From: Mohammed BEN JELLOUN <mohammed.benjelloun-AT-mail.bip.net>
Subject: Fw: an article by Edward S. Herman
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 21:45:15 +0200



> "The price is worth it"
> By Edward S. Herman
> 
> Try to imagine how the mainstream U.S. media and intellectuals would
> respond to the disclosure that at an early planning meeting of the
> terrorists responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and
> Pentagon, the question had come up about whether the "collateral damage"
> of prospectively thousands of dead civilians wouldn't be excessive, but
> that the matter had been settled with the top leader's response: "we
> think the price is worth it"?
> 
> Suppose further that the terrorists' leaders then set out to make their
> case to their followers, arguing that it was extremely important to show
> the citizens of the Great Satan that they were not immune to attack on
> their own land--that they could not continue to bomb others freely and
> support the violent states of their choice without suffering some
> retaliation themselves. The terrorists argued that, as the Great Satan
> has been conducting low- (and often not so low) -intensity wars against
> the Third World and Arab states for decades, the planned attacks would
> be both just and legal under international law, justifiable under the UN
> Charter's grant of the right of self-defense, which He has relied on so
> often to excuse his own unilateral actions.
> 
> The leaders argued further that since the symbolic value of showing the
> Great Satan's vulnerability by attacking the WTC and Pentagon would be
> greatly enhanced by taking out several thousand civilians, this must be
> regarded as acceptable collateral damage. Finally, imagine the
> terrorists' leaders explaining to their followers that for the sake of
> global peace and security, no less than the welfare of peoples the world
> over, it is crucial to raise the costs of imperial violence, and help
> persuade the Great Satan's population to ask Him to terminate His wars.
> This, the terrorist leaders argued, would in the long run save far more
> lives than those lost in the bombing of the WTC and Pentagon.
> 
> Wouldn't the mainstream media and intellectuals be wild with indignation
> at the inhumanity of the terrorists' coldblooded calculus? Wouldn't they
> respond in one voice that it is absolutely immoral, evil, and
> indefensible per se to kill civilians on a massive scale to make a
> political point? And as to the terrorists' underlying argument that the
> attacks were justified both as retaliation for the Great Satan's ongoing
> wars and as part of an effort to curb His imperial violence, wouldn't
> this be rejected as outlandish? Wouldn't establishment spokespersons
> rush to claim that despite occasional regrettable mistakes this country
> has behaved well in international affairs, has intervened abroad only in
> just causes, and is the victim of terrorism, not a terrorist state or
> supporter of terrorism? And wouldn't it also be stressed that it is
> immoral and outrageous to even SPEAK of a "just cause" or any give any
> kind of legitimation for a terrorist action such as occurred in New York
> and Washington? That the only question in such a case of violence is
> "who," not "why"? (These last two sentences are a paraphrase of the
> indignant argument of a U.S. liberal historian.) And in fact, across the
> board the U.S. mainstreamers have refused to talk about "why" except for
> superficial denunciations of an irrational enemy that hates democracy,
> etc.
> 
> Turning now to the actual use of the phrase "the price is worth it," we
> come to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's reply to Lesley
> Stahl's question on "60 Minutes" on May 12, 1996:
> 
> Stahl: "We have heard that a half a million children have died [because
> of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean that's more children than died in
> Hiroshima. And--you know, is the price worth it?"
> 
> Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think
> the price is worth it."
> 
> In this case, however, although the numbers dead are mind- boggling--the
> ratio of dead Iraqi children to deaths in the WTC/Pentagon bombings was
> better than 80 to 1, using the now obsolete early 1996 number for Iraqi
> children--the mainstream media and intellectuals have not found
> Albright's rationalization of this mass killing of any interest
> whatsoever. The phrase has been only rarely cited in the mainstream, and
> there has been no indignation or suggestion that the mass killing of
> children in order to satisfy some policy end was immoral and outrageous.
> 
> Since the morning hours of Tuesday, September 11, the civilian dead in
> the WTC/Pentagon terrorist bombings have been the subject of the most
> intense and detailed and humanizing attention, making the suffering
> clear and dramatic and feeding in to the sense of outrage. In contrast,
> the hundreds of thousands of children dead in Iraq are very close to
> invisible, their suffering and dying are out of sight; and whereas the
> ratio of Iraqi children killed by sanctions to WTC/Pentagon deaths was
> better than 80 to 1, the ratio of media space devoted to the Iraqi
> children and WTC/Pentagon deaths has surely been better than 500 to one
> in favor of the smaller WTC/Pentagon casualties. Pictures of sufferers
> and expressions of pain and indignation have been in a similar ratio.
> The UN workers in Iraq like Dennis Halliday who have resigned in disgust
> at the effects of the "sanctions of mass destruction" have been given
> minimal space in the media to inform the public and express their
> outrage.
> 
> The "who" in the case of the Iraqi mass deaths is clear-- overwhelmingly
> the U.S. and British leadership--but the "who" here is irrelevant
> because of how the "why" is answered. This is done implicitly. Madeleine
> Albright said that the deaths are worth it because U.S. policy finds
> this to be so--and with Albright saying this is "why," that settles the
> matter for the media. Their indignation at the immorality of killing
> civilians as collateral damage to make a political point ends, because
> the Iraqi children die by U.S. policy choice--and in this case the media
> will not even allow the matter to be discussed. The per se
> unreasonableness of killing civilians as collateral damage is quietly
> set aside (reminding one of how the Soviet's shooting down of KAL 007 in
> 1983 was per se barbarian, but the U.S. shooting down of Iranian
> airliner 655 in 1988 was a "tragic error.") The media focus on whether
> Saddam Hussein will allow UN inspections to prevent him getting "weapons
> of mass destruction," not on the mass death of children. (And of course
> the media regularly fail to note that the United States and Britain had
> helped Saddam Hussein obtain such weapons in the 1980s, and didn't
> object to his using them, until he stopped following orders in August
> 1990.)
> 
> Because the media make the suffering and death of 500,000 children
> invisible, the outrage produced by the intense coverage of the
> WTC/Pentagon bombing victims does not surface on their behalf. The
> liberal historian who was so indignant at even asking "why" for the
> WTC-Pentagon bombings and argued that only "who" was pertinent has said
> nothing about the immorality of killing Iraqis; he is not interested in
> "who" in this case, partly because he does not have to see dying Iraqi
> children every day, and partly because his government has answered the
> "why" to his satisfaction, justifying mass death. Is it not morally
> chilling, even a bit frightening, that he, and the great mass of his
> citizen compatriots, can focus with such anguish and indignation on
> their own 6,000 dead, while ignorant of, or not caring about, or
> approving his (their) own government's ongoing killing of scores of
> times as many innocents abroad?
> 
> This reflects the work of a superb propaganda system. The U.S.
> government finding the mass death of Iraqi children "worth it," the
> media push the fate of these "unworthy victims" into the black hole,
> thereby allowing that policy to be continued without impediment. With
> the United States itself a victim of terrorism, here the reverse process
> ensues: with these ultra-worthy victims, the media feature their
> suffering and deaths intensively and are not interested in root causes,
> but only in "who" did it; they beat the war drums incessantly and push
> to the forefront the most regressive forces in the country, making
> violence and repression the probable outcome of their efforts. But they
> will sell papers, get larger audiences, support the "national interest,"
> and prove to the rightwing that they are real Americans.
> 



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