[Reader-list] naomi klein in the Nation

[Ravi Sundaram]

This one of the better pieces which looks at the mediscape of the coming war...


Game Over
Now is the time in the game of war when we dehumanize our enemies.
They are utterly incomprehensible, their acts unimaginable, their 
motivations senseless. They are "madmen" and their states are "rogue."
Now is not the time for more understanding--just better intelligence. These 
are the rules of the war game. Feeling people will no doubt object to this 
characterization: War is not a game. It is real lives ripped in half; it is 
lost sons, daughters,mothers, and fathers, each with a dignified story. 
Tuesday's act of terror was reality of the harshest kind, an act that makes 
all other acts seem suddenly frivolous, game-like.
It's true: war is most emphatically not a game. And perhaps after Tuesday, 
it will never again be treated as one. Perhaps September 11, 2001 will mark 
the end of the shameful era of the video game war.
Watching the coverage on Tuesday was a stark contrast to the last time I 
sat glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space 
Invader battlefield of the Gulf War had almost nothing in common with what 
we have seen this week. Back then, instead of real buildings exploding over 
and over again, we saw only sterile bomb's-eye-views of concrete 
targets--there and then gone. Who was in these abstract polygons? We never 
found out.
Since the Gulf War, American foreign policy has been based on a single 
brutal fiction: that the US military can intervene in conflicts around the 
world--in Iraq, Kosovo, Israel--without suffering any US casualties. This 
is a country that has come to believe in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe war.
The safe war logic is, of course, based on the technological ability to 
wage a war exclusively from the air. But it also relies on the deep 
conviction that no one would dare mess with the United States--the one 
remaining superpower--on its own soil.
This conviction has, until Tuesday, allowed Americans to remain blithely 
unaffected by--even uninterested in--international conflicts in which they 
are key protagonists. Americans don't get daily coverage on CNN of the 
ongoing bombings in Iraq, nor are they treated to human-interest stories on 
the devastating effects of economic sanctions on that country's children. 
After the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (mistaken for a 
chemical weapons facility), there weren't too many follow up reports about 
what the loss of vaccine manufacturing did to disease prevention in the 
region.
And when NATO bombed civilian targets in Kosovo--including markets, 
hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains, and a TV station--NBC didn't 
do "streeter" interviews with survivors about how shocked they were by the 
indiscriminate destruction.
The United States has become expert in the art of sanitizing and 
dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. Domestically, war is no 
longer a national obsession, it's a business that is now largely 
out-sourced to experts. This is one of the country's many paradoxes: Though 
the engine of globalization around the world, the nation has never been 
more inward looking, less worldly.
No wonder Tuesday's attack, in addition to being horrifying beyond 
description, has the added horror of seeming, to many Americans, to have 
arrived entirely out of the blue. Wars rarely come as a complete shock to 
the country under attack but it's fair to say that this one did. On CNN, 
USA Today reported Mike Walter was asked to sum up the reaction on the 
street. What he said was: "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I just can't 
believe it."
The idea that one could ever be prepared for such inhuman terror is absurd. 
However, viewed through the US television networks, Tuesday's attack seemed 
to come less from another country than another planet. The events were 
reported not so much by journalists as by the new breed of brand-name 
celebrity anchors who have made countless cameos in TimeWarner movies about 
apocalyptic terrorist attacks on the United States--now, incongruously 
reporting on the real thing.
The United States is a country that believed itself not just at peace but 
war-proof, a self-perception that would come as quite a surprise to most 
Iraqis, Palestinians and Colombians. Like an amnesiac, the United States 
has woken up in the middle of a war, only to find out it has been going on 
for years.
Did the United States deserve to be attacked? Of course not. That argument 
is ugly and dangerous. But here's a different question that must be asked: 
did US foreign policy create the conditions in which such twisted logic 
could flourish, a war not so much on US imperialism but on perceived US 
imperviousness?
The era of the video game war in which the United States is always at the 
controls has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at 
the persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which twisted 
revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens share 
their pain.
Since the attack, US politicians and commentators have repeated the mantra 
that the country will go on with business as usual. The American way of 
life, they insist, will not be interrupted. It seems an odd claim to make 
when all evidence points to the contrary. War, to butcher a phrase from the 
old Gulf War days, is the mother of all interruptions. As well it should 
be. The illusion of war without casualties has been forever shattered.
A blinking message is up on our collective video game console: Game Over.
NAOMI KLEIN