If ever there was a cliché picture, it is a picture of a soldier going to war. But, a soldier going to war is a clever cliché picture, and these pictures are now all over the wire services. There was one cliché war picture, in which George Bush the American President was shown holding a small baby over his head, while a US marine looked on. He was the father who was going to war, and the picture was meant to get your tear ducts working overtime.

Pictures of this sort belonged in the historybooks. Now, they have become strong impressions of life and times in 2003, and looking at these images one would think that there is an attack aimed at earth by a mob of extra terrestrials armed with unknown lethal weapons.

There is such a sense of urgency, and poignancy that is created by these images of American soldiers going off to war leaving their babies back home. But this is like prostituting small babies, because there is an immense 'hollowness' that is generated by these pictures. They are supposed to be taking our minds to the great wars that were fought by troops who were given a sad send off before they left to fight the 'good wars' to save good nations from the designs of evil powers.

But with these pictures, there is no real sense of anxiety that's created about the soldiers going to war, because it is generally known that they are going to reduce Iraq to a pulp. Even the babies in these pictures are asleep, because they can sense that their fathers are going nowhere that is really dangerous.

Maybe these babies have read the stories that appear alongside these pictures. Mainstream papers now carry stories which say things like "Bush is attacking Iraq because there is oil there, and not attacking north Korea because there is no oil there at all.''

It reminds me of a time when a friend of mine used to work for Reuters news agency, when I suggested to her that all news agencies are there to work within the subtle agenda of the Americans, and those who make global policy who are allied to the Americans. She called me all kinds of names for saying this.

She has since left, but today the mainstream papers have come to the point of acknowledging that this is indeed the role of agencies such as Reuters, and for this acknowledgement we have to thank George Bush. Mainstream writers such as those in the British Independent for instance, have said quite candidly that most of the Western media follow the agenda of the Americans and quite shamelessly so -- and now you can guess why those pictures of American soldiers with sleeping babies appear all over the newspapers worldwide. Reuters loves babies.

Half the war is the propaganda war, and this time the US seems to have lost the propaganda war even before the proper war got started. This is why Reuters are carrying a good deal of baby pictures and tear jerking 'special-effects' photographs of soldiers preparing for war. This is to shore up the falling credibility of the US rationale for war against Iraq, when 'not even a jam jar'' of chemical weapons have been found by the UN special weapons inspectors, as one writer put it.

In the United States itself, there is a backlash against people such as Noam Chomsky who are continuing to expose George Bush, and it has come to a point where Chomsky has been referred to by some editorialists as the 'man with the sick mind''.

But all this attention has only propelled Chomsky's hitherto 'alternate' views into the mainstream, and now they will know Chomsky by name in the Bronx.

To that extent George Bush has done some service by making American people more aware of how unjust their regime is. "Closet' verities such as the hegemony that news agencies such as Reuters have over the world media, have suddenly come out of the closet, because of the war the George. W. Bush is getting ready to wage.

What Chomsky says about the American nation however seems to be coming true before our eyes. The soldiers do the bidding of the American leadership, and despite the fact that there is considerable opposition to George Bush's war-policy among right thinking people, especially in American academia, the American hoi polloi does not know anything very much about this, and even if they do they are the 'herd' which needs to follow orders.

Chomsky says for instance that the role of the American media is to 'manufacture consent'; that is to manufacture consent for the war for instance that is to be waged against Iraq.

By and large the American media does this by showing baseball and giving the masses bread and circuses, so that when it comes to a time when the President has to say 'war'.. they are in a such a daze that they all just get up and go to war, leaving all their sleeping babies back at home. No doubt this time too the American media has been successful in doing that, but this war is so absurd that even so, the news that it is an unjust war has percolated to the masses who do not known what to do with this piece of information.

George Bush is increasingly looking like the cheerleader who has the wind knocked off his sails. Try as he might to 'cheer' and psyche up the Americans for this war, the American people are not enthused, no matter how many babies he is going to carry over his shoulders.

But even so there is no such thing called a mass movement against the war in America because of what Chomsky calls 'manufacturing of consent.' The American people have a herd mentality that has been conditioned by long years of giving 'consent' which has been artificially manufactured. How is this consent manufactured? By saying 'we will run the country, and you watch baseball.'

This formula still works to the extent that there is still no mass movement against the Iraq war in America. For one thing the people also know that this is not going to be a haemorrhaging long standing conflict like the Vietnam War. Instead, Iraq will be pulverised or at least brought to submission with superior weapons. After that, the troops will come back, there will be more pictures, more sleeping babies, and then - back to baseball.

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