AUGUST 2007
The
nature of the problem is familiar enough. Belgrade is the
capital of a vanishing state that once stretched to the
Austrian border. Its peeling stucco and abandoned old
cars are emblematic of decline. Nobody needs a thousand
guesses to determine who was the big loser from
Yugoslavia's disintegration . Slovenia and Croatia have
left Serbia in the dust. Note in map below the removal of
Kosovo and Montenegro leaves Serbia stranded in the
mountains.
this shows the
diminished country of Serbia - punished for standing up
against EU planned break up of Yugoslavia
MEDIA ALERT: FROM BLAIR TO BROWN -
THE KILLING WILL CONTINUE
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of
the corporate media
July 23, 2007
The first truth of American foreign policy is that it is
formulated to maximise corporate profits and state power.
The second truth is that it is perennially sold to the
public as a mission to spread freedom, democracy and
human rights. The third truth is that the first two
truths apply regardless of whether the Republicans or
Democrats hold power.
But this cannot be true. After all, America led the 1999
Nato campaign to stop “the Serbian genocide
machine” in Kosovo, as the Guardian observed in
April of that year. (Peter Preston and Patrick Wintour,
‘War in the Balkans,‘ The Guardian, April 4,
1999)
Although the word genocide is rarely used now that the
basic facts have become undeniable, Kosovo continues to
be almost universally acclaimed as an example of
“humanitarian intervention”. Indeed it is used
as circumstantial evidence for the purity of US-UK
motives in Iraq. In reviewing the “legacy” of
Tony Blair, Polly Toynbee wrote:
“Abroad, Blairism was a noble ideal of liberal
interventionism: sheer force of moral argument brought a
reluctant US to the rescue of Kosovo and the downfall of
genocidal Milosevic.” (Toynbee, ‘Regrets? Too
few to mention any in particular,’ The Guardian, May
11, 2007)
Jonathan Freedland commented of Blair:
“He led the Nato alliance into what was hailed as
the first humanitarian war, the military action aimed at
saving Muslim lives from Serb aggression in Kosovo in
1999.” (Freedland, ‘The Blair years: A
contrarian and a magician,’ The Guardian, May 11,
2007)
Notice that Freedland subtly affirmed in the second half
of the sentence what he reported as merely “hailed
as” true in the first half.
Johann Hari wrote in the Independent:
“In 1997, with fears that the violence would begin
again, Blair had a naive, noble desire to stop Serbian
ultranationalism in its bloody tracks.” (Hari,
‘Blair's legacy lies in the Baghdad morgue,’
The Independent, May 14, 2007)
‘Bambi’ Blair, then, was a well-intentioned
innocent abroad. Hari felt able to write this eight
years, and many hundreds of thousands of deaths, after
Andrew Marr wrote at the height of the Kosovo war of
Blair: “I am constantly impressed, but also mildly
alarmed, by his utter lack of cynicism." (Marr,
'Hail to the chief. Sorry, Bill, but this time we're
talking about Tony,' The Observer, May 16, 1999)
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote more recently:
“Robin Cook promulgated the ideals of an ethical
foreign policy and we intervened nobly in Sierra Leone,
Bosnia and Kosovo.” (Alibhai-Brown, ‘Blair's
failed promise to Britain's blacks,’ The
Independent, May 14, 2007)
"Who is this 'we' exactly that you're talking
about?” as Harold Pinter has asked so well. Is it,
perhaps, an elite journalist special forces unit? David
Aaronovitch explained in the Independent:
"Would I fight, or (more realistically) would I
countenance the possibility that members of my family
might die [for Kosovar Albanians]?"
His answer: "I think so." (Aaronovitch, 'My
country needs me,' The Independent, April 6, 1999)
The technical term for this kind of writing is:
‘independent liberal journalism.’
Keith Waterhouse responded a little unkindly in the Daily
Mail:
“David, baby, you are too old, too fat and too silly
to be allowed to handle a gun, as you well know. Throwing
Lion bars to the refugees would be about your mark.
“On the other hand, we don't want to lose you but we
think you ought to go.
