to integrate, they would have been repressed, so becoming an unconscious force directing our adult behaviour. Our turning of Iraq into a baby was therefore due to the influence of these repressed traumas.
Unfortunately, with our 2003 invasion and continuing occupation, our treatment of Iraq as a symbolic baby has continued. Whereas in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War it was the UN sanctions that kept Iraq weak, helpless and dependent, after our more recent invasion the shambolic ‘reconstruction’ effort has achieved this. So, out of the billions of dollars supposedly allotted for reconstructing Iraq, currently just $29 million has been spent on roads, bridges, health, water, sanitation and public safety combined.9 Furthermore, the ‘reconstruction’ began with initial contracts going exclusively to American firms, without being offered to the Iraqis. For example, Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement. 17 state-owned factories had employed many Iraqis and were even able to export some cement. Yet not a single contract was offered to any of them. While the Coalition Provisional Authority paid up to $1,000 for each imported blast wall, local manufacturers said they could make them for just $100. According to the Iraqi Minister of Industry Mohamad Tofiq, the reasoning behind this was that, among the people making the decisions, “no one believes in the public sector.”10 However, I would suggest the underlying (unconcious) motivation is that by denying Iraqis the freedom to rebuild their own country, we can continue perceiving them as symbolic babies, unable to do anything for themselves.
Our denying the Iraqi people any independence through helping to restructure and run their country was worsened by L. Paul Bremer, the man in charge of the occupation from May 2003 to June 2004, in a series of reforms. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, described these reforms as “an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world.”11 Canadian journalist Naomi Klein outlines this economic ‘shock therapy’:
The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Bremer’s economic engineering had only just begun. In September, to entice foreign investors to come to Iraq, he enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was Order 37, which lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years. Order 40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All that remained of Saddam Hussein’s economic policies was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining. 12
So by giving control of Iraq to everyone but the Iraqis themselves, we have ensured that they remain helpless and dependent. Unsurprisingly, with this ‘shock therapy’ occurring after the devastation of over a decade of crippling sanctions, unemployment in Iraq remains as high as 67 per cent.13 So, lacking the independence a job would give them, Iraqis are being kept even more like symbolic babies.
Our parent-baby relationship with Iraq was starkly apparent when, in April and May 2004, stories and photographs came to light of appalling maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, by their American guards. Here though, we were like a cruel, abusive parent. Photos shown repeatedly in our media revealed Iraqis in various positions of helplessness and defenselessness, with the American guards as their all-powerful masters—like abusive parents in relation to babies. One picture that made the front page of Britain’s biggest selling daily newspaper, the Sun, showed a female U.S. soldier holding an Iraqi prisoner on a leash. The Iraqi man lay curled up and helpless on the floor, whilst the soldier—Lynndie England—towered over him, like a symbolic abusive mother with complete power over her baby. At the trial of one of the American guards, the defense attorney actually compared this to the way some parents hold their toddlers on a leash to stop them from wandering, saying: “You’ve probably been at airports or shopping malls and seen children on tethers.” Stories even surfaced of inmates being forced to crawl naked across the prison floor—baby symbolism at its most blatant. 16
Another instance of us making Iraqis more like symbolic babies has been the brutal November 2004 siege of the Iraqi city of Falluja. Mike Whitney describes some of the damage we inflicted:
The siege, which began on November 8, was intended to rid the city of an estimated 5,000 insurgents who were using it as a base of operation. The results have been devastating. Over 250,000 people have been expelled from their homes and the city has been laid to waste. The US military targeted the three main water treatment plants, the electrical grid and the sewage treatment plant; leaving Fallujans without any of the basic services they’ll need to return to a normal life.
