W is for War   by Ted Dace

Since the national nervous breakdown of 9/11, America has crawled into the fetal position and won't come out. We float in a sea of our own hallucinatory waste. Many observers blame mass delusion on the mass media, failing to see how the media's messages are shaped, in part, by the masses themselves. The role of PR is overrated, while the will of the people to remain ignorant is overlooked. That's not to say the problem is "the people" rather than "the elites." The problem is collective insanity.

Shortly after last year's three-week march to Baghdad, Norman Solomon observed that none of the major networks had reported the widespread use of not only cluster bombs, which randomly spew shrapnel across the landscape, but depleted uranium shells, essential in making mince meat of armored vehicles and equally effective at exposing anyone in the vicinity (including US soldiers) to radiation poisoning. While the rest of the world got a reasonably clear picture of the situation, Americans were kept in the dark by our all-powerful media. It was for this reason, Solomon argued, that Bush's popularity soared at home exactly as it was crashing in the rest of the world.[1]

But maybe the Americans who cheered on Bush simply despised Saddam Hussein and enjoyed seeing the US military smash his regime. Maybe those "funny foreigners" didn't get it because they're not on Team USA. As Solomon himself noted, the Pentagon's deck of cards featuring Iraqi bad guys to be hunted down by American good guys was hugely popular with the public. When Bush creates an opportunity for ordinary people to feel vicariously heroic, they duly reward him with approval points. The last thing they need to find out is that the latest crusade is another self-serving deception. News executives are well aware that viewers can always turn the channel if they're confronted with information they find disagreeable or disturbing. It's no accident that Fox News, the least informative and most gung-ho of the networks, also received by far the highest ratings.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, authors of Weapons of Mass Deception, point out that every network in the US refused to air antiwar ads during the invasion. But does this mean ideology is bigger than money at the corporations in charge of the airwaves? Or did the networks simply realize the ads weren't worth the money they brought in if they turned off viewers? Rampton and Stauber also cite MSNBC's dismissal of Phil Donahue prior to the invasion as an example of pro-war bias. While it's true that Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network, this was outweighed, in the minds of MSNBC executives, by the frequency of his anti-war guests. The executives feared this might give the impression that the network was unpatriotic, thereby triggering a potentially catastrophic loss of viewership. What motivates the media is not the desire to manipulate people so much as the abject fear of alienating them.[2]

In the September 1, 2003 issue of Time, Michael Elliot disclosed that the US objective in Iraq was to transform a "wolf into a lamb." Yet Iraq long ago abandoned the tiny country it invaded in 1990. This time around it was the US launching a war of aggression, though on a much greater scale. Elliot mentions, in passing, that the only "legal" occupiers of Iraq are the US and Britain. Of course, there's nothing legal about powerful countries invading weak countries. US occupation of Iraq is about as legal as Hitler's occupation of Poland in 1939. So, are Elliot's distortions intended to serve the financial interests of Time Warner? Is this a corporate conspiracy to keep the masses misinformed? Or is he simply articulating the same unreflective biases held by millions of other Americans? In their sidebar to Elliot's story, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon refer to Al-Qaeda operatives as extremists and "God-obsessed terrorists," which is true, but then it's hard to imagine a more apt description of Bush & Co. Are Benjamin and Simon cynically manipulating the public? Or do they just share in the same delusions as the rest of the country?[3]

According to a pre-war poll conducted by CBS and The New York Times, a clear majority of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, that Iraqis were on board those planes, and that terrorists back in Baghdad were planning more such attacks. These beliefs seem to have emerged out of thin air. Americans didn't just buy into Bush administration lies but embellished on them. Not just passive receptors of propaganda, they actively wove it themselves from the most threadbare of fabrications.[4]

Most Americans seemed completely oblivious to the hypocrisy of going to war over "weapons of mass destruction." During the Gulf Massacre of 1991, the US intentionally targeted Iraq's sewage and water treatment infrastructure so as to unleash an army of homegrown germs against its citizens. Upwards of a million Iraqis, mostly small children, perished in the biological onslaught. The death toll was common knowledge. Yet Americans, by and large, felt no qualms about invading an already bombed-out, blockaded country over the hypothetical possibility that it was stockpiling deadly chemicals and germs. So virtuous are we that our actual evil is outweighed by their potential evil.

