Picking Apart the Rush to War

I just watched Chris Matthews’ interview with Mike Morrell, the reluctant blower of a long-delayed whistle. The interview reminds me of some of my reasons for writing Carla Rising.

As the CIA’s chief liaison to the Bush-Cheney White House, Mike Morrell painfully confirms that US President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney fabricated the amazing lie they told Americans and the world: That Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear and biological weapons, capable of hitting targets in the United States. During the interview, Chris Matthews grows increasingly angry and tells Morrell why….

Matthews angrily wants to know why President Bush and his administration lied in connecting Saddam not only to weapons of mass destruction but to the radical islamacists’ attacks of September 11, 2001 – a lie that, remarkably, persists in the minds of many Americans today.

Further, as Morrell confirms, Cheney and his convicted aide “Scooter” Libby smeared the work and reputations of others, including CIA operatives, who tried to set the record straight. Bush and Cheney clearly lied to the American people to inflate the threat from Saddam in Iraq and used their offices and power to isolate rational opposition in the United States and abroad.

Matthews presses Bush’s CIA briefer: “Why?”

Morrell refuses cross that line. “I don’t know,” he says. “You will have to ask them.”

But Matthews gets it right anyway: The Bush Administration was determined to go to war against Iraq — likely even before 9/11/2001 — and they needed to turn any possible opposition into a US “enemy.” Matthews describes “very objective people” in the newsroom who “finally” were cowed into backing the war, exactly because of the Bush-Cheney lies, based on CIA “intelligence” that did not exist.

Matthews is clearly angry because of the way that Bush and Cheney lied to convince Americans that Iraq — and, by extension, the Middle East — was a much more dangerous place than it actually was in 2002. The lies about nuclear weapons and WMDs had the effect of removing any middle ground. Anyone who openly questioned the lie became a target for official, very public criticism — and, sometimes, professional ruin — in the newly polarized atmosphere that was created by these very same, very big lies.

“If you’re not with us, you are against us,” Bush announced — in a line I borrowed for a pro-war speaker in Carla Rising.

Like the hyping of threats from long-ago civil-rights and labor protesters, Bush’s fiction of a threatened attack from Saddam’s Iraq had the effect of shutting down even newsroom conversation about it, contributing to the American media’s own rush to war, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of spreading violence in the region.

“Intelligence gets politicized all the time in this town,” Morrell says. “On both sides.”

This is a weak reiteration of the “both sides are guilty” argument. The side he served, however, was clearly determined to drive America into an awful, deadly war — killing more than 100,000 innocent people —  “on false pretenses,” as Matthews says.

Part of the plan was to polarize the political environment in the United States — even to the detriment of the Republican Party. Bush/Cheney’s early most high-profile victim of the lie from their own ranks was Colin Powell, once representing hope for a new, more rational GOP.

It’s good to see Mike Morrell doing something to set the record straight, however late and “safe” it is.  It’s troubling, however, that Bush and Cheney and their loyalists  are still “at large” in Washington, some of them in public office, getting away with the fabulously weak “Mistakes were made” position in order to maintain their choke-hold over US public opinion.

 

Protect books and readers

(This is my own interpretation of a printed defense of the German Book Price Regulation, endorsed by the Market Association of the German Book Trade.)

“This law serves to protect the book as a cultural good. The establishment of a binding price in each sale (of a new book) to the final customer ensures the preservation of broad book diversity. At the same time, the law guaranties a further good for the public interest, in that it advances the existence of a large number of book outlets.”

The book price regulation’s guarantee:
Every single book counts.

Each reader is different. Each has different needs and wishes. Books serve our need for entertainment, for information or for getting advice. And then, sometimes we have to immerse ourselves in a unique area of study — taking joy in discovering an obscure title within the boundless sea of content.

For more than 500 years, since the time of Gutenberg, we have been able to satisfy these needs, in part, because our culture of books has offered us infinite diversity. Each book exists as part of an economic market, as a material good. Collectively, books also define a broad cultural good.

No single title is interchangeable with another.
Each one counts.