… The full force of America’s arsenal, including F-16s, C-130s, Abrams tanks, and Apache Helicopters were unleashed on a few thousand rebels in a civilian enclave. 17
Dr Saleh Hussein Isawi of the Falluja general hospital saw the extent of the damage when he accompanied some residents back into the city. He reported that 60 to 70 per cent of the homes and other buildings were “completely crushed” and uninhabitable. Of the 30 per cent still standing, he reckoned every one had received some damage. Furthermore, the city now lacked water, electricity and a sewage system. 18
Despite early claims that the U.S. military had “broken the back of the insurgency,” this massive assault was soon proven to be utterly pointless and counterproductive. As Mike Whitney describes:
Pockets of resistance still maintain a tenacious grip on parts of the city and the guerilla-style tactics have negated the overwhelming force of their adversary. If anything, the siege has only emboldened the resistance and broadened its sphere of influence. Violence has now spread throughout the Sunni triangle; ending last week with a devastating mortar attack that killed 22 in a mess tent outside Mosul…. Insurgents are increasingly able to “operate at will”. 19
The vague pretext for this siege seemed to be to rid Falluja of “foreign terrorists” led by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian alleged to be al-Qaeda’s “top operative” in Iraq. Yet, according to one polling organization, out of 2,700 attacks every month by the Iraqi resistance, only six could be credited to al-Zarqawi.20 Furthermore, weeks before the siege the Fallujah Shura Council, which administers the city, wrote a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan trying to avert the coming assault. It said:
In Fallujah, they have created a new vague target: AL ZARQAWI…. The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah and is probably not anywhere in Iraq. The people of Fallujah have announced many times that any person who sees Al-Zarqawi should kill him…. At the same time the representative of Fallujah, our tribal leader, has denounced on many occasions the kidnapping and killing of civilians, and we have no links to any groups committing such inhuman behaviour. 21
Yet this letter was totally ignored by the mainstream media in Britain America. So not only was the siege pointless and counterproductive, it was also avoidable. The one thing it did achieve was to make the city’s residents weaker, more needy and less able to cope for themselves. In other words, by rendering them homeless and with their city lacking running water, electricity or a sewage system, we made them more like babies.
Furthermore, at the time of writing, the U.S. plan for returning Fallujans who evacuated before the siege is to run their city like a prison camp. Everyone entering the city will be photographed, fingerprinted, have an iris scan taken, then be issued an ID card to be worn in plain sight at all times; private automobiles will be banned; Fallujans, after being cleared by American intelligence vetting, will be organized into “work brigades” to help reconstruct the city.22 Thus residents will be treated like babies or small children, requiring very close monitoring and supervision by us, their ‘parents.’ And by having their cars banned they will be limited in their ability to move about, just as a baby is limited, since at best it can only crawl around.
More evidence that this extremely destructive siege was in fact motivated by our own childhood experiences is the words of the U.S. military as they prepared to attack. Sergeant Major Carlton W. Kent told troops: “each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done—kick some butt.” [Italics mine] Surveying the marines around him, he said: “This is a whole can of whoop-butt all combined here.”23 A young marine said: “they won’t know what hit ‘em,” whilst Brigadier General Denis Hajlik told a roomful of embedded journalists: “We’re gonna whack ‘em.”24 It was as if the coming siege was to be a restaging of our own childhood physical punishments, only with the roles reversed such that we were now the all-powerful, punishing parent, whilst the people in Falluja represented us as children, being ‘whacked.’
Three weeks after the siege of Falluja began, Britain’s Sunday Mirror newspaper reported a chilling story:
US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujaha
News that President George W. Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments around the world.
… Reports claim that innocent civilians have died in napalm attacks, which turn victims into human fireballs as the gel bonds flames to flesh. 25
In August 2003, the Independent on Sunday and the Sydney Morning Herald both reported the U.S. using this appalling weapon on Iraqi troops during the initial invasion. Reportedly, the new “Mark-77” weapons used a different petroleum distillate to Vietnam-era napalm, so the U.S. military considered them legal. Said Colonel James Alles of Marine Air Group 11: “The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect.” 26
Rather than stunning governments around the world though, this story was largely ignored. Surely this should have been big news? After all, in democratic nations the public need to know if atrocities are being committed in our name, so we can protest and try to stop them. Yet there was very little media coverage and no outcry over this use of napalm. Similarly, during the final days of the 1991 Gulf War, the following occurred:
Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them firing their weapons from first world war-style trenches, had been buried by ploughs mounted on Abrams tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of sand from the plough spoil had funnelled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun bullets into Iraqi troops.
“I came through right after the lead company,” said Colonel Anthony Moreno. “What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands.”
Two other brigades used the same tank-mounted ploughs and Bradleys to obliterate an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches…. The finishing touches were made by armoured combat earth-movers (ACEs). These massive bulldozers, with armoured cockpits impervious to small-arms fire, smoothed away any hint of the carnage. “A lot of guys were scared, but I enjoyed it,” said PFC Joe Queen, an ACE driver awarded a Bronze Star for his performance in the battle. 27
This story of young Iraqi soldiers being buried alive also failed to get the media attention it should have. According to investigative reporter John Pilger, the only televised images of the atrocity were shown as a backdrop during a late-night BBC arts programme, where participants were discussing the reporting of the war whilst oblivious to the disturbing scenes on screen behind them. 28
Another recent story one might expect to have been front-page news and to have caused a public outcry was when, on October 29, 2004, the prestigious scientific journal The Lancet published a report by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, comparing Iraqi civilian deaths before and after the 2003 invasion. By surveying 30 homes in each of 33 neighbourhoods across Iraq (a total of over 7,800 Iraqis), they calculated the extent to which the death rate among civilians increased after the start of the invasion. Their conclusion: “Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100 000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.” Furthermore, “Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.”29 Yet, as the British independent media watchdog MediaLens point out: “The report was met with a low-key, sceptical response, or outright silence in the media. There was no horror, no outrage.”
