We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Our Man in Basra (now back in the UK) has some thoughts on the difference between how the media reported Gulf War 1991 and how they reported Gulf War 2003 and why that matters.
During the Gulf War of 1991, media reporting went something like this: About a month of showing pictures, entirely controlled by the US military, of Allied airplanes flying over Iraq, followed by the announcement by General Schwarzkopf that the war was over and we had won.
Although they had their suspicions, none of the journalists, all kept behind the lines in Riyadh, knew that Allied troops had crossed the border into Iraq until three days after the ground offensive had started, the Republican Guard in Kuwait had been virtually destroyed, and Schwarzkopf announced victory. This severely limited the opportunity for the media to criticise the conduct of the ground war.
The above is a simplification, but it covers in essence the way the media war was fought in 1991 – by the journalists out there, by the military out there, and as it was seen by everyone else on their TVs. Naturally, the military regarded this as a great success. Equally naturally, the media regarded it as a disaster. The viewing public generally seemed satisfied, bar a few dedicated peaceniks, who wanted pictures of military screw-ups.
Two factors therefore set the context for the reporting of Gulf War 2003. First, the media were determined not to allow the military to keep them away from ‘the story’, the way they were kept away in 1991. → Continue reading: The media in the Gulf
It is a beautiful day here in London, the sun is shining, I am looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend in the countryside. So this story comes along to make me lose a bit more sleep at night.
Whatever you think about George W. Bush’s pre-emption doctrine – and I confess to being a bit more doubtful than some more hawkish folk – this is worrying. Iran may still be some way off from developing nuclear weapons, but it appears the threat is getting closer. Stay tuned.
Another ‘truth’ constantly parroted at us is bin Laden would never work with Saddam. As with the bin Laden was trained by the CIA meme, it can be difficult to remember or find the refuting evidence when you need it. Fortunately, someone has done it for us.
It is a good summary, but Richard Miniter (author of Losing bin Laden) left out at least one item.
‘Our man in Basra’ is back in the UK, with some first hand stories and a different perspective on what is going on both in Iraq and in the media. His first post (out of three planned so far) is about his view of the media and why they report the events in Iraq the way they do.
Most people have an implicit, nebulous, and generally unthought through understanding of the media and what their job is. It has to do something with getting the facts and reporting the truth or at least the reality to the best of their abilities. The media is a sort of civilian intelligence agency. This is how the military, in particular, view them and when the media are not reporting the facts, they are seen as failing in their job.
The media do not see their job in this light at all. Their job is to find and sell stories. Of course, these should not be completely divorced from the facts, but facts are merely the raw materials of the stories. More importantly, the media do not feel obliged to report all the facts, especially in a place like Iraq, where there is either very intense competition among reporters and therefore not much time to investigate the story in detail. Alternatively, the interest is fading a bit, so it is not worth investing the time. Either way, the result is the same.
What has become obvious to me while in Basra and helped me understand the media better is that they have now decided what their story is in Iraq. They have signed up this story as their product before they even arrive. They are not there to research ‘the facts’ – they are merely looking to illustrate their story. → Continue reading: The media story
Samizdata.net often makes references to the importance of the ‘meta-context’ in explaining and determining events around us. A question to consider: What would happen if the mainstream media were somehow forced to refer to Saddam’s old regime by its own official title, which is The Arab National Socialist Party or Arab NAZI Party? What a thought…
Many of us are aware bin Laden was not US funded. Fewer of us have the information at hand to prove it when faced with an adamant statement that “the US funded and trained bin Laden!”.
Osama paid his own way. Through his wealthy Saudi friends he helped finance a jihad against the Russians by forces entirely seperate from other, less religiously fanatical, guerrilla forces. Even those forces were not funded directly by the CIA. The money went to Pakistan and the arms went in via the Pakistani ISI. In hindsight this had some some serious downsides. It made the ISI nearly independent of the central government. Later the ISI did indeed back the Taliban during the post-Russian Kabul free-for-all.
