(C) Fairness & Accuracy in Media This story was originally published by Fairness & Accuracy in Media and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Already Erasing His Record, Media Celebrate Biden’s ‘First’ Attack [1] ['Gregory Shupak', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Vertical-Align Middle .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar Is .Alignleft .Alignright'] Date: 2021-04-01 15:35:30+00:00 The less clear a population is about the frequency and scale of murderous violence its government carries out, the easier it is for its ruling class to go about its wars. Fortunately for the US state, corporate media help manufacture collective amnesia by expunging US aggression from the record. When the Biden administration bombed Syria on February 25, killing at least 22 people, CNN’s Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann and Nicole Gaouette (2/25/21) said the airstrikes “mark the US military’s first known action under President Joe Biden,” while their colleague Fareed Zakaria (GPS, 2/28/21) had a segment about the strikes called “Biden’s First Military Action.” Christian Science Monitor (3/2/21) ran an editorial headlined “Biden’s First Use of Force Overseas.” Yet not even a month earlier, the US carried out an airstrike in Iraq that officials said killed ISIS commander Jabbar Salman Ali Farhan al-Issawi and nine other ISIS fighters (New York Times, 1/29/21). Furthermore, Airwars, a nonprofit monitoring group affiliated with the University of London, suspects the US of carrying out or helping to carry out four bombings in Somalia in the period between Biden’s inauguration and the attack on Syria, killing 2–4 people in one case and 6–12 on two other occasions. The US military stopped disclosing its airstrikes in Afghanistan last year, but it is unlikely that military operations in the US’s longest overseas war came to a halt when Biden took office. The US said the February 25 bombing was retaliation for three rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq that were purportedly carried out by groups allied with Iran (NBC, 2/25/21). In one of the attacks, rockets fired at Erbil airport killed a military contractor and an Iraqi civilian. However, the site that the US bombed in Syria “was not specifically tied to the rocket attacks” (CNN, 2/25/21), and a New York Times (2/25/21) report from Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt acknowledged that little is known about the group that took credit for the Erbil attack, “including whether it is backed by Iran or related to the organizations that used the facilities the American airstrikes targeted on Thursday.” But many in the media were quick to accept Washington’s versions of events and portray the US as acting defensively. The Post’s Jennifer Rubin (2/28/21) said Biden had “responded forcefully” to “Iranian proxy attacks,” and thereby sent an “important…signal to Iran that the new administration will not look the other way on Tehran’s regional conduct simply to encourage discussion about” Iran’s nuclear power program. Cooper and Schmitt (New York Times, 2/25/21) noted that the US dropped “seven 500-pound bombs” on Syria, and described this as Biden taking “a more measured response to the rocket fusillade in Erbil than Mr. Trump’s pitched campaign against Iran and past actions of its proxies in Iraq.” Set aside the absurdity of calling dropping nearly two tons of bombs “measured”; set aside the lack of evidence of Iranian responsibility for the deaths at Erbil; set aside that the US doesn’t claim that it bombed the parties that fired the rockets that killed the contractor and the Iraqi civilian in Erbil, and assume for the sake of argument that Iran is behind those acts. If that’s the case, Rubin, Cooper and Schmitt leave readers guessing as to how many people in the United States, or an allied country, the authors believe Iran would be permitted to kill as part of a “measured response” to send an “important…signal” to the US that it must lift sanctions on Iran that are “targeting basic foodstuffs [and] lifesaving medicines” (Jadaliyya, 12/3/19) and killing cancer patients (Foreign Policy, 8/14/19). The pretense that the US defended itself by carrying out last week’s airstrikes also necessitates glossing over the fact that the country Washington actually bombed, Syria, is accused of neither sponsoring nor carrying out the rocket attacks on American bases in Iraq that should not be there in the first place. It’s remarkable how little attention Syria received in the coverage, especially considering that the bombing was aimed at groups allied with the Syrian government in that country’s war. Had the coverage paid more notice to how Biden’s bombing was carried out against a country that the US has helped to decimate (FAIR.org, 3/7/18), despite Syria not attacking or threatening to attack the US, the narrative that Biden was merely “responding to attacks” would have been that much more obviously threadbare. [END] --- [1] Url: https://fair.org/home/already-erasing-his-record-media-celebrate-bidens-first-attack/ Published and (C) by Fairness & Accuracy in Media Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/fair/