Fw: [R-G] Lost in the rhetorical fog of war - Robert Fisk

Macdonald Stainsby mstainsby at tao.ca
Sat Oct 13 04:28:32 PDT 2001


----- Original Message ----- From: <shniad at sfu.ca> To: <shniad at sfu.ca> Sent: Friday, October 12, 2001 4:39 PM Subject: [R-G] Lost in the rhetorical fog of war - Robert Fisk


> The Independent 9 October 2001
>
> Lost in the rhetorical fog of war
>
> 'The Taliban have kept reporters out; does that mean we have to
> balance this distorted picture with our own half-truths?'
>
> By Robert Fisk
>
> A few months ago, my old friend Tom Friedman set off for the small Gulf
> emirate of Qatar, from where, in one of his messianic columns for The New
> York Times, he informed us that the tiny state's Al-Jazeera satellite
> channel was a welcome sign that democracy might be coming to the Middle
> East. Al-Jazeera had been upsetting some of the local Arab dictators -
> President Mubarak of Egypt for one - and Tom thought this a good idea. So do
> I. But hold everything. The story is being rewritten. Last week, US
> Secretary of State Colin Powell rapped the Emir of Qatar over the knuckles
> because - so he claimed - Al-Jazeera was "inciting anti-Americanism''.
>
> So, goodbye democracy. The Americans want the emir to close down the
> channel's office in Kabul, which is scooping the world with tape of the US
> bombardments and - more to the point - with televised statements by Osama
> bin Laden. The most wanted man in the whole world has been suggesting that
> he's angry about the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions, about the
> corruption of pro-western Arab regimes, about Israel's attacks on the
> Palestinian territory, about the need for US forces to leave the Middle
> East. And after insisting that bin Laden is a "mindless terrorist'' - that
> there is no connection between US policy in the Middle East and the crimes
> against humanity in New York and Washington - the Americans need to close
> down Al-Jazeera's coverage.
>
> Needless to say, this tomfoolery by Colin Powell has not been given much
> coverage in the Western media, who know that they do not have a single
> correspondent in the Taliban area of Afghanistan. Al-Jazeera does.
>
> But why are we journalists falling back on the same sheep-like conformity
> that we adopted in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo war? For here we go
> again. The BBC was yesterday broadcasting an American officer talking about
> the dangers of "collateral damage'' - without the slightest hint of the
> immorality of this phrase. Tony Blair boasts of Britain's involvement in the
> US bombardment by talking about our "assets'', and by yesterday morning the
> BBC were using the same soldier-speak. Is there some kind of rhetorical fog
> that envelops us every time we bomb someone?
>
> As usual, the first reports of the US missile attacks were covered without
> the slightest suggestion that innocents were about to die in the country we
> plan to "save''. Whether the Taliban are lying or telling the truth about 30
> dead in Kabul, do we reporters really think that all our bombs fall on the
> guilty and not the innocent? Do we think that all the food we are reported
> to be dropping is going to fall around the innocent and not the Taliban? I
> am beginning to wonder whether we have not convinced ourselves that wars -
> our wars - are movies. The only Hollywood film ever made about Afghanistan
> was a Rambo epic in which Sylvester Stallone taught the Afghan mujahedin how
> to fight the Russian occupation, help to defeat Soviet troops and won the
> admiration of an Afghan boy. Are the Americans, I wonder, somehow trying to
> actualise the movie?
>
> But look at the questions we're not asking. Back in 1991 we dumped the cost
> of the Gulf War - billions of dollars of it - on Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
> But the Saudis and Kuwaitis are not going to fund our bombing this time
> round. So who's going to pay? When? How much will it cost us - and I mean
> us? The first night of bombing cost, so we are told, at least $2m, I suspect
> much more. Let us not ask how many Afghans that would have fed - but do
> let's ask how much of our money is going towards the war and how much
> towards humanitarian aid.
>
> Bin Laden's propaganda is pretty basic. He films his own statements and
> sends one of his henchmen off to the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. No vigorous
> questioning of course, just a sermon. So far we've not seen any video clips
> of destroyed Taliban equipment, the ancient Migs and even older Warsaw Pact
> tanks that have been rusting across Afghanistan for years. Only a sequence
> of pictures - apparently real - of bomb damage in a civilian area of Kabul.
> The Taliban have kept reporters out. But does that mean we have to balance
> this distorted picture with our own half-truths?
>
> So hard did a colleague of mine try, in a radio interview the other day, to
> unlink the bin Laden phenomenon from the West's baleful history in the
> Middle East that he seriously suggested that the attacks were timed to fall
> on the anniversary of the defeat of Muslim forces at the gates of Vienna in
> 1683. Unfortunately, the Poles won their battle against the Turks on 12, not
> 11, September. But when the terrifying details of the hijacker Mohamed
> Atta's will were published last week, dated April 1996, no one could think
> of any event that month that might have propelled Atta to his murderous
> behaviour.
>
> Not the Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon, nor the Qana massacre by
> Israeli artillery of 106 Lebanese civilians in a UN base, more than half of
> them children. For that's what happened in April, 1996. No, of course that
> slaughter is not excuse for the crimes against humanity in the United States
> last month. But isn't it worth just a little mention, just a tiny
> observation, that an Egyptian mass-murderer-to-be wrote a will of chilling
> suicidal finality in the month when the massacre in Lebanon enraged Arabs
> across the Middle East?
>
> Instead of that, we're getting Second World War commentaries about western
> military morale. On the BBC we had to listen to how it was "a perfect
> moonless night for the air armada'' to bomb Afghanistan. Pardon me? Are the
> Germans back at Cap Gris Nez? Are our fighter squadrons back in the skies of
> Kent, fighting off the Dorniers and Heinkels? Yesterday, we were told on one
> satellite channel of the "air combat'' over Afghanistan. A lie, of course.
> The Taliban had none of their ageing Migs aloft. There was no combat.
>
> Of course, I know the moral question. After the atrocities in New York, we
> can't "play fair" between the ruthless bin Laden and the West; we can't make
> an equivalence between the mass-murderer's innocence and the American and
> British forces who are trying to destroy the Taliban.
>
> But that's not the point. It's our viewers and readers we've got to "play
> fair" with. Must we, because of our rage at the massacre of the innocents in
> America, because of our desire to cowtow to the elderly "terrorism experts",
> must we lose all our critical faculties? Why at least not tell us how these
> "terrorism experts" came to be so expert? And what are their connections
> with dubious intelligence services?
>
> In some cases, in America, the men giving us their advice on screen are the
> very same operatives who steered the CIA and the FBI into the greatest
> intelligence failure in modern history: the inability to uncover the plot,
> four years in the making, to destroy the lives of almost 6,000 people.
> President Bush says this is a war between good and evil. You are either with
> us or against us. But that's exactly what bin Laden says. Isn't it worth
> pointing this out and asking where it leads?
>
>
>
>
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