[This piece also appearing in this week’s Prince George’s Sentinel: ] 

After the scandals of Watergate, with a Fourth Estate somewhat revitalized around the idea of investigative journalism – you don’t get a much better pep pill than having a big-name reporter played by Robert Redford – there was a fairly widespread understanding that the press should check governmental malfeasance, corruption, and excesses.

This broad concept came with some congressional attention to problems in the CIA and in the Pentagon, and with the thorough discrediting of the manipulations behind the Vietnam War, even with periodic scandals, public discourse sustained some general concept of governmental accountability through the seventies and even into the eighties.

That concept, muted and beleagered though it already was, is exactly what was attacked by a hideously well-funded right wing. The very notions of government accountability, individual judgment and participatory democracy were attacked root and branch with a savagery sometimes stealthy though often flamboyant, by an increasingly effective propaganda machine calling itself “conservative.”

By the time Clinton got into office, every voice for the poor and every fiscally rational policy for preserving a huge middle class were on the defensive. To strengthen the middle class, after all, you have to soak the rich and help the poor – but any candidate saying so would have had his assassination called for, jestingly of course, in mass media. They do but poison in jest.

Meanwhile, in the media and in behind-the-scenes think tanks and spuriously academic conferences, a well-subsidized faction spent ten to twelve years boosting (1) economic policies to erode any security for the vast majority of our population; (2) political tactics to splinter any moral opposition and to silence and intimidate genuine populism; and (3) extreme militarism in foreign policy and in budget priorities.

One result is the immoral, illegal and unconstitutional invasion of Iraq. In all the war-boosting over Saddam’s oppression – brought up only to justify invading – there was little mention of progressive and secular facts about Iraq, where oil revenues paid for infrastructure, healthcare and education, without taxes, and where women were comparatively advanced. The first Gulf War destroyed the infrastructure and was followed by sanctions that harmed the Iraqi people rather than Saddam Hussein, further undermining their ability to oust Saddam themselves.

More fundamentally, in all the talk about “democracy,” no prominent person in the news media said publicly that one country has no right to remake another country. Nobody said it: there is no such right, absent a threat requiring self-defense.

We know by now that there was no such threat. The claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were false. The accusations that Iraq had been behind 9/11 were false. The claim that Saddam was in league with Islamic fundamentalists was false. The anticipation that Iraqi was behind the anthrax mailings was false. The story that Iraq tried to purchase “yellowcake” uranium was false. The story of the aluminum tubes was ludicrously false. The story of Iraqi “mobile labs” for germ warfare was false.

Yet these claims and others were assiduously pushed by well-paid media personalities, while anyone who debunked or questioned them was vilified like Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, or marginalized like me.

We know now that the “war on terror” has been used as a good-times substitute for the Cold War rather than for genuine defense or genuine attention to issues of public health and public safety. Contractors, lobbyists, George W. Bush’s cronies and even some of his relatives have made money off it. Big media outlets have made money off it. But it has not advanced the most sensible and inexpensive measures to preserve and safeguard our major cities, our waterways, and our petrochemicals sector.

As New Orleans demonstrates again, anything that makes for huge “defense” contracts and macho posturing gets Bush’s attention. Anything that could genuinely benefit the country at large does not.

The current emergency must be addressed for now, with whatever help can be provided by people at all levels.

But for the future, a continuing question will have to be addressed: why are the people who brought about this disaster still in their positions? Obviously, most of Bush’s political appointees will keep their jobs rather than be given an impetus to drop the dime on him. Each of his nominees knows the miserable job done by his own agency and the culpable motivations behind his getting the job in the first place.

But why are the paid propagandists who boosted this war still appearing on major television networks?