Several days after being published, “the Lancet report has not been mentioned at all by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The Express devoted 71 words to the report, but only in its Lancashire edition.” The only coverage in the Sunday Times was one sentence: “Tony Blair, too, may have recalled Basil Fawlty when The Lancet published an estimate that 100,000 Iraqis have died since the start of the allied invasion.” The Evening Standard managed two sentences: “The emails came as a new study in The Lancet estimated 100,000 civilians had died since the conflict began. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman…added that the 100,000 death toll figure could not be trusted because it was based on an extrapolation.” Yet, as the Times reported: “Statisticians who have analysed the data said last night that the scientists’ methodology was strong and the civilian death count could well be conservative.”
On the Chann'el 4 News, a large chunk of their report was spent challenging the study’s methodology: that it “used an extrapolation technique…rather than a detailed body count”; that “The reliability of interviews must be questioned too, though four out of five families were able to produce a death certificate”; and that “it multiplies a small sample across the whole of Iraq.” Yet, as MediaLens point out: “It is remarkable that a news reporter could so casually dismiss the methodology and findings of a carefully implemented study that has been rigorously peer-reviewed for one of the world’s leading scientific journals.”
MediaLens write: “there have been no debates allowing the report’s authors to respond to challenges. Journalists seem uninterested in establishing whether the government’s dismissal of the report might be one more cynical deception. Instead they have been happy to just move on.” Unlike the mainstream media, MediaLens contacted the authors of the report, who were able to rebut all the criticisms that had been proffered. Dr. Gilbert Burnham responded:
Now the precision of the results is mostly dependent on sample size. The bigger the sample, the more precise the result. We calculated this carefully, and we had the statistical power to say what we did…. Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet and here in the school (chair of Biostatistics Dept), so we have the scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as this one has!
Thus, MediaLens conclude: “Their results point to the mass slaughter of 100,000 civilians. The media is just not interested.” 30
Similarly in the U.S., as sociology professor Peter Phillips observed: “where is the US corporate media coverage of thousands of dead and homeless? Where are the live aerial TV shots of the disaster zones and the up-close photos of the victims? Where are the survivor stories—the miracle child who lived thought (sic) a building collapsed by US bombs and rescued by neighbors?” Similar to what happened in Britain, “The US corporate media has published Pentagon statements on civilian deaths in Iraq as unknown and dismissed the Lancet Medical Journal study.” 31
Why is it that we ignore or dismiss important stories like these that are clearly in the public interest, whenever they show ‘us’—our military, politicians, etc.—in a bad light? Surely these are the stories that deserve most coverage, so the public might bring about change for the better. I believe the reason is that we need to maintain a belief that we are ‘good guys.’ As President Bush declared at the 2004 Republican convention: “I am proud that our country remains the hope of the oppressed, and the greatest force for good on this earth.”32 Similarly, when visiting British troops in Basra early in 2004, Tony Blair told them: “it is as well to know not merely that you are fighting because that is what you have been ordered to do, but that the work that you have been doing has been in a noble and a good cause, and it has.” 33
Robert Fisk of the Independent describes our attitude:
We are all victims of our high-flown morality. “They”—the Arabs, Muslims, “cloth heads”, “rag heads”, “terrorists”—are of a lesser breed, of lower moral standards. They are people to be shouted at. They have to be “liberated” and given “democracy”. But we little band of brothers, we dress ourselves up in the uniforms of righteousness. We are marines or military police or a Queen’s regiment and we are on the side of good. “They” are on the side of “evil”. So we can do no wrong. 34
Thus, as the ‘good guys,’ President Bush was able to say to Iraqis as we prepared to bomb their country: “The day of your liberation is near.”35 A week into the invasion, Tony Blair similarly claimed: “the justice of our cause lies in the liberation of the Iraqi people, and to them we say we will liberate you, the day of your freedom draws near.”36 Vice President Cheney could say before the invasion: “I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.”37 Johann Hari of the Independent wrote: “If Britain were governed by such a man [as Saddam Hussein], I would welcome friendly bombs.”38 And when the invasion began, it was called “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” as if we were such ‘good guys’ that we were selflessly doing this all for the benefit of the Iraqis. It is probably also because of this ‘good guys’ belief that, as U.S. marines were about to launch their massive assault against Falluja in November 2004, Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Brandl could make the ridiculous claim: “The competence and compassion of my marines will mitigate any civilian casualties.” And, since we are the good guys, this would logically make our enemy ‘evil.’ As Brandl continued: “the enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we’re going to destroy him.”39
Because of our need to believe we are the ‘good guys,’ stories of atrocities committed by our military, or of massive death and destruction we have wrought, are disregarded. Were they given the attention they deserve, our ‘good guys’ belief might be shattered.