“I would personally buy the tin helmet and fly him
over Kosovo in a hired helicopter if I thought the beggar
would jump.” (Waterhouse, ‘Fighting talk,‘
Daily Mail, April 8, 1999)
By contrast, John Norris, director of communications
during the Kosovo war for deputy Secretary of State
Strobe Talbott - a leading figure in State Department and
Pentagon planning for the war - commented on the real
motives. Presenting the position of the Clinton
administration, Norris wrote in his book, Collision
Course: “it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the
broader trends of political and economic reform –
not the plight of Kosovar Albanians – that best
explains NATO’s war”. (Norris, Collision
Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo, Praeger, 2005, p.xiii)
Strobe Talbott noted in his foreword that “thanks to
John Norris,” anyone interested in the war in Kosovo
“will know... how events looked and felt at the time
to those of us who were involved”.
“Hence,” Noam Chomsky writes,
“Norris’s evaluation is of particular
significance for determining the motivation for the
war.” (Chomsky, Failed States, Hamish Hamilton,
2006, chap. 2, n 34)
The Balkans writer Neil Clark had earlier pointed out:
"The rump Yugoslavia... was the last economy in
central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western
capital. ‘Socially owned enterprises’, the form
of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still
predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum,
mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75% of industry
was state or socially owned.” (Clark, ‘The
spoils of another war,’ The Guardian, September 21,
2004; http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,1309165,00.html)
In the Nato bombing campaign, state-owned companies -
rather than military sites - were specifically targeted.
Nato only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial
facilities were hit - including the Zastava car plant at
Kragujevac. “Not one foreign or privately owned
factory was bombed,” Clark noted. (Ibid)
The media consensus on the humanitarian nature of the
war, then, is a fraud. Indeed, in reality, Nato’s
bombing campaign dramatically increased the scale of
atrocities against Kosovar civilians, as Nato commanders
predicted ahead of their assault.
Unsurprisingly, Norris’s words do not exist for the
liberal media - they have not been mentioned in any UK
newspaper.
This all accords well with the three truths of US policy
described above.
British Foreign Policy - Always A New Dawn
The first truth of British foreign policy is that it is
also formulated to serve elite power. The second truth is
that it is rooted in unwavering support for US policy,
including participation in attacks on defenceless Third
World targets - the reason London, not Stockholm, has
been subject to September 11-style suicide attacks.
The third truth is that this foreign policy is always
sold in a way that echoes US claims of humanitarian
intent, so lending a veneer of international legitimacy
and support. It is of course very much easier for a
“coalition” to claim to be expressing “the
will of the international community” than it is for
a rogue superpower acting alone.
The fourth truth is that these truths apply regardless of
whether Labour or Conservatives hold power.
Finally, because the collision between the reality and
appearance of policy becomes increasingly obvious over
time, the fifth truth is that a change of British
government is always said to herald a change to a more
moral foreign policy. This transformed policy is always
said to be driven by idealistic new minds acting out of
revulsion at past ’mistakes’ - the slate can
thus be wiped clean and media gullibility rebooted to the
default setting.
Thus, as Tony Blair took office in 1997, his new foreign
secretary, Robin Cook, promised a new, ethical approach:
"We will not permit the sale of arms to regimes that
might use them for internal repression or international
aggression." (Quoted, Ian Black, 'Cook gives ethics
priority,' The Guardian, May 13, 1997)
This would be part of New Labour's determination to do
nothing less than "put human rights at the heart of
our foreign policy," Cook claimed. (Ibid)
Liberal cheerleaders queued up to celebrate the
revolution. In the New Statesman in 1999, John Lloyd
looked back on “one of the boldest initiatives taken
by a major state to shift foreign policy on to new
tracks”. (Lloyd, 'Mandarins, guns and morals,' New
Statesman, October 25, 1999)
The Guardian's Hugo Young wrote of Blair: "the
grandeur of his ambition shouldn't be underestimated. He
wants to create a world none of us have known, where the
laws of political gravity are overturned.” (Young,
‘Everybody is one of us in Blair’s world,’
The Guardian, May 27, 1997) This in “the age when
ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'."
