Told You So

[Chris Burford]

At 17/11/01 16:39 +0000, you wrote:
>>Can anyone post the text of Alistair Campbell's letter to the Guardian?
>>
>>It would be interesting to see how much caution there is in the triumphalism.
>
>Of course. Here it is:
>
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4299230,00.html
>
>Why the media are losers
>Guardian
>
>Thursday November 15, 2001
>
>I don't suppose Polly Toynbee will thank me for saying it, but her column 
>got as close as anything I've read for a while to defining the corrosive 
>negativism of so much of today's print and broadcast media (Our victory 
>has proved the pessimists utterly wrong, November 14).
>
>Sadly, the point she made about the leftwing press echoing the propaganda 
>of the right is one that links the histories of past Labour governments. 
>Add in the competitive pressures of 24-hour TV, the fact that newspapers 
>and broadcasters now care more about being noticed than being informed and 
>the fact that taking things to bits has always been easier than building 
>things, and you have the media we've got.
>
>The good news for Polly is that the public are more intelligent than the 
>media gives them credit for, and they see right through it. Not even the 
>combined forces yesterday of front pages which favoured what might go 
>wrong over what did go right; nor the Today programme's misleading, 
>unscientific and outdated "poll" on Muslim opinion; nor even the massed 
>ranks of commentators on the BBC and elsewhere effortlessly gliding from 
>explaining why the military strategy would never work to complaining that 
>it had worked too quickly could persuade many British people that 
>yesterday was anything other than a very good day for the coalition, for 
>Afghanistan and its people.
>
>Alastair Campbell
>
>Director of communications and strategy
>10 Downing Street

Too modest.

Not just of 10 Downing Street - of the World!

rather peevish letter, but all part of a sophisticated choreography that is 
well understood on both sides. No accident Campbell gave the letter to the 
Guardian, whose criticisms he would probably have taken most to heart.

The debate against the war was extensive in the UK and had a powerful 
indirect influence on the USA's most prominent ally.

My drug-fired brain (too much caffeine) generally found this skirmishing 
highly relevant.

Considering that Hakki considers it fantasising, the material results of 
the military strategy were very important. The broad lessons of this phase 
of the war seem to be that Empire can use high level bombing but if this is 
not to be unnacceptably indiscriminate and prolonged, it must be combined 
with ground troops. If those ground troops are local they may then seize 
the intiative, in the way the Empire tried to prevent in Kosovo. They may 
even turn round as now, and say that the tiny UK occupation force at Bagram 
airport is not wanted, thank you very much. They also have a tendency that 
can only partly be reduced to more human rights abuses probably than the 
Empire's own troops would commit (though consider the conduct of Italian 
troops in Somalia). It is a mixed picture but the broad outlines will be 
influential, and not just in drug fired brains.

Campbell will no doubt feel peevish about these latest objections too. Of 
course it is his moment to crow. But the media pack will gather again, 
thankfully undermining the Manichean sense of this inevitable war being a 
war of Good versus Evil. What we must try to ensure is that long term the 
winner is the democracy of the multitude.

I gather the demonstrators are out again in Ottawa.

Chris Burford

London