The Bush people made it clear that the US would invade as long as Saddam Hussein retained power. From Saddam's point of view, since the US was going to invade anyway, why not build or breed chemical or biological weapons? While claiming to be stamping out WMDs, the US was actually encouraging their production. Despite justifying the invasion on the grounds of WMDs, the US felt no compunction to demonstrate that Iraq actually possessed any. On the conrary, Saddam had to prove he didn't have any. As Ari Fleischer remarked, "I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are." Yet the bizarre illogic of it all went right past the American people unnoticed.[5]

It's well known that the US and other Western powers supplied Saddam not only with dangerous germs but the chemical weapons he actually unleashed, with our knowledge, against Iranian troops and his domestic Kurdish population. The chemical onslaught against Iran was already underway in 1983 when Saddam received a visit from none other than Donald Rumsfeld, who came bearing a pair of golden spurs for the mad dictator. Thus, on the basis of his long-ago possession of toxins and germs that we gave him, we now felt justified in condemning him as a threat to all that is good and true. How could the American people have failed to see the absurdity in this?[6]

As it happens, Saddam's unconventional weapons were destroyed years ago, just as the UN discovered back in '95 from high-level defector, Hussein Kamel. Many Americans have been content to rewrite history, as if all along the justification was only to free a country in the grip of an evil dictator. Others are in such deep denial that even this Orwellian tactic is unacceptable. My own aunt tried to convince me, via email, that intelligence officials have "photos, wiretaps, and numerous reliable eye witness accounts" proving that "many of the weapons were moved to Saudi Arabia and Iran." A shockingly large number of people believe the US actually has found the dreaded weapons. Then there's the crowd that never gave a damn about "WMDs" and just wanted to see bombs going off over the cities of helpless Ay-rabs. (Let's not forget them).[7]

It wasn't just Bush but millions of Americans who thought US troops would be welcomed as liberators. How could they have been so clueless? In '91 the bombs that fell like raindrops were all made in the USA. We destroyed much of the infrastructure of modern life, and the twelve-year blockade that followed greatly complicated the task of rebuilding. After all the suffering they endured, Iraqis were pummeled with more bombs and a full-scale invasion, at which point they were supposed to line up in the streets cheering the troops and blowing them kisses as they rode by. This was fully expected and eagerly anticipated by people all over the country, the climax of the latest "reality TV" show.

What is going on here?

Imagine if the president, every January, had to give a mental state of the union address. An accurate assessment would indicate hysteria, paranoia, narcissism, mass dependence, a schizoid lack of feeling, a psychopathic lack of empathy, and a total inability to reflect on any of these conditions, every one of which is chronic and inflexible to the point of pathology. With our predilection for lethal violence, we're a danger to ourselves as well as others. In short, America is cracked wide open for all to see. A lot of people around the world do see it, and they're scared of what this country will do next. Europeans are especially sensitive to what's going on, as they know the sickness all too well in their own not-so-distant past.

Can we really expect to understand US behavior outside the model of mental illness? Did we really think we could blame it all on cable news outlets or the Republicans, as if an election or some new media regulations would clear everything up? While we tend to think of insanity as a private affliction, something that strikes the rare individual who must be segregated from an otherwise healthy society, as often as not, it's society that needs to be locked up. When the deranged is the norm, the lunatic is not the lone voice of rage and despair but the society that won't listen.

Is our country molded by its unhinged leaders, or do our leaders merely reflect the general egomania? It does seem almost destiny that George W. Bush took the White House. Like Hitler, W failed at the polling booths but was lucky enough to be appointed to power later on. With brother Jeb occupying the governor's mansion in Florida, the voting rolls in that state were purged of 8000 mostly minority citizens, thereby tipping the field enough to throw the election into the twilight zone. Granting the presidency to Bush, the Supreme Court reasoned that an election whose results were totally unclear and highly disputed did NOT necessitate a statewide recount, a measure which, as it turned out, would have shown that W still lost the election despite his brother's tampering.[8]

How could millions of Americans put their trust in this man? Given the well-known fact that he went AWOL during his term with the National Guard, how could Bush have gotten away with donning a flyboy outfit and landing on an aircraft carrier? He succeeds to the extent that he embodies, at the personal level, the madness that infects the country at the "tribal" level.

The president lives in a simple world. The truth is whatever he happens to believe. The good is whatever is personally good for him. To be a clinical narcissist is not simply to love yourself but to confuse yourself with the world, precisely the sin of the US. It's the mark of the infantile personality, which cannot envision a perspective beyond its own. W is blind in his mind. Not so different from Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, who think every liberal is a deceitful, America-hating jerk because it's never occurred to them that people might honestly and passionately express views differing from their own.

