>Since Peter K has bolted, I suppose someone has to toss this dead
>fish on the table:
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><<http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12773688&method=full&siteid=50143>http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12773688&method=full&siteid=50143>
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>Robert Fisk is in Baghdad Hitch -- why aren't you?
A few words from the former Christopher Hitchens, a leading exemplar of the "cretinization of the mass media" that he condemned 12 years ago.
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The Nation - March 11, 1991
MINORITY REPORT Christopher Hitchens
On December 28 last, I pulled a long face as I cut out and kept a front-page story by the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, the sagacious and well-connected Jack Nelson. The article concerned the coming war as it would be fought at home. It reported a conversation with "two officials involved with Bush in Persian Gulf strategy." I cut it out because I thought I might be needing it:
"The officials said Bush assumes that the American public will be mainly concerned about the number of US. casualties, not the tens of thousands of Iraqis who stand to die or be maimed in a massive air assault, and that even the killing of thousands of civilians - including women and children-probably would not undermine American support for the war effort."
As I write, the opinion polls show that a well-fed public more or less believes that there was a mass suicide in a Baghdad bunker, orchestrated with the fell purpose of making George look, and Barbara feel, bad. This filthy plot, which unfolded just a day short of qualifying to call itself the St. Valentine's Day Provocation, was thwarted by American resolve. Three days before it, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell were photographed as they wrote jaunty inscriptions on the casings of aboutto-be-used bombs. In the hours after it, Marlin Fitzwater opined solemnly that certain Iraqis had a different attitude toward death. (Do you notice that this usually means that the speaker has a different attitude toward the death of Iraqis?)
Of course, from the renowned "progressive" and humanistic viewpoint long espoused by this magazine, it is regrettable that George Bush can be as right in his bet on public opinion as he was in the Willie Horton matter. But if we are honest. we will admit that we already knew that. To possess an empire, it is necessary to be tough and resilient. The public must in principle be ready at all times to display an unflinching stoicism, a stem willingness to endure the suffering of complete strangers. Without this resolute quality, the entire concept of "peace through strength" would become a hollow thing. The contemptible "Peace movement" had even conceded this in advance by agreeing with the White House managers that any speech not containing the disgusting words "body bag" would put a needless strain on cognitive capacity among the consumers.
But the coarsening of domestic public opinion, like the cretinization of the mass media, will serve only in the short term. There is stiff the arena of politics to be contested. After all, if you had asked the yellow-ribbon sob sisters ten years ago whether they would expect a United States expedition to the Persian Gulf to risk everything in order to restore Iran to its position as master of the region, they might well have answered no. Yet that is precisely what is now happening. Having relied on a policy of divide-and-rule in the region, Washington must not be surprised if there is also a faction fight within its own policy establishment, a fight that occurs at a level of much greater sophistication than the peaceniks can boast.
Currently, the clear winners are the Iran/contra veterans who always based their strategy on a triad consisting of the Iranian "moderates:' the Israeli right and the Saudi royal family. Oliver North must be giggling even more than he spontaneously does when he sees Teheran propose itself as "mediator" and prepare, with Israel and the Saudis, to reap the benefits from a shattered Iraq. Henry Kissinger, who has also been a longtime pro-Iranian, can likewise award himself an extra smirk. But it's interesting to see who dissents. There are still those in the nation's capital who know that you have got to have some Arabs, even some nationalist ones, however unpalatable the prospect may be, and who tremble at the unforeseen outcome of this war as it affects America's Arab sphere.
Probably the best known of these is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has been arguing strenuously that we had better not destroy or eviscerate Iraq since we may need it again if only (yellow ribbons please note) as a counterweight to Iran. On a recent Crossfire show he went so far as to say that the whole war could have been avoided if the Administration had not sabotaged the Algerian peace initiative. At this there was some shuffling of the feet among the State Department "insiders."
Algeria, after all, is not one of those disposable towel-head nations that, like Qaddafi's Libya, are on the outs with us one day and in the fold the next. It was the Algerians who brokered the release of the U.S. Embassy hostages in Teheran. It was the Algerians who mediated the Shatt-al-Arab dispute between Iraq and Iran, losing in the process their own Foreign Minister, Mohammed Benyahia, who was shot down over Iranian airspace by persons unknown. Algeria hosted the Palestinian summit in 1988, which extended de facto recognition to the Jewish state.
When the record of this contrived war is told in all its discreditable origins, the insulting treatment accorded President Bendjedid of Algeria will form an important element in the story. At an early stage Algiers had sent its Foreign Minister to Baghdad and arranged terms of mutuality-an Iraqi commitment to leave Kuwait if the army was not attacked from the air or the land after doing so - that have formed the basis of all subsequent proposals. Algerian diplomats have told me that they do not consider the question of Palestine to be "organically linked" to the question of Kuwait (as indeed it is not) but that a few gestures from the United States about Palestinian rights, to which it was in any case committed in advance, might not have been misinterpreted. Yet Bendjedid, considered the Arab world's senior mediator, was denied the chance to land his plane in Saudi Arabia and was cold-shouldered in all his efforts to visit Washington. He recently told the Algerian Parliament that he felt rebuffed and embarrassed.
