Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a What’s Actually Happening In Iraq?
American forces have opened up a northern front in Iraq, in a possible attempt to deflect attention away from what is or isn’t happening in Baghdad, Basra and the rest of the south. What is or isn’t happening being a matter of some conjecture, not just between foreign correspondents who are asking the military tougher questions that the likes of Fox News, but between the military themselves. The U.S military has offered four possible explanations for the death of 17 civilians in Baghdad: “that one of its precision missiles might have gone astray; that the attack was aimed at Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles “positioned less than 300ft from homes”; that an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile hit the market; that an accurately-aimed US missile was deflected by Iraqi ground fire.” (Report from The Guardian).
However, ABC Australia reports that the Pentagon, whilst conceding that maybe a surface-to-air missile went astray and fell into the market area bombed, are more concerned with deflecting attention from American mistakes by blaming the Iraqis for the attack.
Also in the same report, Pentagon public affairs official, Victoria Clarke, on the next step in the war: “I just make one point about our general strategy, it is not changing the strategy, it is not changing the overall game plan. One of the aspects of the overall game plan and strategy was to be able to adapt and adjust as appropriate depending on what the enemy does.” She might as well have said, “Look, we don’t know what’s happening. We’re just making this war up as we go along.”
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By the way, ABC Australia’s breakfast anchor is one Linda Mottram. A relation?
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Dunno - I see her name a lot in Google news feeds, and have never bothered to find out. Maybe Australia is full of Mottrams.
As for the to and fro of ‘facts’ - it’s a good spin tactic, where you allow information to dribble out unchecked, revise it, negate it, issue conflicting statements, with the end result that no one can get a handle on what actually happens. Even the number 17 in your post is under constant revision. The Iraqis said it was 14 initially, Robert Fisk, who was on the scene pretty quickly, estimates 20. All these little discrepancies work in the favour of the US, as there is no truth or fact, just a bewildering array of possibilities that are cherry-picked by commentators depending on their allegiance. That said, most of the World at One today seemed to be meta-reporting of the problem of conflicting reports, rather than any attempt to assess the veracity of those reports.
What Victoria Clarke said strikes me as perfectly sensible - how else do you fight a war but by reacting to the enemy. The US are just taken aback that there is an ‘enemy.’ They seem genuinely to have believed that Iraq would just roll over and cheer the liberating troops, and now they have to take into account that there are significant numbers of troops loyal to Saddam Hussein, and that the Iraqi public might not be peachy keen on swapping a homegrown dictator for colonial overlords…
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There’s a really interesting piece by Chomsky here at ZNet —
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Oh, I know what Clarke said is sensible. I’m just having a cheap dig. Having said that, you’d expect them to have thought through possible scenarios, and have plans to deal with them; in the propaganda war, “adapt and adjust as appropriate” is a hell of a lot less certain than “shock and awe,” and it’s maybe indicative that, behind the fug of bullshit and nonsense trotted out by the Pentagon, there’s a lot less certainty about the means and methods of “liberating” Iraq than there was a week ago.
As for the “facts,”it is good spin, but it’s not a long term solution for them, and could easily backfire, particularly if there is a lot of media focus on the problems of accuracy in counting the bodies.
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I think it is meant as a long term solution - or at least a medium term one: these multiple ‘truths’ will be quite sticky, especially on the internet where all the alternative ‘facts’ will linger in newspaper archives forever. Not that the truth won’t come out eventually, but the obfuscatory cloud of alternative near-truths will hang around for a long time…
Interesting distinction in that Chomsky piece between Preventive and Pre-emptive War… for some lighter reading, there’s a nice profile of the Chomsk from the New Yorker excerpted here.
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