But infantilism comes with a heavy price. Holed up in a universe of itself, the ego of the narcissist is isolated and alone, adrift in a cold vacuum. Hence the fear and paranoia. It's not enough that US military superiority is historically unprecedented. We must extend our advantage to outer space. We must enclose the earth in a web of surveillance and weaponry. If we can't drop-kick laser-guided missiles from satellites, we just don't feel warm and comfy.

As Noam Chomsky says, "It's a frightened country." Fear suspends our capacity for sound judgment and makes us receptive to whatever tall tales are conjured up in the White House. How else could people all over this country genuinely believe that our invasion of a defeated and powerless nation was in self-defense? "Levels of fear here of almost everything - crime, aliens, you pick it - are just off the spectrum." So how did we get this way? Chomsky isn't sure, but he urges us to look for answers in our formative years as a nation. "It probably has to do with the conquest of the continent, where you had to exterminate the native population; [also] slavery, where you had to control a population that was regarded as dangerous, because you never knew when they were going to turn on you." Though we can destroy the world several times over, we can't shake that feeling that "somebody is going to come after us."[9]

W is for war. Somehow he knows that war is the switch that turns on the current that brings the monster to life. Only war can submerge independent human personalities into a mindless mob. Since 9/11 Bush has found his calling. His job is to channel the diffuse anxiety and rage of the populace into a singularity of earth-shattering intensity. It's a kind of magic, and the magic wand is war.

As famed ethologist Konrad Lorenz once observed, "There cannot be the slightest doubt that human militant enthusiasm evolved out of a communal defense response of our prehuman ancestors." All it takes is a threat grave enough to trip our ancient predator-defense reflex, and individuality is lost as everyone bands together to scare off the beast. We're not so different from chimpanzees, who scream and jump about at the sight of a prowling tiger, throwing sticks and rocks at it and even hugging each other for moral support. Today the tiger is Osama. With a sleight of hand, Osama becomes Saddam.[10]

Even the most sophisticated propaganda machinery ever assembled is useless if people don't crave the lies it churns out. Swept away in a tide of religious-quality fervor, most Americans readily believed our country was under imminent threat from a beaten-down, tin-pot dictator halfway around the world. There's a long historical precedent for this kind of collective dementia, extending back thousands of years. Like Chomsky says, we must look to the past for answers, but much further back than he realizes.

In the course of her ten-year research project on the origins of war, Barbara Ehrenreich discovered that what applied to our pre-human ancestors was equally true of our human forebears. Right up until the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago, human beings were routinely killed and eaten by predator beasts, such as lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, etc. The evidence for this unpalatable fact, which has accumulated since the 1980s, is now overwhelming and indisputable. Somehow the human race managed to collectively forget its long-time status as catfood.[11]

Homo sapiens is the only species ever to have transformed from prey to predator. Though our hominid ancestors relied on meat for the protein they needed for their big brains, they didn't know how to bring down the big game all around them. Thus they had to acquire their meat largely by scavenging the kills of other animals. According to anthropologist Lewis Binford, it wasn't until about 70,000 years ago that humans learned to hunt, and even then it was more like herding than what we think of as hunting today. By the Upper Paleolithic, around 30,000 BP (before present), humans had become highly skilled hunters. Though the tools they forged were later used in warfare, for millennia the men who wielded these weapons used them to hunt animals, not each other.[12]

There are many signs of the practice of war in prehistory, but they only go back so far. After 12,000 BP, the evidence is seemingly everywhere. Prior to 12,000 BP, there's nothing - no drawings of soldiers on cave walls, no spear points embedded in human skeletons - nothing of any kind. Though long believed to be an expression of an inherently violent human nature, war is a cultural product with a very definite beginning in time. Triggered by a combination of overhunting and climate change at the end of the Ice Age, warfare came in the wake of widespread devastation of not only grass-eating herd species but the predators that fed on them.13 According to historian Lewis Mumford, the warrior band was the flip-side of the hunting band. In all the earliest literature, great warriors are also accomplished hunters. Ehrenreich explains the relationship between hunting and war in her 1997 book, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War:

With the decline of wild predator and game populations, there would have been little to occupy the males who had specialized in hunting and anti-predator defense, and no well-trodden route to the status of "hero." What saved the hunter-defender male from obsolescence or a life of agricultural toil was the fact that he possessed weapons and the skills to use them. Mumford suggests that the hunter-defender preserved his status by turning to a kind of "protection racket": pay him (with food and social standing) or be subject to his predations.[14]

The presence of warriors in nearby settlements provided a menace for local warriors to defend against, and vice versa. According to war historian Gwynne Dyer, "Pre-civilized warfare... was predominantly a rough male sport for under-employed hunters." For eons, hominids and humans were menaced by wild animals. When the threat receded, like an auto-immune disease the tools developed to fight it off were turned on ourselves. Instead of being preyed upon from without, the beast was internalized and began preying on us from within.[15]

The name of the beast, of course, is God.