This retrospective vindication of Oliver North - the national security extremists in Israel inviting the pro-expulsion Molodet Party into the government; the mullahs in Teheran waiting for their share; the House of Saud resplendent - will be remembered in the Arab world even longer than the mass graves in Baghdad.
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The Nation - March 25, 1991
MINORITY REPORT Christopher Hitchens
The future lay with Major Kitchener and his Maxim Nordenfeld guns... At any rate it had all ended very happily - in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.
--The End of General Gordon" in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians
In their anxiety to do nothing that can be construed as reminiscent of Indochina, US. military authorities are avoiding anything in the nature of a "body count" for Operation Desert Storm. Saudi sources have spoken of Iraqi casualties, for soldiers only, in the range of 80,000 to 100,000. Other estimates put the toll as low as 50,000. We may-since nobody's counting-never know. And it will be for the Iraqi people to decide how many of those deaths are on what might be called Saddam Hussein's conscience. What interests me, very much, is the butcher's bill presented to Iraq after its acceptance of U.N. Resolution 660 and its offer to withdraw from Kuwait under international supervision.
That offer was made through Soviet mediation on February 21. On February 26 the following dispatch was filed from the deck of the U.S.S. Ranger, under the byline of Randall Richard of the Providence Journal:
Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck.
The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice, the Rockeye cluster bomb, because it took too long to load. Describing the scene on the jammed roads out of Kuwait, pilot Brian Kasperbauer exulted: "This was the road to Daytona Beach at Spring Break; just bumper to bumper. Spring Break's over." Others spoke of the massacre in a predetermined vernacular, calling it a "turkey shoot" and referring to "fish in a barrel:' So it seems odd that the President who ordered the assault should now say, with that enthusiasm of his that seems so infectious, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." I'd say that Lieutenant Kasperbauer had the symptoms of the Vietnam syndrome pretty comprehensively.
The President should have a sharp word to say to Army Sgt. Roy Brown, who was on the ground at Mutlaa at the scene that the pilots had created. "I got a little bit sick when I saw this," he said. "This" was mass burial by the roadside and heaps of bodies. Pull yourself together, Sergeant Brown! This is no time for sickly introspection and Vietnam masochism! Remember Admiral Dewey at Manila Bay in 1898. "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley," he remarked before sending the Spanish fleet to the bottom in a leisurely fashion: what might be called the Philippines syndrome. As General Neal coyly allowed in his post-turkey shoot briefing of March 1, "We might have created a picture that they had a better capability than they really possessed." No doubt.
On the night of the Soviet-brokered Iraqi acceptance of Resolution 660, 1 had a television debate with Senator John McCain, the Republican hawk from Arizona and (as well as leading Keating-fancier) a prominent enemy of the Viet. nam syndrome. He thought the Administration could, and probably should, accept the withdrawal offer. So did the moderators, Patrick Buchanan and Michael Kinsley. So let it be remembered that on the eye of the turkey shoot the political heirs of Barry Goldwater, Joseph McCarthy and Adlai Stevenson all thought that a solution short of slaughter was possible and desirable. I felt surreal and lonely as I argued that the Bush-Quayle team would reject the deal. Kuwait was a sideshow to them. They wanted to give the troops some desertfighting experience (after all, America is going to be in this region for a long time to come) and they wanted, in Bush's words, to show that "what we say goes."
It now seems that on their way out of Kuwait the Iraqi forces indulged in an additional saturnalia of looting and mayhem. Why should this in retrospect license the turkey shoot? If they had been withdrawing under international guarantee, how would they have dared to behave in this fashion? But having offered to withdraw, and been told that, no, they had to be driven out, what disincentive existed? If Bush had cared for Kuwait and the Kuwaitis (and the families of the few slain American soldiers), might he not have tried to spare them this final paroxysm? Instead, Iraqis were told that withdrawal was not good enough because they had also to accept all UN. resolutions enforcing 660 (such as Resolution 665, which calls on member states to allow the inspection of ships' cargoes, or Resolution 674, which calls for the release of foreign nationals and the protection of diplomatic and consular facilities, or Resolution 677, which mandates the Secretary General to safeguard a smuggled copy of Kuwait's population register).
I look forward to the editions of Sesame Street and other special programming in place of cartoon fare in which American children will have the turkey shoot explained to them. I look forward to more statements from American peaceniks explaining how it is that they support the troops but not the war. I especially look forward to fresh Augustinian tautologies from our churchmen about proportionality in a just war. But perhaps we may be relieved of the necessity for these reassurances. After all, if no misgivings are expressed, where is the need for rationalization?
I began with Lytton Strachey because this year of grace 1991 is the year in which the United States has become the direct inheritor of the British Empire in the Middle East. From ruling by unsavory proxies (such as, before August 2 last, the vile Saddam himself) we have moved into a period of direct engagement and permanent physical presence. Moments like this are traditionally marked by some condign lesson being meted out to the locals. The fantastic, exemplary bloodletting that took place after the ostensible issue of the conflict had been decided was in that tradition. I can hardly wait for the parades. And I now know what the boring catch phrase of the day really means. It means an Order imposed by the New World.