But not bin Laden. The linked story by Richard Miniter (author of Losing bin Laden) has an extra nice touch to it. This bin Laden quote:
“We were never, at any time, friends of the Americans. We knew that the Americans supported the Jews in Palestine and that they are our enemies.”
comes from an article written by… Robert Fisk.
That lonely, marginalised, oppressed siren voice in the wilderness John Pilger has managed to escape from the daggers of the vicious McCarthyite witch-hunt that has cowed so many into a silence that has prevented them from speaking the truth about America and the war in Iraq.
This brave, determined peace-campaigner has finally succeeded in casting off the shackles of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that has, hitherto, so ruthlessly crushed his dissent with a one-hour television special screened earlier tonight on ITV1, Britain’s most popular TV channel. There is no link here, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to go and look for one.
Neither could I actually be bothered to watch the programme. I have been exposed to enough of Pilger’s toxic, manipulative propoganda to know in advance exactly the kind of things he was going to be whining about. In fact, I think I can even summarise them:
Bush. Warmongers. Neo-Conservatives. Oil. Conspiracy. World domination. Capitalism. Globalisation. Unfair trade. Bush. Oil. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. CIA. Mossad. Inequality. Poverty. Despair. Hopelessness. Arms trade. Environment. Sharon. Zionist thugs. Oppression. Cruelty. Palestinians. Bush. Oil. Blair. NATO. Poodles. American bullying. Human rights. Amnesty International. Unilateral. Nuremburg trials. Nazis. Aggression. Bush regime. Conquer the world. Crush dissent. United Nations is our only hope.
And those were the good bits!
In the heated discussion prompted by my statement that “I hope we win”, commenter Julian Morrison posted the following comment, much of which I disagree with but which struck me as worth “promoting” to a post to give it better visibility and its own discussion. I have removed the quotes from other comments in the discussion so it can be read as a stand-alone.
Terrorism is a tool to influence governments, via scaring the electorate. In the absence of governments to scare, it would be a pointless tactic, just stupid and non-effectual murder. By analogy with the famous quote, “terrorism is the continuation of lobbying by other means”.
There is no war.
I hear “terrorists”, but all I see is (a) “clerics” with more mouth than sense, but more sense than balls, failing to convince the rest of Britain’s moslems to rise up in Jihad (they would rather sell you groceries) (b) the security state having a big happy “who needed civil liberties anyway” party.
The western world is not under attack by moslems. It is, at most, “under rant” by a few hotheads, if that’s even a phrase.
There are no WMDs. Iraq didn’t have any. The terrorists don’t have any. They’re a bunch of illiterate backwater arab yokels. They wouldn’t know a nuke from a microwave oven. The nearest they come to microbiology is the infestations upon their own scabrous hides.
If there were real terrorists in Britain or the USA, then they wouldn’t need WMDs. They could drive either country into a blue shivering funk by randomly suicide-machinegunning a few crowded malls, while screaming “allahu akbar!” Far more bang for the buck. There’s nothing effectual preventing them. They haven’t. They don’t exist.
9/11 wasn’t indicative of a national malaise. It was a fluke.
James Lileks has a piece today on the war and its critics that is worth reading (scroll down a bit, although the first few paragraphs about his daughter culminate in a nice insight into diplomacy).
James can certainly speak for himself, but his point is that there is a war on, and wars are all about who wins, which means that anyone who cares about the war has to pick a side sooner or later. He hopes that we win (as do I). While it is certainly possible to criticize a war effort in order to help it succeed (and indeed, such criticism is very helpful to ensuring success), it is clear, and has been for awhile, that some critics of the war do not particularly care if we win or lose. Some are quite open about their desire for us to lose, others seem simply not to care that the result of their preferred policies is the advancement of terrorism.
Quick sample, but you really should read the whole thing:
→ Continue reading: “I hope we win”
Two problems in subdeveloped countries: dumping of subsidised argicultural produce in local markets which destroys local agriculture, and in Iraq, I am told the big bottleneck in getting electric power services restored is the looting of power cables.
I wonder how expensive this problem is in financial terms, we certainly know that power outages are a powerful symbol of the failings of the coalition forces. I wonder if we could employ one of the EU’s most wicked weapons for a good cause?
