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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (87128)	3/27/2003 10:18:34 PM
From: Ron	Respond to of 281500

MEDIA WAR: OBSESSED WITH TACTICS AND TECHNOLOGY By Norman Solomon Two months ago, when I wandered through a large market near the center of Baghdad, the day seemed like any other and no other. A vibrant pulse of humanity throbbed in the shops and on the streets. Meanwhile, a fuse was burning; lit in Washington, it would explode here. Now, with American troops near Baghdad, the media fixations are largely tactical. "A week of airstrikes, including the most concentrated precision hits in U.S. military history, has left tons of rubble and deep craters at hundreds of government buildings and military facilities around Iraq but has yielded little sign of a weakening in the regimes will to resist," the Washington Post reported on March 26. Shrewd tactics and superlative technology were supposed to do the grisly trick. But military difficulties have set off warning bells inside the U.S. media echo chamber. In contrast, humanitarian calamities are often rendered as PR problems, whether the subject is the cutoff of water in Basra or the missiles that kill noncombatants in Baghdad: The main concern is apt to be that extensive suffering and death among civilians would make the "coalition of the willing" look bad. But in spite of all the public-relations efforts on behalf of this invasion, the military forces of Washington and London remain a coalition for the killing of Iraqi people who get in the way of the righteous juggernaut. Despite the prevalent media fixations, the great moral questions about this war have not been settled -- on the contrary, they intensify with each passing day -- no matter what gets onto TV screens and front pages. When U.S. missiles exploded at Iraqi government broadcast facilities Wednesday morning, it was a move to silence a regime that had been gaining ground in the propaganda struggle. Throughout the months of faux "diplomacy" and the first days of invading Iraq, the governments led by George W. Bush and Tony Blair had managed to do the nearly impossible -- make themselves look even more mendacious than the bloody dictator Saddam Hussein. On the home front, most U.S. news outlets are worshiping the nations high-tech arsenal. It was routine the other day when the Washington Post printed a large color diagram under the headline "A Rugged Bird." Unrelated to ornithology, the diagram annotated key features of the AH-64 Apache -- not a bird but a helicopter that excels as a killing machine. We're supposed to adore the Pentagons prowess; the deadlier the better. Transfixed with tactical maneuvers and overall strategies inside Iraq, media outlets rarely mention that this entire war by the U.S. government and its British accomplice is a flagrant violation of international law. Only days before the United States launched the attack, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said that the invasion -- lacking a new Security Council resolution to authorize it -- would violate the U.N. Charter. In the capital city of the world's only superpower, the Post is cheering on the slaughter. "Ultimately the monument that matters will be victory and a sustained commitment to a rebuilt Iraq," the newspaper concluded. Its assessment came in an editorial that mentioned the pain -- but not the anger -- of family members grieving the loss of Kendall D. Waters-Bey, a Marine from Baltimore who died soon after the war began. The Post's editorial quoted the bereaved father as saying that "the word sorrow cannot fill my pain." But the editorial did not include a word of the response from the dead mans oldest sister, Michelle Waters, who faulted the U.S. government for starting the war and said: "Its all for nothing. That war could have been prevented. Now, were out of a brother. Bush is not out of a brother. We are." The Baltimore Sun reported that Michelle Waters spoke those words "in the living room of the family home, tears running down her cheeks." A week into this war, CNN's White House correspondent John King was in sync with many other journalists as he noted criticisms of the administrations "war strategy." The media anxiety level has been rising, but the voiced concerns are overwhelmingly about tactics. A military triumph may not be so easy after all. j Today, I took another look at quotations that Id jotted at meetings with Iraqi officials during visits to Baghdad last fall and winter. (The quotes are included in "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didnt Tell You," a book I co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich.) In mid-September, the elderly speaker of Iraqs national assembly, Saadoun Hammadi, told our delegation of Americans: "The U.S. administration is now speaking war. We are not going to turn the other cheek. We are going to fight. Not only our armed forces will fight. Our people will fight." Three months later, at a Dec. 14 meeting, Iraqs deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz said: "Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, including Americans -- because if they want to take over oil in Iraq, they have to fight for it, not by missiles and by airplanes ... they have to bring troops and fight the Iraqi people and the Iraqi army. And that will be costly." The fuse lit in Washington is now burning in Baghdad. Our tax dollars are incinerating Iraqi troops and civilians. No matter how long this war takes, it is profoundly wrong.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (87128)	3/28/2003 9:33:13 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

How would you characterize the difference in the way French went about their war on terror and the way US is going about it? Internally I mean. That's an interesting question, but I'm not sure the answer is completely applicable to the US situation. France is a fairly small country compared to the US with a more centralized government (made possible by the country's modest size), and they have a large Maghrebin population. The terrorism they suffered when I was there came directly from Algeria, just across the Mediterranean with recruits from French housing projects. The French, having lived through WWII, and having had to pull out of Algeria, and having had other terrorism affairs already (there's ever present Corsica, the ETA Basque separatists, there had been Action Directe, etc) had some experience in dealing with such things. The population was very upset, believe me, but people didn't go nuts with backlash for all that. I think they did about as well as they could do, by making modifications in public places like Metro trains, and above all a careful stretch of detective work to identify where the bombers came from. The only reason the authors of the bombing were not promptly taken into custody once identified was thanks to the British, whose legal system was adroitly used by lawyers to prevent extradition and trial. Certainly, some things were just for show - armed soldiers in the Printemps department store aren't going to prevent terrorism - but they handled it more or less sensibly, there really was less of the comical "zero tolerance" stories we have here. But not everything we're doing is incompetent either. It's just that some things, like the installation of radiation detectors in NYC, or shifting border patrol work from drug runners to look for terrorists don't make a lot of news. For Iraq, I don't believe Saddam is very directly linked with the attacks against us. We clearly had good cause to clean out Afghanistan. In the case of the French Algerian terrorists, there was no group of "Taliban" in Algeria openly flaunting the French government and nobody as well financed as bin Laden, so questions of military action abroad didn't apply. Algeria itself was already in the middle of genuine civil war, with a death toll many, many times that between Israel and Palestinians. I don't know what the French would do if any of the Corsican bombings lead to a high death toll. That could get ugly, but luckily there haven't been any disasters, mostly "symbolic" attacks like destroying the town hall in Bordeaux in the middle of the night to give Alain Juppé the finger when he was prime minister (and simultaneously mayor of Bordeaux...)