From: NY Transfer News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 17:24:27 -0400 (EDT)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (NY Transfer News)
Subject: [CubaNews] Bush Crusade: A Festival of Lies

Via NY Transfer News * www.blythe.org * All the News That Doesn't Fit

The Guardian - October 8, 2001

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,565214,00.html


THIS WAR IS A FESTIVAL OF LIES AND THEY WILL ONLY GET WORSE

Anything we see of the impact of US strikes
will be strictly controlled

Peter Preston 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

So it begins. The flashes of light in the night sky, the distant
explosions, the appearance of a "relentless" George Bush talking
command and control. We slowly remember what war is like; but we need
to remember, too, that truth is the first casualty of conflict, that
the briefers, bureaucrats and politicians who act as reasonably
"reliable sources" in peace are operating now under different house
rules. That they have become wholly unreliable by design.

Sit back and apply commonsense to the tales of the first 26 days.
Troops massing at this or that frontier post. Air strikes "imminent"
(three weeks ago) or "within 48 hours" (eight days ago). SAS teams
already staging search-and-destroy missions inside Afghanistan.
Commonsense asks a difficult question. Would anyone with braid on his
shoulders, anyone who really knows, tell a journalist such things if
they were true? Why not send Osama bin Laden a postcard instead?

Those of us who yomped through the Ministry of Defence in the
Falklands soon got the changed hang of things. Top chaps in dark
suits would summon up the full authority of their office and lie like
troopers. Who, on reflection, could blame them? General Galtieri took
the Guardian and the Telegraph on subscription. If journalists needed
scoops, they'd better be fed some duff ones.

The Falklands war was more than a distant side-show. It hugely
impressed the Pentagon. Ensure that reporters are cooped up on
aircraft carriers or minded by MoD male nurses far from the front
and, as long as you keep decent clamps on back at the political
ranch, there is total information control. Grenada and Panama proved
the point and the Gulf was its apotheosis, war watched from afar by
video screen. Globalisation meant being further away from, not
nearer, the action. More space, less truth.

How, then, will this latest, very curious conflict be played out?
Pull down the handbooks from their dusty shelves and start pondering.
For we are going by the book.

The start of the horror - the destruction of the twin towers was
- uncontrolled disaster: for the thousands of innocents who died,
for dreams of security and illusions of intelligence. The world
watched in stunned fascination. The world was out of control. One
task in the days since September 11 has been to regain equilibrium.

The building of this fabled international coalition against terrorism
may or may not prove vital in the end. But, shuttling from summit to
summit, it has certainly filled in the time while the military
mammoths got their lugubrious act together. There's been a Gulf-style
pause. Now, as bombing begins, we can begin to sense a pattern.

Would Galtieri pull his troops off the Falklands as the task force
sailed ever closer? He had that chance. He failed to take it. Would
Saddam quit Kuwait as billions of dollars rolled into the desert? He
had the chance. Will the Taliban give up Bin Laden and save their
regime? That, obviously, has been the descant of the past couple of
weeks. The answer is now written in the night over Kabul.

Meanwhile the control freaks have had their thinking caps on. The
world's correspondents (one factor) are there in force and deployed:
Uzbekistan, Quetta, Peshawar, and the Afghan enclave where the
Northern Alliance rules. But, save for the deeply unfortunate Ms
Ridley and a handful of Afghan agency reporters, they aren't in
Taliban country, let alone camped outside Bin Laden's rural retreat.
Suicidal peril and impossibility co-joined.

Better still, the Taliban themselves seem to be PR mutts. They can't
field a Tariq Aziz figure looking grave, just a deputy ambassador in
Islamabad looking perplexed. They have already (losing Bin Laden,
then miraculously finding him again) blown what credibility they had.
In their self-imposed isolation, they won't be able to take western
camera teams to inspect any civilian casualties of air attack. No
wrecked Baghdad hospitals; no Serbian buses burned on a bridge. They
are sitting, silent targets. That won't stop protest waves round the
Arab world today, nor will it necessarily catch Bin Laden. But it
does mean that the only clear TV evidence of effectiveness, however
carefully selected, will come from the Americans and the Brits.
Happenstance has played to the handbook rules.

What can go wrong? Plenty, naturally - even apart from bombs gone
astray. Bin Laden himself, as yesterday's television interview
showed, has a malign gift for PR. He could stage a dismaying series
of catch-me-if-you-can for the cameras. Proof of his death or capture
will need to be absolute before the briefers celebrate. More
terrorist onslaughts are high on the agenda. More American lives in
places like Saudi Arabia lie on the line. Hostage-taking (as Jimmy
Carter might add) could wreck every equation.

Even so, because restraint equals thinking time, a measure of control
has returned. The war of perception, vital after September 11, is on
a more even keel. The perception is that governments still govern and
can seem to call the shots. The HQ hope must be that some finite
battle in an unseen field far away will soon be enough to end any
shooting war and, with a little help from the Pakistani secret
service, leave al-Qaida headless.

But then the dissonances of difference begin to impinge. The FBI and
CIA, caught ludicrously short by 19 men with penknives, are obliged
to exalt the potency of Bin Laden's network. Poison gas, germ
warfare, nukes? Some or all of these visions may have a sliver of
reality to them, but they also conveniently turn a low-tech enemy
into a Bond villain like Ernst Stavro Blofeld. (Indeed, yesterday's
Sunday Times did just that.)

You may call this reacting to a challenge, and so it is. But it is
also, in the nature of spin, the inflation of the adversary who
wounded you. Warnings of risk from Scotland Yard become as fearsome
as Met Office gale forecasts after 1987. No danger knowingly
understressed. No briefer, by training or profession, is more usually
unreliable than a secret agent covering his back, and the tale he
tells is likely to be self-serving tosh.

The trouble is that, even as the jets go in, this is also an
amorphous war of jaw-jaw. The braided ones, clutching their handbook,
may have devised a scenario they have a prospect of commanding and
controlling. We will be, as we were last night, distant spectators of
this enterprise. We can only hope it succeeds, and hope as well that
we can maintain a decent perspective, a balance of understanding. But
that needs thought and fact as well as cheers. Keep calm, or at
least, calmer. But believe nothing implicitly, especially from the
Blofeld blowhards. Travel carefully and carry a big waste basket.

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