How the media misleads with language...
Why is the US Always 'Stumbling' or 'Sliding' Into War?
The way the mainstream media tells it, the United States never, ever
ends up embroiled in wars and military conflicts on purpose — only ever
by mistake, or as a result of things like ‘bad planning’ or ‘strategic
missteps’.
Very often when media coverage of war is analysed, there is a focus
on how hawkish pundits cheerlead for conflict and journalists parrot official
narratives while dissenting voices are drowned out. Mainstream
networks, for example, have been heavily criticized by media watchdogs
for almost exclusively inviting
pro-war guests and ex-military hawks onto their news shows to convince
Americans that war is the only reasonable course of action, while
refusing to let anti-war commentators get a look in.
But there is another more subtle and unnoticeable way that the media
deceives us. Even when they are not outright cheerleading for military
action (as was the case in the lead up to the Iraq War), the language
they use to describe events is designed to absolve Washington of blame.
Next time you read the news, notice how the US is always “stumbling into” war, or “drifting into” war or “sliding into” war — or even “sleepwalking into” war. To “stumble into” war seems to be a firm favorite among headline writers. The US has“stumbled” into war in Iraq and Syria and has been, at one time or another, at risk of “stumbling” into war with Russia, North Korea and most recently Iran.
According to these headlines, the US has also been “dragged into” (CNN) and “sucked into” (NI) war in Syria and Afghanistan, twice (NI, The Times). In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been “sliding into” (AP) a potential “accidental” war with Iran — and back in 2017, it was “dragged into” (FP) the disastrous Yemen conflict.
The examples of the US stumbling, blundering and bumbling its way
into wars are endless — and it does raise a question that no one ever
seems to ask: If it’s so easy to trip and fall into massive never-ending
wars, why isn’t it happening to everyone else? Is Washington just
especially clumsy?
With this narrative of the bumbling superpower, agency is always
removed from the architects of war. Instead of enthusiastically banging
the drums for war, we’re told the White House is always ‘reluctant’ to
deploy its military, but is ‘forced’ into it . Then, once the war is in
full-swing, when things are not panning out exactly as planned, the US
can become the sacrificial hero, propelled into a deadly conflict not of
its own making.
A recent headline in the Miami Herald framed recent US actions on Venezuela as the US being “pushed to act.” Pushed
by who? The Trump administration voluntarily helped organize and
instigate the attempted coups that worsened the country’s political
crisis and proudly imposed the economic sanctions which have led directly to thousands of premature deaths. There was no “pushing” involved.
In April, Foreign Policy magazine even had Venezuela’s self-declared interim president Juan Guaido “stumbling toward a coup.” How
do you stumble into a military coup? Surely that’s the kind of thing
that requires careful, deliberate planning and execution? The Washington
Post had Trump “fumbling” an uprising in Caracas, too.
It’s not just media pundits and journalists who employ this kind of
misleading language, either. British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said
this week that a US war with Iran could happen“by accident.” Did
Hunt take a vacation from reality and miss US Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton ramping up war rhetoric
against Iran for months? Maybe Trump abandoned the 2015 Iran nuclear
deal by accident and sent an aircraft carrier and bomber task force into
the Persian Gulf last week to “send a message” to Iran by mistake.
Such framing obscures basic facts about Washington’s motives and
predilection toward military conflict over diplomacy. Washington doesn’t
get into wars by mistake. Unless a country is directly attacked,
threatened or occupied, wars are quite easy to avoid getting into if you
really don’t want to be in them — but the hawks in Washington, no
matter how much they pretend to not want war, are always itching for
more and they will stop at nothing to get what they want, even if that
means fabricating evidence (as in Iraq) or pulling off false flag attacks to use as convenient pretexts for the US to ‘respond’ to.
US military actions are designed specifically to provoke the
conflicts that they believe will be of benefit to their overall
geopolitical strategy. Talk of freedom, democracy and human rights are
just a convenient cover. Washington is never at risk, for example, of
stumbling into war with Saudi Arabia, despite Riyadh’s laundry list of
crimes against humanity.
Whether this propagandistic language is always employed in a totally
conscious way or not, it’s difficult to tell. Either way, it’s a
psychological trick which frames the most powerful, military-minded and
trigger-happy country in the world as some kind of innocent victim of
events beyond its control.
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