Why though do so many of us depend upon believing ‘we’ are the ‘good guys’? I would suggest the reason is we need this belief as a defense mechanism, to protect us from the repressed pain of times in our childhood when we were treated as ‘bad.’ These may have been times when we were shouted at, constantly criticized, hit or otherwise physically abused; at the severe end of the spectrum these incidents could include sexual abuse or other extreme cruelty. What these events have in common is that they involved us, as the child-victim, being treated as a bad person.
Such acts of maltreatment would have been too painful for us as children to integrate, particularly when we were at our youngest. Consequently, we would have repressed the pain of what was done to us in order to survive and go on functioning. It is in the service of this repression that our ‘good guys’ belief plays its role.
To understand this better, we need to understand the connection between ideas/beliefs and our bodies’ own morphine-like analgesics: the endorphins. As the psychologist Arthur Janov summarizes in his 1980 book Prisoners of Pain: “Defenses block Pain; and the way they do so is through the endorphine system.”40 Janov describes how particular beliefs can act as psychological defenses:
The best possible tranquilizer in the world is an idea. Ideas are not like opiates—they are opiates. When someone says, “you are really good,” “we care about you,” or “we are behind you,” these ideas are tranquilizing. They enter the brain where they pick up meaning, become transmuted into biochemical processes (no doubt of the morphine-endorphine variety), and end up suppressing Pain. Subjectively the person may not believe that he is in agony—just that those ideas make him feel a little bit better. 41
Janov continues:
The evidence that ideas and thoughts can be opiates is growing. Dr. Howard Fields of the University of California, San Francisco, experimented with dental patients to show that psychologic factors trigger production of the endorphines. One group received sugar pills (placebos) but were told that these were powerful Pain-killers. One third of the patients reported decreased pain. Yet the benefits of the placebo disappeared after an injection of Naloxone [a morphine antagonist], indicating that the ideas had triggered the production of endorphine. Those who reported no pain decrease with placebos were not affected by the Naloxone. The investigators claimed that endorphine production is the best explanation of the results. This very important research shows that psychologic factors, expectations, hopes, and ideas can shut down Pain in the same biochemical manner as injected morphine does. 42
It is thanks to this relationship between ideas and endorphins that the belief systems espoused by some support groups for addicts can act as a defense to help these people fend off their inner misery:
People with “addictive personalities” meet regularly with others like them and develop an ideology that reiterates that you are helpless before the addiction, that there is a higher power which will watch over you and protect you, that you are not alone with your suffering. These ideas “work,” as long as you get ongoing infusions of them, because they directly counter the real feelings of being alone. These groups offer defenses against an imprinted reality that means: “I’m all alone. No one cares about me. I’ll never get any support or encouragement. There is no higher power (parents) to help out.” 43
Similarly: “if one has a need for a father—having never had a real one in a lifetime—that need can result in physical tension and can also become a belief in a warm, protective, interested God. No amount of evidence is going to change that belief.” 44
Once we recognise this relationship between beliefs and the endorphins, we can understand how the belief that ‘we’—us, our leaders, our military, our allies—are the ‘good guys’ is in fact a pain-killer, a psychological defense mechanism that protects us from the pain of our early childhood maltreatment, when we were treated as ‘bad.’ This belief bolsters our repression by stimulating our body’s production of its own morphine-like painkillers.