The genius of Blood Rites is the way Ehrenreich weaves the history of war and religion into a single, seamless narrative. Religion everywhere begins as the sacrificial offering to a hungry deity. "Sacrifice," says Ehrenreich, "is the means by which humans feed the god or gods; the victim is in fact a meal." The Olympian gods longed for the scent of roasting flesh rising from the altars. Aztec and Mayan gods needed blood in order to continue their celestial and earthly labors. Several books of the Bible testify to Jehovah's lust for raw meat. The oldest known altar, discovered in a cave in Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in southern France, consists of a large rock on which has been placed the skull of a bear. While most people settled for a symbol of the hungry predator, some worshipped the real thing, such as ancient Hawaiians, who made offerings of themselves to sharks habituated to expect copious amounts of human flesh on regular occasions.[16]

Though predators terrorized early humans, they were also essential to our survival as scavengers. Once the great herd populations had collapsed in the wake of the Ice Age, a partly-eaten kill would have been a godsend. As Ehrenreich argues, the first blood offerings were probably investments intended to keep predators nearby. To this day the Koyukon people of northwestern Alaska maintain that wolves intentionally leave behind part of their kills for humans, who naturally reciprocate with their own kills. The native tribes of southern California venerated the mountain lion as a provider of meat. The Cheyenne claimed panthers killed deer for them in gratitude for having been suckled as cubs by Cheyenne women.[17]

Just as the pious both love and fear their deity, at one time people everywhere felt exactly the same ambivalence toward wolves, lions, and panthers. The lion that provides for you could just as easily turn on you. The lord giveth, and the lord taketh away.

The chief fear among small children, even in urban areas, is wild animals, especially snakes, lions, tigers and bears. We see ourselves reflected in the humble California ground squirrel, which still exhibits stereotypical anti-rattlesnake behavior despite being free of rattlesnakes for as long as 300,000 years. When his two-year-old son developed a fear of large animals at the zoo, Charles Darwin wondered if we too are haunted by ghosts of predators past. This would certainly explain our ancestors' need to ritualistically re-enact, in the drama of animal sacrifice, our ascension from hunted to hunter.[18]

But before there was animal sacrifice, there was human sacrifice. What was once regarded as racist slander is now firmly established as a widespread practice "from small-scale tribes to mighty urban civilizations." A man shot by arrows lies buried under the entrance of Stonehenge. Two miles away, at "Woodhenge," archaeologists found a three-year old child whose skull had been split open prior to burial. Somehow we still sensed that our lord was hungry, even if we no longer heard its growl. Long ago, if a tiger suddenly appeared from the brush, somebody was simply going to have to die. As with any trauma, the anxiety continued to return like clockwork even after the threat had all but vanished. So we simply did what we'd always done before: Sacrifice one that others may live.[19]

As the trauma gradually weakened, the sacrifice of our own kind gave way to animal offerings and even circumcision, in which the foreskin substitutes for the man. It was only in war that human sacrifice found a durable institution. In other words, war is not just make-work for under-employed hunter/defenders but a religious undertaking. To this day, the battlefield is sanctified, the soldier who dies in defense of his people a glorious sacrifice. To oppose the insanity of systematic human slaughter is seen as a diabolical affront to "God-fearing" people.[20]

Christianity may be regarded as an attempt to short-circuit the sacralization of war. The "logic" of the blood offering is turned on its head as God himself becomes the sacrifice, after which none more will ever be necessary. To love our enemies is to recognize that they are us, that we are killing our own brothers. If there's a true enemy, it's the beast that clamors for more blood. Our ancestors defeated the one in the jungle. Christianity is about slaying the one in our minds.

