Avoiding reality?

Thursday, June 19, 2008

MUCH OF THE MEDIA SEEMED ODDLY taken by surprise at the recent build-up of significant peace moves in the Middle East, peaking with yesterday’s ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas (a Hamas security detail, left, drilling in Gaza).

US press attention has been largely directed elsewhere, mainly domestically; not least on Mid-West floodings … the Presidential race where bottom-feeding scurrility is starting to play its inevitable part … and the sudden death of one of the media’s own, a much-regarded political ringmaster on TV.)

 

Meanwhile the Gaza ceasefire – negotiated with Egypt’s help, and never exactly a secret, thanks to the state news agency MENA and other Egyptian sources - came about in an atmosphere already well-conditioned by peace talks taking place between Israel and Syria (albeit indirectly, through Turkey as intermediary). Further, the Israeli Prime Minister's press spokesman Mark Regev has long hinted (yesterday confirming it during a mobile phone-call in his car with Bloomberg News) that negotiations were being considered with Lebanon's heavily Hezbollah-influenced government.

 

American newsrooms’ foreign desks can too often, unsurprisingly, allow their calendars and agendas to reflect and be swayed by the US State Department's.

 

And State can often work (especially as directed by this White House) on the assumption that what State doesn’t particularly want to happen in the world isn’t really happening, or certainly doesn’t deserve as much attention as what it wants to happen. On the Arab-Israeli question, the Administration as a whole has not been encouraging close attention, not even in the wake of a Presidential visit there last month.

 

THE MEDIA BEAT was then having some fun, I acknowledge, at the expense of George W Bush’s unlikely role as Blogger-in-Chief, especially when he abandoned his online Middle East diary entries, called “Trip Notes”, which he’d supposedly begun posting to the Web on an earlier journey. It was of course just mischievous to imagine then what Bush might have written from Air Force One as it took off from Jerusalem in May – in lines like “as soon as I leave, Israel's suddenly talking with that terrorist state Syria, even though we told 'em not to."

 

But the serious truth remains, that Bush and his legacy-managers - what a horrible, embarrassing job, you might think, and you'd be right - are stuck with a (not unfamiliar) contradiction. There’s a mismatch once again between what they want the world to think (and how they brief journalists in hope of achieving that) and what’s actually going on.

 

“We don’t talk to terrorists” is the un-shifting baseline of their rhetoric, and as Bush himself told Rupert Murdoch’s TV outlet Sky News when in Britain last weekend:

 

“I want it to be said about George W Bush that when he finished his presidency, he looked in the mirror at a man who did not compromise his core principles for the sake of politics”.

 

And yet here is George W Bush’s main ally (and biggest US aid recipient) in the region arranging a truce with its Hamas enemies (America’s enemies too, of course) and in all probability completing a deal with them to swap prisoners. Add to this of course the fact that this same Bush ally is now, with a maybe overdue sense of realism, also working out a new arrangement on the Golan Heights, which requires cooperation with the same Syrian regime that the Bushites constantly decry as a state sponsor of terrorism (and who would argue that it’s not?)

 

It now seems a long, long time -  though it’s less than four years - since that still-unidentified, male, senior White House aide could blithely tell writer Ron Suskind (then examining the Administration for the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine, but formerly a senior Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Price of Loyalty, about W’s first, woe-begone Treasury Secretary) that the Bush team was simply not part of “what we call the reality-based community”. And that by contrast, indeed, ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”.

 

Maybe that, afer all, will be the lasting Bush legacy, or at least his epitaph.

 

  

 

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A FURTHER REALITY BEING - IF NOT PERHAPS DENIED - CONSIDERABLY overlooked is in another global trouble-spot.  Not many front-page inches, or top-of-the-bulletin minutes, have been devoted, until very recently, to the serious events in southern Afghanistan.

 

It’s against a background of well-megaphoned appeals by the US for its NATO allies (besides the pretty constantly supportive UK) to contribute more to sustaining the coalition-installed President Hamid Karzai’s government, that Taliban fighters have been making some alarmingly assertive gains in the historically resonant Arghandab Valley, near (remarkably near) Khandahar, the country’s second city and main southern center.

 

To repeat the journalistically obvious, this is the same Taliban, remember, whom the US and allies successfully bombed out of running the rogue state (and Al Qaeda-supporting haven) of Afghanistan, in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. They’ve been allowed to regroup, in the view of many observers, ever since the Bush Administration took its eye off the real target, and redirected its military attention to Iraq.

 

Again, as with news of the Gaza truce, the signs of this new development were in the Afghan wind for some time. Local orchard workers had been warned that Taliban landmines were being planted, and then last Friday came the brazen busting open of the area’s Sarposa Prison, which held Taliban prisoners as well as common criminals. (Two years ago, by the way, Canadian troops with NATO were reporting that Sarposa’s poorly-built walls were all too vulnerable to attack). A massive Taliban truck bomb (picture, above right), two individual suicide bombers, and scores of riflemen on motorbikes proved very effective in freeing 400 militants during a 30-minute operation. The major NATO base at Khandahar Airfield, some 18 miles away, couldn’t get forces to the prison in time.

 

Now reporters have had to scramble for eyewitness reports of the intense fighting that was inevitably to ensue, for possession of the villages that curve to the north of Khandahar. By last night, in the tried and not-to-be-trusted formulae of battlefield news-management, Taliban military spokesmen were claiming they had captured ten villages, and killed 16 Afghan government troops. The government meanwhile claimed to have taken back four of the villages and killed 36 Taliban fighters, but with the loss of just two of its own servicemen.

 

Observers of war with long memories will recall that this same territory was a bedrock in the 1980s for mujahedeen resistance to the Soviet occupation – and was never fully subjugated.

 

Today NATO forces and more government troops from the capital are being marshaled for a fresh onslaught on the insurgents, some 4000 local residents are reported to be fleeing their homes, and correspondents are gearing up for a long and bitter battle to follow. 

 

The price of having looked away is proving very costly.