| Dday:
This may be a little thing, but signs that a war where Americans are still dying is intractable doesn't seem to me to be that little.
Officials in Iraq's mostly Sunni Muslim Anbar province are refusing to raise Iraq's new national flag, which the parliament approved earlier this week.
"The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won't raise it," said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, "If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida."
Why have the Sunnis in Anbar turned against the Iraqi flag?
A slim minority of parliamentarians approved the new flag, which doesn't have Saddam Hussein's handwriting or the three stars that represented his Sunni-dominated Baath Party.
It was rushed through parliament before a pan-Arab parliament meeting that's planned for March in Irbil, in the Kurdish north, because the Kurdish Regional Government prohibits flying Iraq's Saddam-era flag. The Kurds consider that flag a symbol of Saddam's oppression.
Details, details! Who can keep all that straight? The Surge(TM) is working, don'cha know! Or do we have to condemn you, like we did MoveOn?
You see, the condemnation of MoveOn effectively ended any coherent Democratic questioning, much less opposition to the endless surge in Iraq. Any questions about whether it was actually, you know, working were effectively ruled "out of order" for the duration. (Much less questions about just what "working" might mean.) It was a glorious victory for our glorious leader who will be speaking tonight, giving his last SOTU, causing many a Versailles tear to be shed.
This is the way hegemony works. The right has its hegemonic institutions well in hand. This includes virtually the entire edifice of the punditalkcrazy--cable, columnists, talk radio, etc., etc., etc. and from its institutionally secure battlements it is mere child's play to launch a quick-strike war of movement attack on a puny 3-million member organization like MoveOn.
Hegemonic institutions in or with easy access to the media are particularly important in regulating the common flow of acceptable (i.e. hegemonic) political discourse, and that is precisely what we saw in this instance. Certain things are simply unspeakable, and hence, unthinkable.
Thus, not only does the right use its array of hegemonically controlled positions to attack and reverse potential challenges, but to shape the very limits of acceptable critical questions, perspectives and ideas. It creates "unpersons," "unthoughts," "unrealities," even though these persons, thoughts, realities continue to be very much alive in the real world, outside the media bubble.
And so, rightwing hegemony was triumphant! Iraq is off the table for the 2008 election. No worries! Just... the economy, stupid! And there, word is out that the US era of global dominance is coming to an end. Just Bush's luck!
Which brings us to...
Hegemony, Part II
The larger story of hegemonic discourse on Iraq is that no one can question the official story, even though, if pressed, almost everyone will admit it was, well, not quite on the up-and-up. (Though Hucksterbee seems certain that those WMDs must have gone somewhere at the last minute.) The trick is, no one gets pressed. That just isn't done, because no one who would do such a thing is allowed to stay in the club. That's the way hegemony works. It has all sorts of rules to keep it going.
And thus, even though I was one of five people cited for Project Censored's #1 Censored Story of 2002-2003, that story--the neocon's grand plan for global dominance--remains strictly off-limits for the normal flow of hegemonic discourse. It might make the NY Times Bestseller list from time to time, but never the Times front page. It just wouldn't be "objective," don'cha know!
Yet, that story--based in part in the Project for a New American Century's (PNAC's) September 2000 Report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses"--reveals the Iraq War to be, perhaps, the most spectacular US foreign policy failure of all time. In PNACs view, terrorists were not even background extras, and even overthrowing Saddam was just a minor point. The big story was controlling the globe for the next century, with keeping China down as Job One.
Ooops!
Which helps explain why hegemony is so important. Because if we were allowed to talk about the real motives behind the Iraq War, and what larger scheme it was supposed to be part of, and how disastrously all that failed, then Bush would be facing execution tonight, instead of an adoring media.
And we can't have that!
After all, "Who lost China?" is supposed to be the far right's line, remember?
p.s. Dday's last line?
Meanwhile, the over-under on sentences about Iraq in the State of the Union tonight is 3.
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