Opinion Forum

Peace Beat

September 11th, 2011

War drums began beating across America before the dust settled at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It’s an all-American tradition to march to the beat for military action, the fountain of flag waving excitement that produces legions of war correspondents, bugle-blaring headlines and armchair commandos in newsrooms.

It is rare to hear that a drum-beat journalist felt, in retrospect, that rushing to war was perhaps a grave mistake. It’s almost historic, in fact, to see the reconsideration that Bill Keller, a top editor and columnist at the New York Times, published amid the flood of 9/11 commemorations on the 10^th anniversary of that explosive spark of war the US expanded to places most Americans had barely heard of before.

“The world is well rid of Saddam Hussein. But knowing as we now do the exaggeration of Hussein’s threat, the cost in Iraqi and American lives and the fact that none of this great splurge has bought us confidence in Iraq’s future or advanced the cause of freedom elsewhere— I think Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder,” Keller wrote in a New York Times Magazine article revealing his conversion from the war hawk club of liberals beating the drums for military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Aside from this astonishing note of atonement, the bulk of the Times’ massive retrospective in the Sunday newspaper is essentially a monument to the US news media’s cheerleading for a decade of military blunders.

A major reason for this is that, for all the war correspondents and warrior-editors, there are few if any journalists assigned to cover waging peace.

Do editors at the Times and other mainstream news organizations ever travel outside military-oriented circles and see what groups such as September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Peace Action, Veterans For Peace or the US Institute of Peace are doing? Even small newspapers have a military affairs reporter. Does any news organization in America have a peace beat?

The glaring lack of coverage of peace groups’ actions spurred a special report earlier this year by the Nieman Watchdog website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

“Antiwar activists repeatedly stage dramatic acts of civil disobedience in the United States but are almost entirely ignored by mainstream print and broadcast news organizations. During the Vietnam era, press coverage of the fighting and opposition to it at home helped turn public opinion against the war. This time around lack of homefront coverage may be helping keep military involvement continue on and on,” wrote John Hanrahan, a former Washington Post reporter.

“By ignoring antiwar protests almost totally, editors are treating opposition to the ongoing war in Afghanistan much as they handled the run-up to the war in Iraq: They are missing an important story and contributing to the perception that there is no visible opposition to the U.S. wars and ever-growing military budgets, even as polls show overwhelming support for early U.S. military withdrawal,” Hanrahan continued.

Among the examples of non-coverage of significant events that Hanrahan cites is this:

“Last December 16, in a demonstration organized by Veterans for Peace, 500 or more people gathered outside the White House, as snow was falling, to protest the war and to support Wikileaks and accused leaker PFC Bradley Manning. As Nieman Watchdog reported in a previous piece in this series, there were 131 arrests – including a sizable number of veterans of current and past wars – for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. (This was the most arrests at the White House at any point in 2010.) One of the arrestees had chained himself to the White House fence and another to a lamppost. Additional newsworthy factors: Among those arrested were the nation’s most famous whistleblower (Daniel Ellsberg); a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter (Chris Hedges, the former long-time war correspondent for The New York Times); a much-praised FBI whistleblower (Coleen Rowley); a former CIA analyst who used to prepare daily presidential briefings (Ray McGovern), among others. Additionally, the demonstration seemed newsworthy because it coincided with both the release of the Pentagon’s latest progress report on Afghanistan to President Obama and the results of a new ABC/Washington Post poll in which 60 percent of Americans responded that the Afghanistan war had not been ‘worth fighting.’

“The event was covered by The Huffington Post, the Socialist Worker, OpEd News, Salem-News.com in Oregon, and the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, but was ignored by The Washington Post, The New York Times and almost all other mainstream media,” Hanrahan found.

As the Nieman report notes, there’s been a colossal failure of balance in coverage of what’s going on in the world. It’s a cultural failure, as well.

“It’s been a decade since 9/11, time enough to let go and shift the way we approach our decisions about war, right? One might think so, but … I’m beginning to question if and when we will choose to let go and imagine a new way forward,” notes James A. Moad II, an Air Force officer whose career as an airline pilot was diverted to military missions by the long war.

“Like most Americans of drinking age, that September day is seared into my subconscious,” he continued. “As a young commercial pilot back then, I can still remember my own nightmares as I imagined what took place in those cockpits, thinking about an old pilot buddy who’d been murdered there, and more than anything, the feeling of insecurity reverberating out from the rubble of those two towers like great clouds obscuring the future and limiting us, blotting out the imagination necessary to see beyond the anger and destruction.”

Moad’s incisive comments were not conveyed in the New York Times’ galaxy of 9/11 reminiscences, but in a War, Literature & The Arts Blog that he administers.

The internet and community-oriented newspapers provide a vital forum for many voices with a different perspective than the usual sources featured in the national news media.

