IN
WITH THE SPIN
The
numbers are in – and so is the spin. The news that the
alleged "genocide" committed in Kosovo by the Serbs was a
complete hoax, and that the numbers of dead – initially
touted as 100,000, then 50,000, then 10,000 – will come
in under 3,000, has yet to make a single American newspaper.
But the Brits, who always get their news slightly ahead of
us, are already disposing of this inconvenient fact in a manner
that points the way forward for our own masters of spin. The
London
Times account gives the numbers a slight boost –
"between 4,000 and 5,000" ethnic "Albanians murdered by Yugoslav
Army and paramilitary forces in Kosovo" – and then comes
out with a real whopper, matter-of-factly informing us that
"this is half the total estimated during NATO's 78-day bombing
campaign." Not so fast – half? Leaving aside the questionable
figure of 4 to 5 thousand – is that total killed, including
Serb civilians? – the number is far less than half. Unless
you believe that half of 100,000 – or 50,000 (both numbers
given out by various sources, official and unofficial, during
the war) – equals 5,000. Perhaps the mathematically-challenged
editors of the Times need a refresher course in elementary
arithmetic – or, better yet, Remedial Journalism.
GOING
INTO OVERDRIVE
But
no amount of remedial instruction can reform propagandists
disguised as "journalists," and this piece by Michael Evans,
the Times' "defense editor," is a classic example of
their incorrigibility. After stating the essential kernel
of news – the Kosovo death toll numbers were waaay
wrong – around which the rest of the article is wrapped,
Evans immediately launches into spin overdrive:
"However,
Graham Blewitt, deputy prosecutor at the UN International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague,
said yesterday that it was known that many of the bodies had
been 'incinerated' by the Serbs. 'We will never know the full
extent of the killings,' he said."
"THE
DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK!"
Challenged
to produce legally-admissible evidence to back up their trumped-up
charges of "genocide, the War Crimes Tribunal and their globalist
cheerleaders came up with the equivalent of: "The dog ate
my homework." Never mind the facts, since they are unknowable.
The truth is what we say it is. Perhaps they can get away
with such brazen effrontery in merry olde England, which is
neither merry these days nor very free. In the colonies, however,
such a statement would be met with a loud guffaw. Americans
know a liar when they see one. After all, the most infamous
liar of them all has been ensconced in the Oval Office for
the past eight years, and not a day has gone by when we haven't
been forced to witness some aspect of his monumental dishonesty
- with the collusion of the American media. This is one reason
you have to go to a British paper to read about what is really
going on in the world.
SULTANS
OF SPIN
Phillip
Knightley, author of The
First Casualty, and a trenchant critic of the media's
cheerleading during the Kosovo war, captured the spirit of
what is happening in a speech
given last year to the Freedom Forum -- in which he addressed
an audience made up largely of the objects of his scorn. Although
war reporting is usually seen as an extension of the war effort,
he said:
"The
military does not trust all war correspondents to toe the
line. What if one of them decides to break ranks and tell
the truth as he or she sees it? To try to make certain that
this does not happen, the military has a manual, updated after
every war, on managing the news in wartime. It follows basic
principles: Appear open, transparent, and eager to help; never
go in for summary repression or direct control; nullify rather
than conceal undesirable news; control emphasis rather than
facts; balance bad news with good; and lie directly only when
certain that the lie will not be found out during the course
of the war."
ORWELL
LIVES
A
NATO spokesman explained it away by denying that the figure
of 10,000 dead had ever been "an alliance estimate." According
to this official,
"It
was a figure produced by the international community, based
on a whole range of sources, including intelligence reports,
interviews with refugees and witness accounts, and if it turns
out that the total number of deaths is smaller, then that's
very good news."
Yet
officials
of the British government repeatedly stated the 10,000 figure
during and after the war. Is Britain not a member of the NATO
alliance? The same figure was repeated
by US government officials, including State Department
spokesman James Rubin. Last we looked, the US was – unfortunately
– still a NATO member. And how is the revelation that
we have been lied to on a massive scale is "good news"? Only
in the Orwellian world of British politics, where Bad News
is Good, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is
Strength.
