Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Issue No. 35 October 14 - 20, 2001 Quezon City, Philippines |
Lost in the rhetorical fog of war BY
ROBERT FISK
Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index 'The
Taliban have kept reporters out; does that mean we have to balance this
distorted picture with our own half-truths?' 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? Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index We want to know what you think of this article.
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