One particular sentence caught my eye: "Mullah Omar's apparent captivity will boost Western morale at a time when many thought that the goals of the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan were not being met."
What is this guy talking about? I'd say "Western morale" doesn't really need much boosting at the current time. Who are these "many" whose hoplessness requires that their morale be boosted, and what are these unmet goals? The toppling of the Taleban has been accomplished (when just a month ago conventional wisdom was that it would take well into the next year at least); Afghanistan is no longer a safe haven for planning and training for attacks on America and the West; the dire predictions about the destabilizing fury of the "Arab street" have fizzled in the face of the campaign's success. bin Laden is still out there, but it seems pretty clear that they'll get him, one way or another (to paraphrase the commander-in-chief.)
It's possible to quibble about the details, to worry about future problems and complications, even to wonder whether there may not be some imminent, unforeseen disaster waiting in the wings as an unintended consequence of the campaign. Perhaps bin Laden will escape to bomb another day. Perhaps a future war won't go so well. Most likely, it must be admitted, we will fall somewhat short of fulfilling Bush's hyperbolic pledge to "rid the world of all evil doers." Yet notwithstanding the fact that winning the Afghanistan campaign fails to solve all of America's problems in one fell swoop, the Times reporter's characterization simply doesn't correspond to reality.
Maybe it's a lot to read into a single sentence, but it reflects a curious phenomenon that I still don't quite understand. A couple of weeks ago, as the evidence began mounting that the US campaign was succeeding; as the grim predictions of quagmires and self-repeating history cracked under the pressure of unrelenting reality and fell quietly away; as, in fact, the news got better and better, the press and other news media both at home an abroad seemed to get gloomier and gloomier. Unable to find a message of hopelessness and doom in the fall of Kabul, its cheering citizens, its kite-flying children and burka-shedding women listening to music legally for the first time in five years, newspapers focused instead on dark hints of the perils of winning, the predations of our proxies, the looming catastrophe of starvation caused by the American campaign (the "silent genocide" of Chomsky's perverse fantasies, duly dished up by the New York Times.)
The predations of the Northern Alliance were apparently genuine, though sometimes exaggerated and even distorted (not every dead soldier is a "massacre" after all.) But as for the "silent genocide," by all accounts the bombing actually increased the amount of food aid delivered. As Christopher Hitchens put it more recently, "the United States of America has just succeeded in bombing a country back out of the stone age." (Not to mention the astonishing news that, on the same day as the fall of Kabul, the President of the United States announced a *unilateral* disarmament of 2/3 of America's nuclear arsenal, which would have been far beyond the wildest dreams of the anti-nuke movement in the '80s when I was paying attention to it. Some journalists even managed to put a negative spin on this one, believe it or not...)
In any case, the patented "all is lost" news-avoidance system did eventually collapse under its own internal contradications in the US. But (and this really is the point of this *long* trip down memory lane) it is still alive and well in Britain, as the above quotation indicates and as I've often observed during my many visits there. It's not so much a matter of "left" and "right" (the Times of London, after all, is supposedly the voice of the "establishment," the Wall Street Journal to the left-leaning Guardian's New York Times-- sort of.) It does, no doubt, have to do with a form of reflexive anti-Americanism on the part of Britain's cultural elite, with both similarities to and differences from our own home-grown elite anti-Americanism. This will have to be the subject of a future lecture, children.
Posted by Dr. Frank at December 8, 2001 01:52 AM | TrackBack