NATO'S
BIG LIE
While
the mass news media is almost completely co-opted and manipulated
by the War Party, occasionally some real bit of news damaging
to their interests manages to leak out. In that case, the
War Party is prepared: their spin-doctors are the best in
the world. The revelations about NATO's Big Lie may just be
hitting the mass media, but we have been reporting this story
since the middle of last year – and the
debate has been ongoing. NATO's fallback argument is that
the numbers don't really matter, since the kind of "ethnic
cleansing" going on in the Balkans is impermissible no matter
what. But that is not the debate we had in the months leading
up to the bombing of Belgrade. In the all-too-brief national
discussion over whether intervention was justified by any
measure, either moral or material, the
American people were told that "genocide" was being committed:
the President and his spokesmen repeatedly invoked the memory
and imagery of the Holocaust, and so much as said that if
we didn't go in the blood of an entire people would be on
our hands – and they lied. It's as simple as that.
GETTING
UGLY
Meanwhile,
nine
children were injured in a drive-by grenade attack on
a Serb enclave in Kosovo a few days ago. The attackers heaved
two grenades into a basketball court in the Obilic area, and
the situation on the ground in that "liberated" land gets
uglier by the day. So ugly, indeed, that even firm backers
of the Kosovo war, such as GOP presidential candidate George
"Dubya" Bush, are backing away from the monster they helped
create.
HAVING
IT BOTH WAYS
Last
year the headline was "Bush
and Clinton Unite to Block Kosovo Pull-out" – yet
now he's complaining about "overdeployment." Bush is making
the same arguments that Senators John Warner and Harry Byrd
made in authoring legislation that would have set a deadline
for our long-promised Balkan withdrawal – so why did
Bush block that legislation, and why did Condolezza
Rice brag about it in an interview on CNN right after her
speech at the Republican convention? When Judy Woodruff brought
up the familiar liberal smear word – "isolationism" –
Condie smiled and reminded everyone that it was George Dubya,
after all, who asked Republicans to vote against the Warner-Byrd
amendment.
A
CAMPAIGN SLOGAN – AND A MASCOT
But
that was then, and this is now – as good a slogan
for the Bush campaign (and the Bush Presidency, should it
ever come to pass) as anyone is likely to come up with. The
god of the Bush camp must be the
two-faced Roman deity Janus, the most important of the
Italian gods. Janus ruled over doors and gates and symbolized
beginnings and endings, presiding over all sorts of transitions
– notably the transition from peace to war or vice versa.
In the ancient Roman Forum stood the sacred temple of Janus,
its doors flung wide open whenever Rome was at war, so that
the god himself might intervene on Rome's behalf. As to what
sort of a transition a Bush administration would make in the
foreign policy realm, the unhappy answer requires some digging.
. . .
AMBIGUITY
THY NAME IS DUBYA
The
Republican standard-bearer, in a recent speech to the Veterans
of Foreign Wars, averred that he would "review foreign deployments
of US troops" – while, naturally, increasing military
expenditures. To begin with, "reviewing" doesn't necessarily
imply one result or the other. In any case, Bush's recent
statement was nothing new, but merely a reiteration of what
he said in a
speech to the Citadel last year, when he told the young
military cadets:
"As
president, I will order an immediate review of our overseas
deployments – in dozens of countries. The longstanding commitments
we have made to our allies are the strong foundation of our
current peace. I will keep these pledges to defend friends
from aggression. The problem comes with open-ended deployments
and unclear military missions. In these cases we will ask,
'What is our goal, can it be met, and when do we leave?' As
I've said before, I will work hard to find political solutions
that allow an orderly and timely withdrawal from places like
Kosovo and Bosnia. We will encourage our allies to take a
broader role. We will not be hasty. But we will not be permanent
peacekeepers, dividing warring parties. This is not our strength
or our calling."
GONE
BY YESTERDAY
With
war brewing on the Serbian-Kosovo border, and the Montenegrin
land mine waiting to be stepped on, what does a "timely" withdrawal
mean? To me, it means we should have been gone by yesterday.