With war came social dominance for the warrior, along with slavery and patriarchy. As manhood became equated with the power of the predator, the female was demoted to prey. Says Ehrenreich, "By assigning the triumphant-predator status to males alone, humans have helped themselves to 'forget' that nightmarish pre- history in which they were all, male and female, prey to larger, stronger animals." Sexist gender division "conveniently obliterates our common past as prey, and states that the predator status is innate and 'natural' - at least to men."[21]

Though the trauma of predation affects us all, in men the memory of weakness and vulnerability is sealed off, repressed, forgotten. When the anxiety begins to re-emerge from its tomb, as it must, there's nothing like a killing to re-establish one's "manhood." Hatred and violence are built on a foundation of insecurity and repression.

What could more dramatically illustrate the vulnerability of Man than a defeated Christ on the cross? Yet how many of his ostensible followers truly empathize with him? The practice of war barely missed a drumbeat with the onset of Christendom. Instead of opening ourselves up to the painful recognition of our imperfections, we steel ourselves against our hated enemies. The true losers are the conquerors, those who kill and rape and enslave, who can always hold the oceanic anxiety at bay by beating their wives or whipping their kids. The true winners are the defeated, who must therefore face their humanity and the vulnerability they share in common with all people - and all living things.

We see the beast on the prowl in the "Christian" West all the way back to the 8th century, when a weak Europe faced a far more powerful and advanced Islamic civilization. According to Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, authors of Why Do People Hate America?, "Europe lived and developed within a war psychosis, conscious of an enemy with whom it was not evenly matched." Though we saw the beast in our opponent, this was more projection than reality, and in projecting the beast onto the "other," it came to life in ourselves.[22]

The key event in the self-defining of Western civilization was the Battle of Tours in 732 when Arab expansion into Europe was turned back. It was about this time that the original anti-Muslim polemicist, John of Damascus, began to portray Islam as a demonic pseudo-religion designed to encourage aggression and lust. Damascus must have known this wasn't true. But his lie took on a life of its own and, within a few centuries, the most ludicrous accusations against Islam were believed, even by those making them. The Crusades were launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II, who guaranteed a place in Paradise to those who took up the cross against "unclean" Muslims. Four centuries later it was Columbus' promise to open up a new front from the east in the war on Islam that got him his ships.[23]

As Sardar and Davies observe, "The old and familiar reflexes of thought shaped in the medieval power rivalry between Christendom and Islam were extended to manufacture the ideas, attitudes and means of dealing with Native Americans." Like his European predecessor, Homo americanus took shape in opposition to people who were initially far stronger and, in the context of the New World, more knowledgeable and advanced. Yet it was always understood that the "savages" would have to step aside as the superior race laid claim to its New Canaan. Before long the US was preying on peoples overseas. "As peace, order and prosperity followed our expansion over the land of the Indians," said Theodore Roosevelt in 1898, "so they'll follow us in the Philippines." As it happened, Filipinos were slaughtered at a per capita rate exceeding that of Vietnamese victims 70 years later.[24]

While Beast USA triumphantly straddles the earth, the hearts of Americans remain cold and closed. Like our predecessors 12,000 years ago, we've used our military dominance to gain economic advantage, to stratify the world with us on top. The riches we've gathered have paid for endless miles of suburban paradise. It's the American Dream, not the Reality. The Promised Land turns out to be TV Land. We jump inside the box and live out our fantasy on 500 channels, ignoring the pain of those whose natural wealth is squeezed for every last drop in the name of US utopia. Who needs reality when you can afford virtual reality?

The "old world," meanwhile, has taken a very different course. After two horrifying slaughters, Europeans see none of the glory and redemption in war, only mass insanity. Unlike the US, postwar Europe never demonized Communist Russia but empathized with the suffering that produced its revolution. While Europe learned to sit down and negotiate with its former colonies, America continues intervening in their internal affairs and generally treating them as vassal states that exist only to service the needs of the US economy. No gun nuts in Europe, no culture of fear and violence, only the ever-present danger of infection from across the Atlantic.[25]

With the renewed terror of Islam, we've come full circle. No need to whip the public into a frenzy of fear and hatred; this is old hat. The only thing that's changed is the technology. Soon after 9/11, Rich Lowry of National Review Online reported "lots of sentiment for nuking Mecca." He advised caution. When Bush declared, "Islam is not the enemy," he was soundly thrashed by various rightwing voices of the people. Bush is merely capitalizing on popular rage, not cultivating it. The true source of our pathology is the uncomprehending terror we carry within.[26]

There's a disconnect between Americans as individuals and "America" as our collective identity. However sane and compassionate we may be in our day-to-day lives, when it comes to issues of national insecurity, we don't stand a chance in the face of a power so intense that few can even look it in the eye.

