3/18/2002
Now that the USA has been thrown fully into the war business, we're wasting no time. We've reinforced our bases everywhere, established new bases, dispatched military advisors, and generally shaken our fist at half the countries on Earth. Not since WWII have we had such a widespread presence; some of these countries have never seen our military on their soil before. We are not, importantly, making any plans for getting back out.
It is imperative to note the area of most of the brand-new bases: central Asia. What's in central Asia? Forbidding mountains, desert, herd animals, economically depressed former Soviet republics. Oh, and a massive reserve of oil. Connect the dots of those bases and you've got a straight line from the ocean to the oil, says this article. The fact that that line also shoots straight into the wintry no-man's-land of the Kirghiz, where Russia and China are within eyeshot of each other, seems to dismay us not (though it perturbs the Russians).
Most of our explicit hit list is in the middle east, where our always uneasy presence has been increased; we mostly want to annihilate Iraq, and then Iran (because this pleases Israel more than any other reason), and maybe Jordan, Syria and Libya later. We have moved into Yemen. To the further detriment of our standing in the Islamic world, we continue (even when everyone else turns away) to do our nonstop best to sing the praises of Israel and back it no matter what it does, though at a certain point even we have to gingerly ask Ariel Sharon to cool it a little.
There are plenty of other fronts, though; on some tenuous and vague ground about al Qaeda connections that nobody can prove, we're in the Philippines. We're eyeing Indonesia. And President Pastrana of Colombia is eager to have more military aid for his army and their unofficial bastard militia against the rebel bastards of the FARC, whose aid is also from the US, in the form of drug money. Pastrana has seized on the word "terrorist" with pleasure (and plenty of others will be willing to adopt our new terms to defend their own dirty little turf battles), and all the license that seems to go with it. And we're right behind him, carefully campaigning to conflate the old hopeless money sink of the "war on drugs" with the shiny new popular "war on terrorism" (which is too often shortened to the more metaphysically daunting "war on terror"). They do after all have ulterior motives in common, which is why neither bears any resemblance to an honest effort to solve the problem.
Not yet too tired to turn every stone, we've even targeted the well-known global menace of Basque separatists. All six or so of them.
When I say we're laying groundwork for new assaults, I don't refer only to troop movements, though there are enough of those to keep a moderately dedicated reader of the news pretty busy. I also mean we're pouring the foundations of general public approval at home. Washington has asked for, and received, assistance from Hollywood on that score. The obvious centerpiece of the effort thus far is Black Hawk Down, the grisliest of the current surge of war movies. This one focuses on the famous incident in Somalia when 19 Elite Rangers were killed after a helicopter crash, dismaying Americans and leading to Clinton's remarkable oath never to land troops in a place where they might get killed.
The movie was already written and being produced before this war. But some say its first audience was a select group of military and intelligence bigwigs in DC--including Oliver North, maddeningly, in case anybody thought that his role in a massive illegal action and coverup umpteen years ago did anything but endear him to those departments. This prestigious organization made some suggestions, and those suggestions were honored before the film went public. The result: a movie in which Somalis are presented as terrifying hordes of feral, slavering black people bent on blood, and the audience is left feeling like we've got a score to settle.
So is it propaganda? It's a squishy question, and people are arguing it both ways. Simply the removal of the questionable history of US involvement in Somalia makes it arguably more supportive of the military than would seem objective--but if that screening in front of Pentagon officials actually happened--and we do know the administration openly called on Hollywood to be patriotic--then that quacks like propaganda as far as I'm concerned.
There are some other examples floating around, but it's a hard thing to track (especially when you don't own a TV). It's hard to say what else on the big or small screen might earn Washington's favor right now; I can't help but notice ads here in New York for a TV documentary on Fidel Castro, for instance, though I don't know much about what's in it. The poster itself looked unsavory, to be sure. What else? There are war movies around. The real question is which of them got pointers from government agencies.