The big lie of Jessica Lynch

                                                           

I remember watching that dramatic CNN footage of that huge statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled by U.S. forces in the Baghdad square just after the war in Iraq.  However, there was a CNN story that really captured my interest. It was the Jessica Lynch story only that story was what we now call, fake news. 

According to the story, Jessica Lynch was a 19-year-old soldier and kindergarten-teacher whose army squad took a wrong turn in Iraq and was apparently, ambushed.

Some of her comrades were killed and she was taken prisoner, full of stab wounds and bullet holes, and she was whisked off to a ragged Iraqi hospital and held for eight days by vicious Iraqi guards and ostensibly sexually abused, and later supposedly "rescued" in the most daring and macho made-for-TV moment of the war by elite teams of hunky U.S. Army Rangers and U.S. Navy SEALS.

WOW. That is great stuff for an action movie.  Except that it never really happened that way other that Lynch herself doesn't remember a single thing and all the nurses and doctors and eyewitnesses on the scene say that the Iraqi fedayeen guards had fled the day before the so called rescue and there was no danger whatsoever, no resistance of any kind, the U.S. forces could just walk right in and rescue her.   

 The hospital doors were wide open, and the nurses and doctors had gone out of their way to provide decent care for Jessica, considering the circumstances and doctors even tried to return Lynch to U.S. forces themselves.     

And yet despite U.S. claims, Lynch had no knife wounds or bullet holes at all, just a few broken bones, and the dramatic and violent "rescue" was really just inane and silly and entirely faked and yet we all bought it, hook, line because it was shown on CNN.

And now, what’s next?  Jessica and disgraced New York Times reporter. Rick Bragg just inked a $1 million book deal to tell her misleading story, titled "I'm a Soldier Too”: The Jessica Lynch Story.                

Is this how Americans fabricate their history? Is this how they spin their patriotism?  The Jessica Lynch tale is America’s most apt and definitive myth of any war so far.

Because Jessica's story of her rescue is much like Saddam's so called nukes and biotoxins and America’s imminently prosperous economy along with President Trump’s ostensible prowess in lying , Americans are  being denied  the truth.

They are expected to always rely on first-hand reports. They are expected to not rely on anything so piffling and what is  dangerous wrong.  Are they so convinced that the media can do no wrong and TV would never lie? Are they not to question the integrity of their armed forces when they are out there right now protecting Americans and the people of other natiuons?  

Apparently, there is no war that is described in the media without the leaders of  the United States outright lying to the populace, without trying to coerce a wary nation into supporting its views by way of Hollywood-style set bits of information by deflecting American’s attention from the brutality in war such as decapitated children, the still-dying U.S. soldiers and the burning bodies by the side of the road. Hence, the Jessica Lynch story is to be used as a salve to ease the pain of war that hurts all Americans and others emotionally.

This is not a shocking surprise to anyone.  This is nothing even remotely unusual or uncommon in this kind of ploy.  The fabric of such a story of war consists not of gallant battles fought by hardy soldiers for some noble collective good but is manufactured tales of valiant brotherhood and purebred heroism designed to make the vile pill of war slightly less bitter.

These are the things that make you wince and sigh. These are the things that put it all in perspective, make you realize what the Pentagon and the military hawks really value.

War is vicious and primitive and disgustingly violent and not the slightest bit gallant, and the United States has rarely been more thuggish in its short history than when the American military seriously damaged Afghanistan and Iraq in these past few years. The world's greatest bloated superpower hammered  down on two nearly defenseless, piss-poor nations in the name of  petrochemical rights and strategic political positioning.

And, hence, comes the sugar-coated stories that Americans are expected to swallow. The sugar is desperately needed to make Americans feel better. Sweet, teary-eyed images of flags and salutes and stunning "rescues" will make the stories that are fed to them go down smoothly in order to suppress the collective recoil and the national gag reflex. After all, who wants to see burning babies screaming to death on prime time?

Americans need a pretty 19-year-old memory-impaired female soldier being rescued by manly SEALs wearing night-vision goggles and yelling "Go! Go! Go!" with lots of explosions and helicopters and with the Pentagon cameras rolling and everyone's adrenaline pumping like at a horse race, except for maybe the baffled Iraqi hospital personnel who were calmly taking care of Ms. Lynch when the U.S. storm troopers swooped in and violently knocked them down.

Of course, this isn't about Jessica herself at all. She has served her country bravely and is probably very sweet and at least articulate.  She doesn't remember a damn thing about the rescue anyway which doesn’t really make her the perfect one to write that part about her rescue. If fact, I am sure that she probably knows by now that her rescue was not the glorious, exciting and dangerous one as the spin doctors would have us all believe. 

We can just imagine how the Pentagon brass doubtlessly winked at Jessie and said, “Hey sweetie, you go girl.  Take the book deal and the movie deal, and the commemorative plates by the Franklin Mint.  It will be good for the country if you go along with the ruse we have created for you.  Do it for America.”

If she accepts the ruse the Pentagon has created and it is part of her book, it will not only bring shame upon her, it will also bring shame on the United States.  It will show other countries around the world that the United States is just a big phoney blowhard.

Jessica Lynch will be remembered as a puppet for the Pentagon—  a convenient TV-ready made canvass onto which Americans  can project their impotent myths of patriotism and war, to ease America's pain and to assuage that increasingly nagging fear that many nations in the world believe that the United States is a war monger and who believe that when President Trump squawked, “AMERICA FIRST!” he meant, “The Hell with all the other  nations” Incidentally, that isn’t my belief. 

In short, Jessica's myth helps hide the facts that the United States in removing an Iraqi tyrant from power which left behind a reeking mess of violence and bloodshed and thousands of dead citizens along with more rabid anti-U.S. sentiment and mistrust and global instability than Saddam or any other tyrants or terrorists could've ever hoped for.

Jessica Lynch is the American’s new doll. She is the nations little G.I. Jessica who is all safe and clean in her homecoming fatigues. Her imaginary story and her appearing as a doll that is ready to grace the nightstands of little girls of the happily gullible parents across the United States`, will make them all very happy.

After all, why should Americans bother with that mundane nonfictional event that describes what really did occur with  respect to Jessica Lynch’s so called rescue when straight fiction is so much more patriotic and also easily digestible to the gullible ?

I would be less than honest however if I didn`t say that in my respectful opinion, the United States has always had and still have brave and honourable military members in its armed forces.

Those of us who were alive during the Second World War were then and even now conscious of the fact that had the members of the America military forces not been in both Europe and in the Far east, the European nations would have succumbed to the Nazi grip of tyranny and the nations in the Far East would have also suffered under the heel of the then Japanese war machine. For this reason, the World owes a great debt to the United States.