Misinformation on the Bounty

At present the mainstream media are occupied with three supposed scandals.  In order of importance (that is, time spent on them), they are: 1) Putin paid Taliban troops a bounty to kill American soldiers, and Trump knew about it and is still making nicey-face at Putin;  2) The spread of the Covid-19 virus  "rages unchecked";  3) The pitiful state of those "refugee" children, separated from their "parents" at the border, is unchanged.  And of course it's all Trump's fault. 

Since that third item is more than a year old, one has to wonder why the newsies are bringing it up now.  The second item is serious, but really not deserving of the panic which the media seem determined to fan; as the number of tests increases, so does the number of discovered cases -- but the fatality-rate for Covid-19 cases is dropping steadily.  It's the first item that's getting the lion's share of the media's attention, but with the least amount of verification.

The Pentagon and the US State Department -- and of course the Foreign Offices of a lot of other countries -- have known for centuries that there's nothing easier than to get Arabs to fight other Arabs.  Quite often you don't even have to pay them;  they'll do it for free.  However, if you want to get Arabs to fight specific groups of other Arabs, it's best to pay them;  otherwise they'll go off the rails and attack anyone in sight. 

Certainly different groups of Arabs will insist that no, no, they're not Arabs;  they're Afghans, or Persians, or Turks, or Babylonians, or whatever, and they're totally different -- but in fact they all share and are defined by a common culture, which has plagued the world for nearly 4000 years.  One constant feature of that culture -- besides its rampant sexism, racism, class and religious bigotry -- is its treasured hate.  Arabs love their hate, and they love to exercise it on anyone they can reach, including each other.  One old Arab saying goes: "Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my brother and my cousin against the tribe, me and my brother and my cousin and my tribe against the world."  This, of course, does not endear them to the rest of the world.  In previous ages the rest of the world endured the Arabs or fought them as best it could, but in the modern age the more powerful countries have found Arabs to be useful as a weapon against each other.   

Now Russia and China have no love for each other, but one thing they can agree on is that they both hate Arabs even more;  therefore it makes perfect sense that Russia would pay Taliban Arabs to go kill ISIS Arabs.  China is, as always, playing its hand very close to its vest, so the State Dept. isn't sure just which Arabs China is paying, and to kill whom. 

The problem with paying Arabs to kill other Arabs is that, unlike Boss Tweed's definition of an honest politician, they don't stay bought.  Russia may be handing out chunks of money to various Taliban tribes, but without careful micro-management those Taliban Arabs will take the money and pay their cronies to go kill other targets.  This, according to what the Pentagon has learned, is pretty much what happened in Afghanistan;  the Russians paid some Taliban warlord, who then offered much of the money to pay other Arabs to go after his own pet target, which is American troops.  There is no evidence whatever that this is what the Russian government intended.  In fact, there's no proof so far that any Arabs actually took up the warlord on his offer, since American troops are noticeably harder to kill than other Arabs.. 

As to the question of whether Trump knew about this, the Pentagon claims that no, he wasn't briefed on this particular situation.  Of course he'd been told, probably many months ago, that the Russians were paying the Taliban to go kill ISIS, so that itself was old news and not worth repeating in the President's daily briefing.  Likewise, until there was good evidence that some Arabs really had taken the bounty and killed American troops, they wouldn't bother telling Trump about the warlord offering the bounty at all.  It's still just an unconfirmed rumor, as even The New York Times admitted.

As for Trump making nicey-face at Putin, remember that Trump shovels on flattery with a trowel, but there's no evidence that he ever means anything by it.  You can almost never rely on what Trump says, but only what he does   What he's actually done with Russia is to keep the trade-sanctions going, and Russia is suffering serious economic problems because of them.  Russia's economy can be politely described as a train-wreck, with no end in sight.  If Trump were to put much more of an economic squeeze on Russia, there would be Russians starving in the streets, which is not a good idea.   

This, plus the nasty press this pay-for-slay story has gotten, should be enough to make the Russians get serious about micro-managing those Taliban warlords that they've been paying off -- either that, or quit paying the Arabs completely, and given Russia's longstanding cultural paranoia, it's  unlikely they'll stop trying to manipulate the Arabs. What's more likely is that the particular warlord who caused the embarrassment  will mysteriously vanish and never be heard of again.

Meanwhile the story is useful for the media to lambaste Trump with, just like the other two "scandals", and a good red herring to divert the public from the AntifaBLM riots, which have become something of an embarrassment for the Socialist Democrats.  In fact, some clever Republicans -- which is not necessarily an oxymoron -- have put together a wonderfully effective campaign ad which shows clips of AntifaBLM thugs going smash-loot-burn while a simulated 911-emergency-line voice sweetly announces that the police are not available now -- "your wait time is approximately five days" -- and lettering at the bottom of the screen labels this as "Biden's America".  As propaganda goes, this is a real coup, and it's no coincidence that the media began pushing its Trump-to-Putin-to-Taliban-killing-our-soldiers story shortly after this ad began playing all over the major TV channels.  It all boils down to a simple case of dueling propaganda pieces.

A parallel case is playing out here in Arizona, over the Senatorial race between McSally (R) and Kelly (D).  Both candidates were previously in the Air Force, so both the ads show clips of flying fighter-planes.  The joke is that the planes are shown flying from opposite directions,and with the ads run back-to-back on the local channels, it looks as if they were coming at each other for an aerial dogfight.  We've taken to calling these the "dogfight ads", and together they make a lovely example of dueling propaganda.  As such, they ought to be shown in Debate, Logic, Speech and Journalism classes.           

It's my hope that in this video age -- and after being regularly bombarded with advertising -- the voters will experience enough propaganda in daily life to recognize it when they see it. 

--Leslie <;)))><  )O(