Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Antiwar Sentiment Dominates Va. Town Hall Meeting

Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va. The congressman was 15 minutes late for his Town Hall meeting on the Iraqi question, so that gave us time to chat about the Bush nightmare and the media’s role as accessories to his crimes.

Fed up with the pseudo patriotism ingrained in the veneer of official Washington, a 60-something audience member remembered a Mark Twain quotation that she had come across earlier in the day. “My kind of loyalty was to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders,” Twain wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as recited by the woman.

Bush and Moran and their colleagues in Washington apparently must operate similarly to the politicians that ruled over America in the days of Twain. These people command us but do nothing to command our loyalty in their ability to let us live our lives without them interfering.

Once he arrived in the auditorium Monday night, Moran summarized some of the messages sent to him by people living in Northern Virginia. An invasion of Iraq would be a “profound departure from the international rule of law,” Moran said, reciting a common theme among the feedback he had received. Military action “must be taken only as a defensive posture,” others had told him.

Moran said that “history has always told us that war creates unintended consequences” and that a U.S. attack on Iraq would be no exception.

Moran, who represents the portions of Virginia closest to Washington, D.C., conducted the Town Hall meeting at an Alexandria, Va., elementary school. The congressman invited Victoria Clarke, the chief flack for Rumsfeld?s Pentagon, and a major general from the Marines, to give short presentations and then take questions from the audience.

The antiwar audience applauded their representative, a centrist Democrat, for his decision last year to vote against giving Bush blanket power to mount an invasion of Iraq. Since casting his no vote, though, Moran has done little with his power as a U.S. congressman to stop U.S. aggression against Iraq.

He provided no evidence of any efforts made for peace in recent months. But he seemed to possess some feelings of guilt for Congress’ willingness to sanction mass murder. “I feel that the Congress abdicated some of its responsibility with that decision,” he said.

One has to give Moran credit, though, for organizing last night?s forum. In our detached political system, a ruler can stand behind a shield without ever having to listen to the concerns of the governed. He provided a forum that forced a Pentagon mouthpiece and a soldier to sit and listen to the opinions of the people who pay their salaries.

It was also a shrewd political move by Moran because he knew that the representatives from the Pentagon, not him, would serve as the targets of the audience?s disgust. Plus, the C-Span cameras covered the event live, giving Moran two hours in the national spotlight. It was a win-win situation - pardon the hackneyed corporate phrase - for Moran because it gave him points among his antiwar constituency and exposed him outside the Beltway to potential financial donors.

Give Clarke some credit, too. The Pentagon?s flack earned her pay as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs for sticking to the Bush regime?s script on Iraq. She even succeeded in giving a plug to the Bush administration’s latest propaganda ploy by warning, in a menacing tone, that the evil and cynical manipulator, Saddam Hussein, was preparing to use his own citizens as human shields when the U.S. bombing raids begin.

Beware. The human shield mantra promises to be at the top of the Pentagon’s list of talking points. Any reports of civilian deaths and injuries during the invasion will be blamed on Saddam for not moving his people away from military targets.

Clarke repeated a story told by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld during the recent NATO meetings in Munich. Rumsfeld, according to Clarke, had a conversation with an unnamed Middle East leader who said the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 were a “blessing in disguise” because they awoke the U.S. government to the perils of the “nexus” between terrorists and rogue nation-states.

Although Clarke forgot to mention this, the Sept. 11 attacks also have been a blessing for the Bush administration’s goal of building a bigger federal government with greater police authority.

During the meeting, Moran gave the audience a short history lesson of the Middle East from a U.S. perspective. His conclusion: “Democracy would be dangerous in the region today from an American interest.” For the United States to keep a seat at the table in the region, monarchies and dictatorships must remain in place.

Television crews from C-Span, the BBC and local Washington news stations were in attendance at the meeting to capture the debate. The Washington Post, however, chose not to report on the event in the next day’s issue.

Keith Harriston, the Post’s deputy metropolitan editor, told me that Metro columnist Courtland Milloy attended the meeting. “We don’t usually say in advance what we are planning to publish, but I expect that we will read his take on the event,” Harriston said.

Why the Post would choose to publish only a columnist’s account of the momentous event a couple days after the fact and not run a news story on the debate is baffling.

-- Mark Hand

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