Warmongering in the New Millennium: Making Racism and Empire Seem Sexy and Selling Americans a War Without End

Selling products is what Big Media does best, and Big Media is now selling Americans a war.  From Ann Coulter’s statements that “every Muslim is not a terrorist but every terrorist is a Muslim” and “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”, to Michelle Malkin’s sneering characterization of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney as an anti-Semite on the News Hour, to Carol Devine-Molin’s charge that Islamic groups are aggressively seeking “converts in both prisons and on college campuses” and hyperbolic rhetoric about “the enemy within”, attractive and even sexy conservative women are increasingly front and center, speaking out in behalf of the War Party’s racist agenda of conquest and empire.

Let’s not forget that when the War Party’s media operatives sold Americans the “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan, their reports repeatedly stressed the Taliban’s mistreatment of women and made much of repression of women generally in the Islamic world.  But now that the War Party is demanding “regime change” in Iraq, the only country in the Middle East where women enjoy gender equality by law, somehow women’s rights have dropped off Big Media’s radar screen, replaced increasingly by smart, sexy, attractive conservative women, spokespersons whose vision is not clouded by tolerance or altruistic regard for humanity that happens to be Arab or Muslim.

From a marketing perspective, it’s proven strategy.  Whether the product is liquor, cigarettes, automobiles, underarm deoderant, or the horrific death and destruction of an unnecessary genocidal war, if you can put an attractive feminine face on it, more Americans will buy it.  And make no mistake, it is a marketing strategy.  Just this morning, Bank One economist Diane Swonk appeared on ABC’s popular This Week with George Stephanopoulos with a subtler but no less racist message, one that goes to the heart of the War Party’s agenda.  According to Swonk, the war against Iraq will be good for the USA’s struggling economy.  To his credit, Stephanoupoulos had on hand Economy.com’s Mark Zandi, who expressed a significantly less enthusiastic view, but Swonk’s cynical message to This Week’s affluent, acquisitive, and secular Sunday morning audience was clear:  Oil prices will go down with the U.S. military in control of Iraq’s oil reserves.

Dick and W’s Big Oil buddies aren’t happy with the estimated ten-cents-per-gallon so-called “war tax” that Americans are paying at the pump, a tax inflated by the fear of a war hyped up by wall-to-wall Big Mediacoverage of the “war on terrorism” and the push for “regime change” in Iraq. Big Oil has big dreams of conquest and the huge profits that will roll in when Dick and W are in a position to let their Big Oil buddies set the price of every barrel of Arab oil at the wellhead.

They have a plan; they have a media strategy; they have an overworked and over-extended military machine.  And they will have their bloody war for oil and empire–unless Americans stop them at the ballot box in November.

Freelance Investigative Journalist and Commentator Michael Gillespie writes about Politics and Media for Media Monitors Network (MMN). His work also appears frequently in the popular Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.