Re: Brian Becker on News Hour with Jim Lehrer

["LouPaulsen" <LouPaulsen@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>


> Just watched Brian from the ANSWER coalition debate Randy Scheunemann of
> The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, who was Trent Lott's former
chief
> national-security adviser.

Thanks very much for the heads-up on this, Louis!  If there was an e-mail
about this from NY, we must have overlooked it in the crunch.  Fortunately
there is a late broadcast on an Indiana station which people in Chicago with
cable can get, and thanks to you we were able to send out an e-mail about it
for people who couldn't go on the bus.

(I personally actually couldn't go to DC because of a family situation.
However, we have 11 buses from the Chicago area, and there was a 12th bus
sponsored by the Chicago Teachers' Union.  If you add in the people who went
by car or plane, there are probably over 1000 people en route from
metropolitan Chicago now.)

The transcript and the audio for the segment will be available on line at
this link:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/newshour_index.html

To me, Brian didn't look nervous, just tired, and concerned about how to get
out a persuasive line in maybe 4 minutes total of talking time.

I must say I'm curious about how it is that Scheunemann and not some other
person was taking the pro-war side in this debate.  At one point, when
Becker had said that the war was not about 'weapons of mass destruction',
Scheunemann agreed that 'no, it's not' and said that the war was about
"liberating Iraq".  If the Bush administration as a whole were to adopt this
line, it would be a significant shift in public relations strategy.

The sentence "We are going to war against Iraq because ...." has had several
different conclusions in the last 16 months or so.  At first it was "because
Iraq supports al-Qaeda and/or was responsible for the anthrax attack."  When
no evidence for this was found or could be credibly manufactured, they tried
"because we need regime change."  But this excuse for war is too clearly
violative of international law, so then they adopted the now-current line
"because Iraq 'certainly' has weapons of mass destruction and we have to
attack Iraq before Iraq attacks us."

However, the longer the weapons inspectors tramp around Iraq and don't find
any "weapons of mass destruction", the less satisfactory this excuse
becomes.  Of course they can try to make something out of nothing, like
those eleven old empty warheads that have gotten so much play (see Feldman's
post of Pitt's letter), but maybe they are thinking it is time to move on to
a new excuse or at least to try one out to see how it sounds.  They may feel
that the idea of a "war to liberate Iraq" will fly better in the U.S.
because the public here is prone to messianic fantasies.  Of course this is
just speculation, but I intend to see if Scheunemann gets brought out more
frequently.

Lou Paulsen
Chicago




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