Random thoughts on "liberation"

I'm thankful that the Battle of Baghdad was not the bloody, catastrophic incursion that many predicted. Casualties were prominent, but it could have been much worse.

Still, what has transpired over the last few weeks was more a slaughter than a war. It seems like US forces and bombings beat the hell out of the Republican Guard, "degrading its ranks" by many thousands, thus leaving little opposition capable of resisting the American onslaught as it moved north.

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Many people in this country seem to be euphoric about the "quick victory". The triumphalism seems to correspond directly with American media coverage, which depicted a clean war of liberation from the moment American forces entered Iraq. This is not the image of this conflict that the rest of the world is familiar with, a point CBS correspondent Bob Simon explained to Larry King:

"I've just spent more than a month in the Middle East and Europe," said Simon, "and just coming back to the United States, you feel you're watching a different war on television. Not only compared to the Middle East, where anger against the United States is rising by the day, but also in Europe, where television, even British television, is far more skeptical about what's going on, far more skeptical about American war aims, far more skeptical about the number of civilian casualties and about what is actually happening.

"Here," Simon went on, describing the now familiar network regimen we've all been watching, "you see advancing American troops. You see retired American generals. These are the dominant themes on American television. But it's an entirely different picture overseas.

"It's imperative that both sides be shown," Simon continued. "And it's all a question of which side is getting more play. When you're in the Arab world today, the television pictures are almost exclusively of what Americans call 'collateral damage' … and when you're in the United States today, I'm just amazed by the extent to which all you see is the American viewpoint, the advancing American troops and no collateral damage. …

"The point is that with this atmosphere in the United States, I think reporters are very cautious about being critical because they can be perceived as being unpatriotic."

The fall of Saddam's statue is the most egregious example of poorly contextualized reporting, if not outright propaganda. Dozens of Iraqis dancing around the iconic figure plays well for the TV, but it hardly seems to be deserving of the adulation it received within the US. The scene now looks like it was entirely staged.

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Right now, Iraq is an absolute mess, and I'm not confident in the Americans' ability to set things right. Bombing and military incursions are the easy part, especially when confronted with a dilapidated regime. Building credible democratic institutions, on the other hand, will be extraordinarily difficult.

Since Bush has decided to don the mantle of liberator, he should be held accountable on this issue. Hopefully, I'm wrong and this war isn't the crude, imperialist power grab I think it is. I haven't seen anything to suggest otherwise up until this point, however.