This is why each individual book needs protection in the bigger marketplace. In Germany, each new title is sold at the same retail price — the price that is established by its publisher. This is true whether that book is sold in Dusseldorf or Berlin, whether it’s purchased in a small, cozy bookshop or in a big, beautiful department store. Or on the Internet.

The German Book Price Regulation protects all books published in Germany from the excesses of the “dog-eat-dog” marketplace, in a market where one “big player” has automatic and easy advantages over his “mom and pop” competitor down the street. Left unregulated, the marketplace would soon destroy the diversity of books and our literary culture.

In Germany, the retail price of each new book is legally fixed by its publisher, and anyone selling that new book to its final owner must honor that price. There are no “special customers” who get the benefit of paying less than the book manufacturer’s price. The price for every customer is the same, whether or not the seller is big or small, private or public, profit or nonprofit.

There are, of course, different prices for different editions. The prices for the paperback, hardcover, and e-book versions of a book are generally different. Publishers have the option of waiving the regulation that binds booksellers to the fixed retail price after 18 months. Only then can the price be determined by the seller. In this case, the price becomes subject to the open marketplace….

The book market
isn’t all about the seller.

About a million different books are available in Germany — an incredible variety of fiction, children’s books, science books, manuals, young adult literature, advice guides, and textbooks in all fields of study. Every year about 90,000 new publications are produced for German readers.

On the broader market,
books are cheaper in Germany.

It has been proven that books in countries without fixed book prices are, on average, more expensive than in countries that establish a binding price law. Of course, in a US-style price war, a retail giant can sell some best-sellers at something close to “dumping” prices. The result, however, is that prices climb rapidly for the larger number of books.

The bookstore should be protected
as a well-established cultural good.

About 4,900 bookstores insure that all books are offered across the country, even in the most remote places. The trained bookseller on site should be able to offer good advice in all matters relating to books. That person also ensures that every book is available within a short time, even overnight, using a remarkable ordering service linked to a selection of more than 300,000 titles.

The German Book Price Regulation
is a law made for book buyers and readers.

The book price agreement has been an industry-wide practice in Germany for almost 150 years. The agreement was passed into law, as the German Book Price Regulation, in 2002.

Father’s Land

BERLIN (February 2014) – I met a doctor at the local pub last night. Actually, we’d met before this, so we were already familiar to each other when I saw her. She smiled, welcoming me into her little group at the bar.

I mentioned my current interest – reading about the Weimar time. I expressed my belief that this period, between the end of WW I, in 1918, and Hitler’s rise to power, in 1933, was not a time of peace, as is commonly believed, but a time of an intense ideological civil war. During this time, the weak German democracy appeased its most militant, right-wing nationalists. At this time, they were just a small-but-loud minority, whose goal was to purge the country of everything to its left – of thousands of creative and intelligent people.

Beginning in 1918, the proto-Nazis worked on a variety of fronts: They fought in small, local elections while death squads conducted political executions. More than 320 political murders happened between 1918 and 1924. The ultra-conservatives politicized everything — from science to religion and art — and cultivated fear of the still-new Russian revolution. All this was happening in the decade before 1933, when they took absolute power, creating the one-party state.

So, I’m offering this interpretation to the doctor. Immediately, she began speaking of her parents, of her father who went reluctantly into the military, either because he was poor or because he was drafted.

“He hated Hitler,” she said. “He always had.”

The army sent her father to Africa where, for a time, he fought under Rommel. When he saw a chance, however, he went AWOL. He was captured in Egypt, where he was imprisoned, she said.

“When he asked for a cell that looked out at the pyramids, they gave it to him. He spent the rest of the war looking out at the Egyptian pyramids every day….”

Afterward, he was reunited with his wife.

“They were as different as they could be,” the doctor told me. “He had always hated the Nazis. But not my mother. She had joined the League of German Girls, loved Hitler and remained loyal…. She never believed what had happened in the death camps, just denied it….”

I was amazed.

“Your parents disagreed over fascism?” I asked. “And, yet, they stayed together?”

She nodded.

“Out of loyalty to each other. Devotion. Tradition. …Loyalty is a powerful thing….”