Now we can see why such little attention is given to stories that show this ‘good guys’ belief to be an illusion. Such stories are a threat to our repression and put us at risk of feeling the misery of our repressed childhood traumas, of feeling like ‘bad guys.’ We can also understand why, after the revelations of prisoner abuse by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib prison surfaced, during the Senate hearing on the scandal Senator James Inhofe declared: “I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.” And around the same time, Newsweek reported: “every day at least a handful of NEWSWEEK readers write in to say that they are tired of images of the abuse or to say that they don’t want to see photographs of coffins bearing the remains of U.S. soldiers.”45 We can now see why the British newspaper that took the strongest anti-war stance—the tabloid Daily Mirror—saw its average daily sales fall below two million copies for the first time in 70 years during the first weeks of the 2003 invasion. The Mirror had been showing a series of unflinching front pages, with captions like “SHOCKING AND AWFUL,” “THIS WAR IS WRONG,” and one showing George W. Bush below a photo of the bombing of a Baghdad market, with the headline: “HE LOVES IT.” In contrast, other tabloids like the Daily Star and the very pro-war Sun saw their sales increase significantly around the same time. 46
However, an apparent exception is the Abu Ghraib scandal: a ‘bad’ news story that made it into the mainstream press and caused an outcry. Yet it had taken months for the evidence of torture and abuse to be made public. And when it was, we maintained our belief in our own ‘goodness’ by attributing the behaviour to a small number of unrepresentative, errant soldiers—what President Bush described as “disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.”47 These individuals were subsequently charged over their actions. Yet evidence suggests that the abuse was in fact far more widespread and was sanctioned from above. According to Seymour Hersh, a February 2004 U.S. army report into Abu Ghraib amounted to “an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels.” One witness in the report, asked why he did not inform his chain of command about the abuse, had said: “Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing belongs to MI [military intelligence] and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.” One of the accused soldiers had told his family before the scandal broke that he’d asked his superior officer about the abuse, but was told: “Don’t worry about it.” 48
A similar psychological process may also partly explain why, with occasional exceptions, the major media have so far failed to investigate the possibility of complicity by some within the U.S. government, military and intelligence services in the attacks of September 11, 2001. This is in spite of an ever-growing body of evidence pointing directly at such complicity.49 Here, the pain-killing belief the media are helping maintain is that our politicians and other parent-like figures whose job it is to protect the public (like the military and intelligence services) are ‘good parents’ who will take care of us, protect us and never do anything to seriously hurt the public. This belief serves as a defense against the repressed childhood pain of times when our actual parents were in fact ‘bad’ to us, maybe failing to take proper care of us or deliberately hurting us (such as by beating us). Thus our belief in the ‘goodness’ of our politicians, military and intelligence services parallels the way abused children idealize their parents. As Alice Miller writes: “The normal reaction to hurt should be anger and pain. However, that anger remains forbidden to the child in a hurtful environment, and the pain would be unbearable in a child’s loneliness. The child must then suppress his feelings, repress the memory of the trauma, and idealize his aggressor.”50
As an example of this failure to ask the necessary but disturbing questions about 9/11, when Senator Tom Daschle appeared on Meet the Press in May 2002, he described how earlier that year President Bush and Dick Cheney had repeatedly told him there was to be no investigation into the events of September 11.51 As long-time Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz points out: “This was highly newsworthy—how could it not be?” Yet, as Mintz continues, “The next morning…leading national newspapers—including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today—printed not a word about it.”52 In order to help maintain an image of Bush and Cheney as ‘good parents,’ this most important story was ignored.
More recently, while addressing U.S. troops in Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld seemed to let slip that the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11, Flight 93, had been shot down, thus contradicting the official claim that it was brought down due to a struggle by passengers to reclaim control from the hijackers. Rumsfeld, in his address, spoke of “the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon.”53 Yet this story was also ignored by the major news sources.
Even in the UK, Labour MP Michael Meacher—formerly one of Tony Blair’s government ministers—received angry criticism when he wrote an article implying U.S. government complicity in 9/11. In the article, titled “This war on terrorism is bogus,” Meacher stated: “it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks.” He asked: “could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?” 54
One senior Whitehall aide responded: “It’s the stuff of fantasy,” whilst an article in the Sunday Times said Meacher had “lurched into the twilight zone.” A senior Conservative politician commented: “We appear to be witnessing the rebirth of what used to be called the ‘loony Left’.”55 Yet Meacher’s article—as it clearly stated—was based upon information reported in respected mainstream sources such as the BBC, Newsweek, Time, the Telegraph and the Associated Press. Responding to the media criticism and ridicule of Meacher, freelance journalist Paul Donovan pointed out: “His crime for establishment journalists is in putting together the various pieces of information to come up with a credible rationale for what has happened over the past two years.” Donovan concluded: “The fact that the account seems so incredible is reflective of how poorly others in the [media] have done their jobs in terms of informing the public.” 56
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