19894: radtimes: Assuming the Right to Intervene (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Assuming the Right to Intervene

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0304-13.htm

Published on Thursday, March 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
by Norman Solomon


If Mark Twain were living now instead of a century ago -- when he declared
himself "an anti-imperialist" and proclaimed that "I am opposed to having
the eagle put its talons on any other land" -- the famous writer's views
would exist well outside the frame of today's mainstream news media.

In the current era, it's rare for much ink or air time to challenge the
right of the U.S. government to directly intervene in other countries.
Instead, the featured arguments are about whether -- or how -- it is wise
to do so in a particular instance.

It's not just a matter of American boots on the ground and bombs from the
sky. Much more common than the range of overt violence from U.S. military
actions is the process of deepening poverty from economic intervention.
Outside the media glare, Washington's routine policies involve pulling
financial levers to penalize nations that have leaders who displease the
world's only superpower.

In Haiti, abominable poverty worsened during the first years of the 21st
century while Uncle Sam blocked desperately needed assistance.

A former leading zealot for economic shock therapy, Jeffrey Sachs, was
insightful when he wrote in the March 1 edition of the Financial Times:
"The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen U.S. manipulation of a
small, impoverished country with the truth unexplored by journalists."
Among the unilluminated realities: For years, the Bush administration has
prevented aid from getting to one of the poorest nations on the planet.

"The U.S. maintained its aid freeze, and the opposition (in Haiti)
maintained a veto over international aid," writes Sachs, now an economics
professor at Columbia University. "Cut off from bilateral and multilateral
financing, Haiti's economy went into a tailspin."

With very little U.S. press coverage of such economic matters -- and,
likewise, scant attention to the collusion between the Bush administration
and disreputable opponents of the Aristide regime -- media acceptance of
the current U.S. military intervention in Haiti was predictable.

Prominent editorial carping hardly makes up for spun-out news coverage. And
in this case, the day after the coup that U.S. media typically refuse to
call a coup, the New York Times ran a lead editorial about Haiti on March 1
that mostly let the Bush regime off the hook with a faint reproach.

The Bush administration, the Times editorialized, was "too willing to
ignore democratic legitimacy in order to allow the removal of a leader it
disliked and distrusted." The editorial faulted "Mr. Bush's hesitation" and
went on to say "it is deplorable that President Bush stood by" while men
such as two convicted murderers and an accused cocaine trafficker "took
over much of Haiti." The editorial's last sentence muted the critical tone,
referring merely to "mishandling of this crisis."

Even at its most vehement, the Times editorial accused the Bush
administration of inaction ("ignore" ... "hesitation" ... "stood by" ...
"mishandling"), as though the gist of the problem was a kind of inept
passivity -- rather than calculated mendacity in the service of an
interventionist agenda.

Meanwhile, also on March 1, the Times front page supplied an official story
in the guise of journalism. Failing to attribute a key anecdotal flourish
to any source -- while providing Washington's version of instantly historic
events -- the newspaper of record reported that Aristide "meekly asked the
American ambassador in Haiti through an aide whether his resignation would
help the country."

In the next day's edition of the Times, the front-page story about Haiti
included Aristide's contention that he'd been overthrown by the United
States. The headline over that article: "Haitian Rebels Enter Capital;
Aristide Bitter."

Bitter.

Underneath such news and commentary runs powerful deference to Washington
policymakers, reinforcing interventionist prerogatives even when
criticizing their implementation. A basic underlying assumption that
pervades media coverage has been consistent -- the right to intervene. Not
the wisdom of intervening, but the ultimate right to do so.

On Wednesday, in Port-au-Prince, a long-unemployed plumber named Raymond
Beausejour made a profound comment to a New York Times reporter about the
U.S. Marines patrolling the city: "The last time they came they didn't do
much. This is not the kind of aid we need. They should help us build
schools and clinics and to get jobs."

It's customary for news media to ignore Americans who unequivocally oppose
U.S. military interventions in -- to use Twain's phrase -- "any other
land." Journalists are inclined to dismiss such views as "isolationism."
But the choice is not between iron-fist actions and economic blackmail on
the one hand and self-absorbed indifference on the other. A truly
humanitarian foreign policy, offering no-strings assistance like food and
medicine on a massive scale, is an option that deserves to be part of the
media discourse in the United States.

Norman Solomon is co-author of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't
Tell You."