WASHINGTON, 24 April 2004 — In Bob Woodward’s brand new book, “Plan of Attack”, Woodward quotes President George W. Bush commenting to CIA deputy director, John McLaughlin, on Dec, 21, 2003. McLaughlin had just given Bush a briefing on the case for going to war with Iraq based on alleged Iraqi WMD evidence replete with communications intercepts, satellite photos, diagrams and other intelligence.

According to Woodward, Bush said, “Nice try. I don’t think this quite — it’s not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from.”

JOE PUBLIC!

Just who is “Joe Public” and how does he/see feel about the major international issues which many people out of the United States think Americans must deal with every day.

Let’s take a quick look at where the overwhelming majority of Americans and Joe Public stand. In Steve Perry’s blog, “Bush Wars”, he nails it. “Start with people: They are tired overworked, and scared — about their own livelihoods and threats from without.

More important, they are woefully ignorant, and easily worn down, concerning the details of any political subject. They are acclimated to political races in which the main differences revolve around personality, and (they are) comfortable making almost entirely emotional decisions about candidates.

This is an overgeneralization, but to date a viable one. Presidential elections are mass-culture phenomena, and the majority of voters in any election know very little of substance about the candidates or issues involved.”

People in the Arab world say to Americans all the time, “Don’t you Americans feel anything when you see the dead bodies of those innocent women and children in Fallujah or Gaza? And it is your troops and your weapons that are doing the killing.”

We Americans don’t see those pictures in the US media and even if we do, it is as Perry said; Joe Public is “tired, overworked, and scared.”

Most Americans don’t really care about the Middle East and the Arab world. We are inundated with 500 channels of meaningless dither on our TV sets and 5 different cell phones per family. We have 24-hour drive-in fast food outlets where we place our orders on the Internet from home before picking up our junk food.

And we only call our local media outlet to complain when our favorite football team gets pre-empted by a special news program. As a friend said, paraphrasing another famous wag, “Electronics is the drug of the American people.”

Apathy is a disease of most Americans which allows our politicians to take outrageous actions, particularly in the international arena. As another blog writer recently said, “American apathy is pathetic.”

Those of us who actively participate in international affairs are in a tiny minority of the American public. And we marvel at how much more grade school children in most countries outside of the United States know about the world then Joe Public does.

Does this excuse the American public from taking responsibility for the international tragedies that we see daily in the newspapers and on TV outside the United States? No, of course it doesn’t. But it tells us that Joe Public has to see the world very differently for fairness and justice to prevail in the world arena.

Years ago with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Americans, for the first time, saw on American TV, Israeli tanks running over innocent civilians. And they saw Israeli guns shooting at women and children. It was the “only show in town” on American TV. Organized groups in the US spoke out strongly against these atrocities. The media got ahead of the Israelis’ ability to control the message and the Israelis were pressured to change their behavior.

Today Americans have largely been immunized again to the carnage foisted upon the Arab innocents in the Middle East conflicts. The American media either doesn’t have access to the scenes of women and children suffering or chooses not to use these pictures when offered them by other media outlets.

However, as one reads the small town newspapers across the US these days, we see more and more pictures and stories about American soldiers from their own communities dying in Iraq. And embedded in these articles, we sometimes see comments by the families that enough is enough. They often state that we have already had too much killing in these conflicts including the killing of innocents. Increasingly more Americans are “getting it” and organizing in opposition to the many deaths. Maybe these pictures are the beginning of a change of the perceptions of Joe Public. And maybe, just maybe, Joe Public will tell President Bush that he finally understands.

— Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.