Melville Cooke Hey Frankie, what's happening?
Marvin Gaye, intro to What's Going On, as his younger brother comes back home from Vietnam
THE WORD "brave" was used more times by US propaganda anchors during the battering of Iraq than fake gasps and moans of pleasure in the equivalent length of back to back blue movies.
Everybody was brave, as long as they were American. Not even the British brethren were allowed into the ranks of the courageous. The reporters, dressed to the nines in combat gear, were brave; the pilots were brave; the cook on a ship a couple miles offshore was brave; a fighter jet pilot a few thousand feet in the air, facing no aerial opposition and no significant anti-aircraft fire, was brave.
Hell, Rumsfeld and George Bush, who have never and will never face any danger in Iraq, were making "brave decisions". And the news anchors were congratulating each other on being brave enough to go long hours without sleeping.
I would not be surprised if the Americans in Iraq were defecating bravely, staring down their crap and sniffing closely without flinching.
RIDICULOUS
It is ridiculous, really. With well over 100,000 troops in the region, the US lost just over 100 including those unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of their stupid colleagues' autographed missiles. On the other hand, the number of Iraqi troops killed has yet to be confirmed. Let us just say, it was many many.
In truth, the average householder glued to the TV half a world away, was in as much danger as the average American soldier in Iraq.
The US news networks if that pile of "brave" bull and slavish adherence to the White House position can be called news magnified the strength of the Iraqi resistance. America does not rush to fight anyone who they know can fight back (read North Korea). Iraq was starved, disarmed and carefully assessed for a decade before the "brave" assault. If they had not known beforehand that Iraq was a pushover, they would not have gone there.
Now all that bravery has culminated in the inevitable scenes of homecomings and talk of heroes. Now all these "brave" folk are "heroes". Every bloody body is a hero, from the cook to the truck driver. However, even if Iraq was not the West Indies to the United States as Australia, heroism simply does not come into the matter.
The cause is just as important as the courage and the United States showed neither.
UNJUSTIFIED, ILLEGAL AND IMMORAL PURSUIT
There cannot be any heroes in an unjustified, illegal and immoral pursuit, and that was what the war on Iraq was. I am reminded of a joke I read maybe 15 years ago. A teacher asked her class to name some heroes. There was the inevitable pause and Johnny put up his hand. "Who is your hero?" the teacher asked gently. "My daddy," he said. "Why?" she asked. "Because heroes are people who die in fighting for other people and my daddy was killed stealing food for us to eat," Johnny said.
There was silence.
Before cable TV became so widespread, the United States relied on movies like Rambo and Missing In Action to shore up its tattered ego after getting its butt whupped in Vietnam. Now, with opponents more carefully chosen than when Mike Tyson just came out of prison, losing is not a factor and the movies are no comparison to the immediacy of CNN, Fox and the rest of the patriotic gang. Who needs Sylvester Stallone when you have Paula Zahn?
Footnote: Thanks to Mark Wignall for his kind sentence in The Sunday Observer. I have said previously that although Mr. Wignall created a furore with his column in praise of younger women, the best I have seen from him is one shortly after, where he spoke about the loneliness of the married man. I do believe, though, that the opinion pages need a good spat and the one that was warming up between himself and Dawn Ritch did not really crank up to anything really enjoyable. Can someone start a cuss-off, please?
We don't need another hero Tina Turner, Beyond The Thunderdome
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