I propose the dumping of a massive copper wire mountain in Iraq and neighbouring countires. Basically troops should hand out 500 yards of copper wire to every Iraqi who asks for it, in exchange for the price of a cup of coffee. For reasons which would be obvious to any British healthcare user, there had better be a price, or demand will be unlimited. The result of such a Cable Dumping Plan would be the destruction of the black market in wire theft from power lines as there would be no effective market to sell the looted product: the looters would find undercutting the subsidized rates very hard. Even if all the looters start saving their coffee money to buy miles of cable, they are not disconnecting the power supply.
We are left with the problem of deliberate sabotage, but this can be solved by normal occupying power policing techniques. The equation is: political cost of failing to get the power working versus the economic cost of a cable dumping policy.
It is terrific news, not just for those who like his writing, but for the blogosphere in general (and therefore even for those bloggers who don’t like his writing), that Stephen Pollard has now got himself a brand spanking new blog, which really is a blog, and that it is now no harder to link to his blog postings than it is to anyone else’s, which wasn’t the case with his previous arrangement.
Consider his piece for today’s Sunday Telegraph, which he has also put up at stephenpollard.net, entitled, in his (to quote the top of the new blog) “never knowingly understated” manner, Why Israel is right to assassinate Hamas leaders.
The comparison with the IRA is entirely specious. If the IRA had espoused not merely the separation of Northern Ireland from the UK but also the murder of every Unionist and every Anglican in Great Britain, the abolition of the United Kingdom and its replacement with a Catholic state, run by the IRA and dedicated to converting the rest of the world to Catholicism by force, then there might be some merit in the comparison.
Hamas is explicit about its aims. In August 1988 it published the Islamic Covenant, which makes clear its opposition to Israel’s existence in any form. It states that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad (holy war)”. Any Muslim who leaves “the circle of struggle with Zionism” is guilty of “high treason”. It calls for the creation of an Islamic republic in Palestine to replace Israel. Muslims should “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine”.
In a statement released on May 19, after a wave of suicide murders in previous days, Hamas said: “These attacks will continue in all the territories of 1948 and 1967, and we will not stop attacking the Zionist Jewish people as long as any of them remain in our land.” A Hamas member explained to an interviewer last month that: “The Jews have destroyed your Christianity just like they are trying to destroy our Islam. You should read the words of the Prophet. Join us. We do not just want to liberate Palestine. We want all countries to live under the Caliphate. The Islamic army once reached the walls of Vienna. It will happen again.”
If Stephen Pollard were the average waffling egomaniac blogger, the fact that linking to him used to be a combination of an obstacle race and an egg-and-spoon race wouldn’t have mattered all that much. It would have been a pity, but no more than that. As it is, and quite aside from whether you happen to agree or disagree with Pollard’s attitude to all this (personally I’m pretty much in complete agreement), this is heavyweight journalism. Facts are being assembled and deployed, not just impressions or feelings. Those gruesome quotes are for real. This man is not merely clearing his throat and finding his voice. He has found his voice. And he has the regular, big-media columns, like this one, to prove it.
And now, his blog-microphone, so to speak, is also in full working order. Other Pollard pieces, not originally for a big print newspaper, can now also be linked to by the rest of the blogosphere with impunity. → Continue reading: All hail the new Stephen Pollard blog
Here’s another Rumsfeld quote, this one from his talk at the The National Press Club:
My view is — maybe it’s because I’ve been a business man for so many years, but my view is that governments can do relatively little for people, and that investment, outside investment, inside investment, people voting with their dollars that they want to make something work in a given place, is what really is the engine that drives things. Government doesn’t create the jobs, the opportunities, the wealth in our country; it doesn’t create the jobs and opportunities in most countries. Private investment does, human capital does. And that’s ultimately what will have to be the case in Iraq. Although they have the benefit of oil, and with some significant investments in their infrastructure, they could get significant increases in revenue from oil above where they currently are. But there’s no one thing that is the answer, in my view.
It’s rather hard to disagree with.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
