With public support for war against Iraq flagging in the U.S. in recent weeks, the Bush administration was clearly hoping the 9/11 anniversary would be just the thing to get war fever back on track.

Certainly, the media could be counted on to do its part to whip the citizenry into a frenzy of grief and rage, thereby rousing the American people to wage war on a country that apparently had nothing to do with 9/11, but at least offers a target that can be located.

The manipulation of grief to stoke enthusiasm for battle is, of course, nothing new. It was used in Iran in the ’70s by fundamentalist Muslim clerics to drum up support for their fledgling movement. Whenever dissidents were killed by the Shah’s brutal forces, the clerics held elaborate funeral ceremonies to further stir emotions and enlist recruits to fight the Shah and his backers in Washington. The clerics’ strategy was highly effective âe” and they didn’t even have CNN at their disposal.

This is worth remembering as we contemplate the media frenzy of the past week that has helped turn the bloodbath of 9/11 into a staging ground for endless war.

Certainly, the U.S. media have greatly helped the White House make its case. When tracking down Osama bin Laden proved too difficult, the Bush administration switched its focus to “regime change” in Iraq. The media have followed this turn in the plot without question, highlighting Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against his own Kurdish population âe” an atrocity that receives far more media attention now than when Saddam was still a U.S. ally.

The U.S. media also acts as a filter, preventing incorrect ideas from slipping through.

As Antonia Zerbisias noted in The Star last week, CNN and MSNBC hosts have smeared Scott Ritter, former head of the U.N. weapons inspection mission in Iraq, who blames Washington for the mission’s breakdown. TV hosts have openly questioned Ritter’s loyalty as an American, indicating the media have taken on the function once performed by the McCarthy Committee on Un-American Activities.

Certainly, criticizing Washington these days leaves one vulnerable to the charge of anti-Americanism. With its demands for blind, unquestioning loyalty, and talk of good and evil, the world’s only superpower seems to be increasingly taking on the characteristics of a cult.

Above all, the U.S. media have filtered out anything that could lead viewers to question why so many people around the world feel such bitterness toward Washington.

When George Bush, soon after 9/11, provocatively raised the question: “Why do they hate us so?” it seemed inevitable the media would start examining some possible reasons, such as the long history of U.S. interventions in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Instead, the media pretty much accepted Bush’s explanation that those who hate the U.S. are simply jealous of its freedoms âe” an explanation that might be satisfying but delusional, like a girl convincing herself other girls hate her because she’s pretty, when it might be because they think she’s a jerk.

Even after a full year of media “analysis” of 9/11, Americans still have little knowledge of brutal U.S. foreign interventions âe” amply documented by Noam Chomsky and other scholars âe” or the enormous power and wealth imbalances in the world that Jean Chr

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...