To Bush's foreign policy advisors, the so-called "Vulcans"
such as Condelezza Rice, however, it almost certainly means
something altogether different. What it doesn't mean
is that President Dubya is going to bring the troops home
anytime soon. It is significant, however, that Bush would
like to appear to be in favor of withdrawal, at least
for the moment: his focus groups must be telling him how dangerous
and volatile the Kosovo issue really is. I realize that foreign
policy is not supposed to matter this election year, and in
any case it is almost considered bad manners to bring the
issue up, but apparently Bush thinks he is getting some political
mileage out of it. His own Republican base opposed the Kosovo
intervention from the very beginning – a fact he ignores
at his peril.
THERE'S
ALWAYS A CATCH
The
catch is that if the shooting starts before Election Day 2000,
the concept of a "timely and order withdrawal from places
like Kosovo and Bosnia" is meaningless: As in Vietnam, a war
essentially started and escalated by a Democratic President
will be inherited and largely fought by US troops under a
Republican commander-in-chief. With John McCain presiding
over the Defense Department, can anyone doubt that we'll be
hearing a lot more of that old moronic McCainiac slogan: "We're
in it, and we've got to win it!" ? This is the way it always
works, it is the essence of our bipartisan foreign policy
of global meddling and empire-building: as Bob Dole once perceptively
pointed out, the Democrats like to start the wars and the
Republicans like to think they can finish them. But where
is this one likely to end? Right on Moscow's doorstep. . .
.
THE
FOREIGN POLICY ISSUE
Don't
let them tell you foreign policy is not an issue in this campaign.
As a factor it may be having an effect entirely beneath the
surface, but at any moment the issue could be front and center
this election year. With yet another confrontation with Iraq
looming in the not-too-distant future, and the Balkan cauldron
bubbling furiously, foreign policy could very well determine
the outcome of this election. In that case, both major party
candidates are sure to suffer – for they are both candidates
of the War Party, the party of perpetual war for perpetual
peace, as the historian Charles Austin Beard once put it.
Fueled by globalist delusions that most ordinary people regard
as dangerous and un-American – as well as the profit-margins
of certain politically-connected companies and industries
– our internationalist foreign policy has never been
popular. Now that the cold war is ended, support for foreign
meddling, foreign aid, and the fevered pleas of foreign lobbyists
is at an all-time low. This is what accounts for Bush's rhetoric
about "overdeployment" and his measured backing away from
his previously fulsome support for the Kosovo intervention.
But don't you believe it: never mind Bush, just take a good
long look at his much-vaunted advisors, who will be making
policy if and when Dubya makes it to the Oval Office. . .
.
BUSH'S
HAWKS
In
a May
22 column, I pointed out the contradictions inherent in
Dubya's Kosovo double-talk, and cited an interesting Washington
Post piece on the factional
alignments within the Bush foreign policy team. While
the relatively dovish Ms. Rice is the author of the "troops
out of Kosovo" commitment, the more hawkish advisors such
as the ever-warmongering Paul Wolfowitz have the real power.
As Clinton readied public opinion for the "liberation" of
Kosovo by US troops, Bush heeded Wolfowitz, not Rice, and
joined the President in calling for intervention, because
"it's in our national interest." Dubya's critique, at the
time, was that Clinton was not prosecuting the war "ferociously"
enough.
TO
THE GATES OF MOSCOW
Behind
Serbia lies Russia – which Wolfowitz and his fellow "Vulcans"
see as the main danger to the US. According to the "Wolfowitz
Doctrine," enunciated in an infamous
memo drawn up by him during the previous Bush administration,
a resurgent Russia is America's main antagonist, and the idea
is for US troops to ride up to the very gates of Moscow in
a drive for NATO expansion – including not only the Baltic
states, but also the Ukraine and the Caucasus. The "Great
Game" being played by the big oil companies over who shall
pump the big oil bonanza out of the Caucasus and feed Europe's
energy needs – and at what price – has the US government
as one of the major players. With Dick Cheney by his side,
and Wolfowitz enforcing the party line in the foreign policy
realm – perhaps using Ms. Rice as national security advisor
or even secretary of state as a shield against "isolationist"
critics on the Republican Right – President Dubya would
sink us even deeper in the European quagmire.
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