In the clutches of mass ego disorder, we cannot begin to address the possible reasons for the Al-Qaeda attack of 9/11. The assumption is that they hate us out of envy for our brilliance and all-around greatness - a classic sign of clinical narcissism. As Joe Klein proclaimed in The Guardian, it's "morally bankrupt" to even consider that the US invited such attacks with our merciless and single-minded foreign policy. Thus it's okay to notice the mote in your brother's eye, but to spot the two-by-four lodged in your own is downright depraved.[27]

We couldn't possibly have invited 9/11, you see, because America has no interest in world affairs except to disseminate freedom and democracy, which we invented on July 4, 1776. Yet today these are little more than codewords for capitalism. "Democracy" means the "freedom" of corporations to dominate government at all levels. Instead of human intelligence guiding economics, the blind market sets the agenda. If religion began as ritual human sacrifice and gained its footing with the onset of war, today's death cult worships the "invisible hand" that provides for all our needs. The new sacrificial offerings are the hungry and sick, the peasants uprooted by "free trade," those lucky enough to be exploited by maquiladoras, and those even less lucky. It's no accident bin Laden targeted the chief symbol of America's permanent war against the world.

The destruction of the Twin Towers - horrifying as it was - gave us an opportunity to reflect. It was an invitation to rediscover our heart, to restore our sense of the vulnerability we share with all others. Instead we saw it as just another lethal assault from a monster to be hunted and killed. We remain hermetically sealed in our collective ego, devoid of feeling or sympathy, numb and number. Halliburton gets $5.3 billion, the US controls 115 billion barrels of oil, and we're that much more removed from our senses and ourselves.

Most of those who recognize the lunacy of it all nonetheless remain blind to its true nature, as if caught up in the shadow of the beast, if not the beast itself. We can't seem to get a handle on war because we see it exclusively from the material side - the geopolitical advantage, the generals with their toys, the propaganda machine - while missing the psychic dimension. War has a life of its own. It lives inside us. As the "turkey shoot" at the end of Gulf War I demonstrated, we're still offering sacrifices to the beast that lurks in the wilderness within, still compulsively recapitulating our triumph over the flesh-and-blood predator of old. Our lord and master lives and grows because we keep feeding it.

The chief threat to collective insanity is the capacity of individuals to start thinking for themselves. We see it happening in Iraq as soldiers realize they are occupiers in a country that doesn't want them. Yet many soldiers remain convinced of the righteousness of their mission. They see the projected image of the beast, a.k.a. the "terrorist," around every corner. But for Iraqis, it's not about images. They really are under assault, as if a lion really were prowling in their midst. While we project an image of evil onto Iraq, Iraqis don't have to project anything. Ultimately, it's a battle of image versus reality. We'll see how long the magician can keep us under his spell.

References

1. Solomon, Norman, "The Media, Gulf War II, & The FCC," Z Magazine, June 2003, p. 3

2. Rampton, Sheldon, and Stauber, John, Weapons of Mass Deception, Tarcher/Penguin, 2003, pp. 172,169

3. Elliot, Michael, "America Stretched Thin," Time, Sept. 1, 2003, pp. 30-35

4. Shalom, Stephen, "Iraq: War and Democracy," Z Magazine, April 2003, p. 4

5. Yoder, Steven, "Weapons of Mass Destruction, A Glossary of Terms", Z Magazine, October 2003, p. 5

6. "Harper's Index," Harper's Magazine, October 2003, p. 13

7. Rampton & Stauber, pp. 82-83

8. Palast, Greg, "Florida's flawed 'voter-cleansing' program," www.Salon.com, December 4, 2000

9. Barsamian, David, "Collateral Damage," Z Magazine, July/August 2003, p. 50

10. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 1997, p. 77

11. Ibid., p. 40

12. Ibid., p. 39

13. Ibid., p. 122

14. Ibid., p. 123

15. Ibid., p. 124

16. Ibid., pp. 30-32, 73-74

17. bid., pp. 70-72

18. Ibid., pp. 51-52, 87

19. Ibid., p. 64

20. Ibid., p. 63

21. Ibid., p. 114

22. Sardar, Ziauddin, and Davies, Merryl Wyn, "Why Do People Hate America?", Disinformation, 2002, p. 146

23. Ibid., pp. 146-149

24. Ibid., pp. 153, 180

25. Ibid., pp. 182-185

26. Ibid., pp. 50-51, 22

27. Ibid., pp. 35-36

Ted Dace has written for Skeptic, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, and counterpunch.org. He can be reached at edace@earthlink.net