“One of the outcomes of 9/11 is we need to make the decision about what kind of society we want to be,” Andrea Leblanc, whose husband Robert died on United Flight 175 when it smashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, told a local newspaper in New Hampshire, Foster’s Daily Democrat. “What do we want to teach our kids? The story isn’t about the fact that for 10 years I’ve been a widow. It’s about the real cost of 9/11. I think this country squandered its moral authority. To me, it’s all about peace; what societies are doing to either move toward or away from conflict.”

Leblanc credited fellow 9/11 survivors with providing a compassionate, activist community of support for her anguish.

“An eye opening thing for Andrea through her involvement with September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows is the people all over the world who are reaching across borders to converse and share with other cultures,” Foster’s reporter Jennifer Keefe wrote. “She noted the numerous women’s networks in Afghanistan and youth networks that reach out via Skype to hold conferences with other youths to talk about love and understanding. The groups and organizations dedicated to forming unity and speaking out in the wake of 9/11 are not in short supply, and demonstrate each day there is a compassion across borders that breaches even the deadliest of wars.”

It’s not hard to find these stories. In Philadelphia, PA, CNN filmed a Saturday night crowd at World Café Live drawn to an evening celebrating peace and ice cream. “Philadelphia-based Christian author and activist Shane Claiborne partnered with Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, to raise public awareness about federal military spending,” noted CNN’s website report.

“The evening started off on a somber note with Cohen pouring 10,000 BB gun pellets into a metal container to illustrate the power of the United States’ nuclear arsenal in front of a stunned audience. ‘It’s that kind of overkill mentality that drives an out-of-control Pentagon budget,’ he said.” Another part of his demonstration is a tall stack of Oreo cookies looming over tiny piles of cookies representing the military vs. everything else in the federal budget’s priorities.

Winding up the evening, Cohen said: “If we’re going to have fewer bombs and more ice cream, we need to shift our budget to what helps people live instead of killing people.”

The ice cream business maven has traveled the nation and partnered with community activists, business executives, war veterans and many others to present a stunning critique of military spending overseas while the home front economy crumbled. I first saw his BB and cookie demonstration at a journalists’ conference in Vermont five years ago. Video versions from presentations around the country are all over YouTube.

For more information:

“My Unfinished 9/11 Business,” New York Times
Nieman Watchdog
“Lee widow promotes peace after losing husband on Sept. 11,” fosters.com
“Jesus, bombs and ice cream,” CNN Belief Blog

(This article was also posted at EarthAirWater.)

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: 9/11, Afghanistan, budget, Iraq, Keller, peace, Pentagon, war
Categories: Media, Military, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

3 Responses to “Peace Beat”

larry ennis | September 12th, 2011 at 10:17 am

Jan
I’m of the opinion that the “peace” movement has lost it’s clout with the media because of lessons learned in the past. The so-called “peace” movement fostered too many violent leftist/socialist students. The Weathermen and SDS to name just two were involved in plots to kill and maim in the name of peace. Acts that resulted in death or property damage are just to hard to justify.

Tom Carter | September 12th, 2011 at 3:11 pm

I think it’s great that we live in a country where people have the right to demonstrate and express their opinions freedly. As far as anti-war sentiments are concerned, it’s hard to find many people who’ve actually fought in wars who don’t think they should be the last alternative in foreign affairs. However, the fact remains that war is sometimes just and necessary. That won’t change.

I agreed with much of the anti-war sentiment expressed during Vietnam. Having been there twice, I still didn’t understand exactly why we were there and why we didn’t get the hell out. I had a lot of respect for men who refused to serve because of their beliefs, then took the consequences for civil disobedience. I had a lot less respect for those who ran away to other countries or tried to fake their way through it (Al Gore’s few months in-country as a “journalist” comes to mind). And I had no respect at all for those who consciously gave aid and comfort to the enemy, however ill-advised the war may have been (the dim-witted Jane Fonda is the best example; the self-promoting John Kerry is on the list, too).

As far as Iraq and Afghanistan are concerned, it’s early to declare them either wise and successful or wrong and failed.

Almost everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, believed in the beginning that Iraq had and would use WMD. The available evidence indicates that even though we didn’t find stockpiles (they may have been shipped to Syria, by the way), Iraq retained the knowledge and capability to produce WMD. There were also other reasons to take down the Saddam Hussein regime, all of which were spelled out in the congressional resolution supporting the war. They way the Iraq situation developed after the highly successful initial military operation was not good, and they way we seem to be leaving may be worse.

Afghanistan is becoming an even worse problem. This land of primitive people, clans, and tribes cannot be dragged into the modern world. When we leave, they’ll revert to who they are. That’s inevitable. We’re stuck to a tarbaby there, and they only way out is to just unstick ourselves and leave because the result will be the same no matter when and how we leave.

The real solution is to change the way we do things. In these two cases, we should have gone in, done what we needed to do, and left.

Jan | September 12th, 2011 at 3:12 pm

Actually, Larry, a small group in SDS who called themselves the Weatherman broke away from the peace movement to engage in violence. They were roundly condemned within the peace movement.