Nicholas F. Benton

While You
Were Sleeping

"Waking Life" is a surreal but compelling movie that came out a couple years ago about someone who goes through his life looking for answers but not realizing he is dead.

It causes one to wonder. How many of us have died, at least in terms of engaging the real world we live in, and aren't even aware of it? How many of us have passed over into some illusory fantasy world governed not by reality, but by internal fears, the perceived expectations of others or the narrow goals of immediate sensual gratification or paying the rent?

We all know this happens, at least on a personal level, because most of us experience the impulse, to a greater or lesser degree, but hopefully don't permit it to govern our lives entirely.

When it comes to the suggestion that major institutions of society have died to the realities of life without knowing it, or at least are sleepwalking through life, it is usually taken as metaphor.
But what if it is not? What if it is as real as we all experience it on a personal level and that it is a very dangerous matter?

This is the state of the major media today, of news organizations that can't wait to get uncomfortable and difficult subjects like Iraq and the U.S.'s real intentions for Iran off its front pages and away from its television cameras.

Circuses outside a hospice in Florida or a courtroom in California have shoved the relentless drumbeat of death and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan to the background of the national consciousness, and everybody presumes it's OK.

Now comes the challenge from former United Nations arms inspector Scott Ritter that "the American media today is sleepwalking towards an American war with Iran with all of the incompetence and lack of integrity that it displayed during a similar path trodden during the buildup to our current war with Iraq."

Remember Scott Ritter? He was one of those unpopular, oft-derided voices that spoke out prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq who insisted that there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found there.

Does anyone remember that he, and many like him including the U.N. team that had been in Iraq, always insisted there were no weapons of mass destruction there? America was not fooled about that. The administration chose to insist on a lie even when it had abundant evidence otherwise.
Ritter was right all along about Iraq, as we now know but most will still not admit. That makes what Ritter has written this week even scarier had he had no track record on the real but unpopular truth.

Ritter insists that earlier reports of a Bush plan to bomb Iran by June 2005 are true, despite administration denials. There is an operative Bush administration plan to be fully prepared to launch a massive aerial attack by June 2005, even if the decision to commence bombing has not yet been made.

He says that he was told by a Bush administration confidant that the June 2005 date was chosen "because the Israelis are concerned that if the Iranians get their nuclear enrichment program up and running, then there will be no way to stop the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon. June 2005 is seen as the decisive date."

The evolution of this policy is fully in the public record, but you will not see it on the front page of any newspaper, or reported on CNN.

No one in the U.S. media has even asked the administration about the earlier reports of a June 2005 date to bomb Iran.

The President reviewed such plans last October, following Iran's rejection of the International Atomic Energy Agency's call to close down its nuclear fuel production program, followed by an Iranian test of a short-range ballistic missile capable of reaching Israel and U.S. military installations in Iraq.

In November, the IAEA issued an official report saying there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, even as it develops peaceful nuclear power capabilities. The matter has since taken on the appearance of the way in which the Bush administration ignored the assessments of U.N. inspectors in Iraq.

In the context of this, Bush's nomination of John Bolton to be the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. throws fuel on the fire. Bolton drafted the current U.S. policy toward Iran and last year insisted the IAEA was wrong and that Iran has "a secret nuclear weapons production program." This hard-liner U.N.-hater once insisted Cuba had an offensive biological weapons program.

Sound familiar? Sound like "weapons of mass destruction" all over again? Think any this will wake up the U.S. media? Think again.

Nicholas F. Benton may be emailed here.