(Young, ‘After the Blair deluge, reality steps
forward,’ The Guardian, June 17, 1997)
Even after claims of an ethical foreign policy were made
ridiculous by Blair’s wars of aggression, the myth
was simply too important to be ditched. Following Robin
Cook’s death in August 2005, former culture
secretary Chris Smith wrote in the Independent of
Cook’s foreign policy:
"It represented a brave attempt to cast our
country's relations with the rest of the world in a moral
light." (Smith, ’Robin Cook: 1946-2005, The
House of Commons was his true home,’ The
Independent, August 8, 2005)
As the piles of corpses expanded in Iraq, Labour MP Denis
MacShane wrote in the New Statesman:
“As foreign secretary, he [Cook] rescued British
foreign policy from the dead waters of failed Tory
cynicism.” (MacShane, ‘More loyal than left:
Robin Cook: a tribute,’ New Statesman, August 15,
2005)
Two years later, of course, much of the British public
perceives Blair and his government as utterly discredited
- and, by extension, the Labour party that allowed him to
remain in place while he cut a bloody swathe through the
Iraqi people.
Many in the corporate media are also only too aware that
their credibility has been shredded by their earlier
adulation of Blair, by their failure to challenge even
the most obvious government deceptions ahead of the war,
and by their cheerleading of the war before the
catastrophe became undeniable. It is not hard to
understand why the political-media system has a shared
interest in declaring a new, ethical beginning.
Gordon Brown’s Brave New World
In Gordon Brown's inaugural Downing Street speech, the
new man claimed: "I have listened and I have learned
from the British people." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1996727.ece, June 28, 2007)
Brown, it seems, will bring about "change" by
sweeping away "the old politics," promising
"a new spirit of public service to make our nation
what it can be".
Perhaps this ‘New’ New Labour could be marketed
as New Labour Plus.
Echoing John Lloyd in 1999, former government adviser,
David Clark, wrote in the Guardian last week:
“Only the most implacable critics of the government
could fail to appreciate the shift in foreign policy
since Tony Blair left office three weeks ago. This was
always going to be a difficult and controversial
process.” (Clark, ‘Britain must take the lead
in Iraq - by getting out first,’ The Guardian, July
16, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2127227,00.html)
On the BBC’s Sunday AM programme, new British
foreign secretary David Miliband, echoing Robin Cook,
declared that the goal was for British foreign policy to
be “a force for good in the world“. Asked if
this meant Britain would distance itself from US policy,
Miliband instantly reversed the claimed priorities,
insisting that the alliance with the US was vital for
Britain’s “national interest”. (Sunday AM,
BBC 1, July 15, 2007) In other words, Miliband is playing
the traditional “double game” - the claimed
emphasis will be on “doing good”, while policy
will be rooted in the muscular realpolitik of
“national interest”. In 1937, anarchist writer
Rudolf Rocker explained the meaning of the favoured
patriotic term:
“We speak of national interests, national capital,
national spheres of interest, national honour, and
national spirit; but we forget that behind all this there
are hidden merely the selfish interests of power-loving
politicians and money-loving business men for whom the
nation is a convenient cover to hide their personal greed
and their schemes for political power from the eyes of
the world." (Rocker, Culture and Nationalism,
Michael E. Coughlan, 1978, p.253)
The same unavoidable clash between appearance and reality
is repeated across the press. An editorial in the
Guardian observed that "in a fundamental way... the
New Labour strategy that [Brown] helped create will not
change".
