Jim Wooten
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IF you have the view that America is essentially an arrogant, thuggish society with aggressive impulses that have to be checked by civilizing forces, whether international treaties or domestic behavior police, there's no doubt we're not above "covering up" civilian slaughter, too.
That's the charge making its way into the mainstream media --- based on a compilation of information gathered by a professor in New Hampshire from world press accounts of the war in Afghanistan that includes tabulation from highly unreliable sources in the region.
The professor, Marc W. Herold, has assembled numbers purporting to establish that 3,767 civilians have been killed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan.
From that, others who share Herold's political views posit the hypothesis that our coverup --- the mainstream media and the Bush administration --- invites retaliation. This from Roberto J. Gonzalez, an assistant professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, in an opinion article reprinted in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday:
The coverup "might create a dangerous future for Americans," he writes. "Such restrictions keep us from understanding how the rest of the world views the war, and why it might provoke future attacks on the United States. They may also breed complacency, ignorance and national insecurity."
The original essay on which he relied comes from "an economist" in New Hampshire.
This is how this professor (who spent 1968-1975, the Vietnam years, as a graduate student at Berkeley) thinks: "The actions of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Rice trio speak eloquently to these efforts: calling in major U.S. news networks to give them their marching orders, buying up all commercial satellite imagery available to the general public, sending Colin Powell off to Qatar to lecture the independent Al Jazeera news network, and lastly, when that failed, targeting the Kabul office of Al Jazeera and scoring a direct missile hit on it."
He is careful to point out that "I have avoided granting greater reliability to U.S. or British sources --- the ethnocentric bias . . . I have eschewed making judgments about the relative reliability of one nation's news agencies and reporters vs. another's."
One of his previous contributions was a course at New Hampshire on anarchy. The course was in response to student interest "and mine as well," he told The Boston Globe in 1999. "I've always been interested in this whole way of looking at life and society," he said then. "I've always had a lot of problems with authority structures, domination, exploitation, discipline and the like."
The essay that forms the basis for the coverup allegation is available online. Judge its balance for yourself. The Web address is: www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm
The left's reaction to this war has been a textbook case in how to spin political opinion. The president's overwhelming popularity among Americans, and the on-ground successes in Afghanistan, make direct challenge unpromising.
So it's largely framed as "we should understand why they hate us," followed by the left's cynicism. Or it's cynicism couched as medicinal patriotism.
The past few months have produced a rather strange breed of resentment and pessimism. The assumption is that America's enemies are most certainly justified in thinking us unsavory because of our actions around the world, in refusing to sign global warming treaties, in refusing to get treatment for our oil addiction, in exploiting the weak, in parading our culture and capitalism before the world's noble misbegottens --- the likes of whom we're killing and covering up.
Almost two decades ago Washington activist Mitch Snyder claimed that 3 million people were homeless --- and that claim became "truth." He made it up.
Snyder's point was to focus media attention on his issue. Alas, much of what passes for academic "studies" these days is a professor's politics in academic garb.
The problem is that once the premise passes into the mainstream media, it becomes a "documented" fact.
How many civilians have been killed unintentionally in Afghanistan? We may never know, any more than we know how many were killed intentionally at the World Trade
Comment on JWR contributor Jim Wooten's column by clicking here.
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