War porn: The new safe sex

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NC30Ak02.html

The early 21st century is addicted to war porn, a prime spectator sport consumed by global couch and digital potatoes. War porn took the limelight on the evening of September 11, 2001, when the George W Bush administration launched the "war on terror" - which was interpreted by many of its practitioners as a subtle legitimization of United States state terror against, predominantly, Muslims.

This was also a war OF terror - as in a manifestation of state terror pitting urban high-tech might against basically rural, low-tech cunning. The US did not exercise this monopoly; Beijing
practiced it in Xinjiang, its far west, and Russia practiced it in Chechnya.

Like porn, war porn cannot exist without being based on a lie - a crude representation. But unlike porn, war porn is the real thing; unlike crude, cheap snuff movies, people in war porn actually die - in droves.

The lie to finish all lies at the center of this representation was definitely established with the leak of the 2005 Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British MI6 confirmed that the Bush administration wanted to take out Iraq's Saddam Hussein by linking Islamic terrorism with (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD). So, as the memo put it, "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

In the end, George "you're either with us or against us" Bush did star in his own, larger-than-life snuff movie - that happened to double as the invasion and destruction of the eastern flank of the Arab nation.