The editors then necessarily muddied the issue, pointing
to a "sense that something significant has
shifted" and asserting that Brown's arrival marks a
"renewal" and "the drama of a new cabinet
with a changed agenda". (Leader, 'Brown arrives: The
old and the new,' The Guardian, June 28, 2007)
Senior Guardian journalists were quick to reinforce this
vital aspect of propaganda. The Guardian's political
editor, Patrick Wintour, wrote of Brown's intention to
"rebalance Mr Blair's foreign policy", with the
introduction of "new faces and plans to heal old
wounds" aimed towards "restoring trust in
politics". (Wintour, 'Brown's first day,’ The
Guardian, June 29, 2007)
Exactly the same, of course, was declared of Robin
Cook’s rebalancing of unethical Tory policy - with
all doubters dismissed as miserable cynics. The title of
a June 1997 article by Neil Ascherson in the Independent
read: “After 18 years of national egoism, the world
has a chance to like us again.” (Ascherson, The
Independent, June 7, 1997)
Guardian assistant editor, Michael White, welcomed
"a smiling Gordon Brown" and the
"unexpected echoes of that other new beginning"
in May 1997 when Blair strode towards Downing Street
before wild throngs of Labour Party activists. (White,
'The accession,' The Guardian, June 28, 2007)
In truth there was nothing “unexpected” about
claims of another “new beginning”. Despite
being up to his neck in the Iraq bloodbath, Brown has to
claim to represent the fresh start, new direction and
clean slate that he clearly is not.
An Independent editorial claimed Brown was "breaking
with the Blair years". (Leader, 'Things can only get
better???,' The Independent, June 28, 2007)
By contrast, John Pilger was all but alone in noting the
"tsunami of unction" that "engulfed the
departure of Blair and the elevation of Brown".
(John Pilger, 'These are Brown's bombs too,' New
Statesman, July 5, 2007; http://www.newstatesman.com/200707050024)
Pilger put Blair's departure - treated by the media
almost as a state occasion - into painfully accurate
perspective: "those MPs who stood and gave him a
standing ovation finally certified parliament as a place
of minimal consequence to British democracy”. (Ibid)
Historian Mark Curtis has commented:
"Brown has been four-square behind Blair on foreign
policy, including, of course, Iraq, which he has financed
as Chancellor and publicly defended when required."
Curtis also points to Brown's "total support and
defence of big business" describing it as
"quite extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented in
the postwar years," adding:
"Virtually every speech for the last ten years has
been a reassurance to business that Labour is on its side
and a defence of 'free trade' and ensuring climates
around the world favourable for British foreign
investment, along with ongoing commitments to low
corporation taxes and cutting business regulation. Brown
is the ultimate liberalisation theologist and every one
of his policies has pushed in this direction."
(Curtis, interview, 'The future of British foreign
policy,' ukwatch.net, May 7, 2007; http://www.ukwatch.net/article/the_future_of_british_foreign_policy)
This is not allowed to matter in the combined
media-political attempt to wash the blood of Iraq from
their hands. And what will be the result if they are
allowed to succeed?
This was made clear enough last week by the
Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland who, as though
appearing in some recurring bad dream, warned, yet again,
of “a very real threat: Iran”. He added:
“Nowhere is the Iranian peril assessed more closely
than in Israel, which would, after all, be target number
one for any Iranian bomb.” (Freedland, ‘This
flurry of Middle East activity is the product of a very
real threat: Iran,’ The Guardian, July 18, 2007)
With the policy goals and the interests shaping them
unchanged, with the “necessary illusions” of
power unchanged, with the bottom-line of state-corporate
greed unchanged, the lies and killing are certain to
continue.
The novelist James Joyce commented on the endlessly
repeating cycle of human tragedy: “History is a
nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
There is no choice - it is up to us as individuals to
wake up. That’s all there is. But what does this
mean? It means we must not allow ourselves to yet again
be deceived. In the absence of serious investigation or
evidence, we must not believe something merely on the
grounds that it is pleasant and comforting. We must not
assume that the world really is under some benign
‘new management’. Instead we must take personal
responsibility and work for real change rooted in genuine
compassion for others.
Mass killing does not originate in great drama. Ten years
ago, when journalists were so eagerly hailing
Blair’s “new dawn”, nothing very terrible
happened. People went along with it, agreed with it -
they felt they had played a virtuous role in promoting
positive change, experiencing their optimism as a
healthy, life-affirming thing. They were doubtless
relieved that they could leave it to this new, more
“ethical” group of politicians to sort out the
problems of the world so that they could 'get on with
their lives'.
And yet these responses were crucial links in a causal
chain that has since resulted in the deaths of perhaps
one million Iraqi people.
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Background photo Yugoslav Drama Theatre