The Official Rhetoric Cools - as I said it should days ago

As I listened to the radio this morning, some favourite lines from Hilaire Belloc’s unmatched Edwardian Masterpiece, his ‘Cautionary Tales for Children’, came to mind, as they so often do.

   

In this case it was the poem about ‘Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion’. The bit that swam into my memory describes the moment when a portly zoo-keeper (‘though very fat, he almost ran , to help the little gentleman’)  instructs the lion, Ponto, to stop eating the boy Jim, who has foolishly slipped away from his nurse, and found something worse, during a visit to the zoo.

 

‘The lion made a sudden stop. He let the dainty morsel drop - and slunk, reluctant,  to his cage, snarling with disappointed rage’.

 

Perhaps you can work out why I was reminded of this passage by a report from the BBC Washington correspondent Aleem Maqbool in an item in Radio 4’s Today’ programme at 6.37 this morning, often a good time of day for the listener to be alert. For the next few days you can listen to the whole thing at roughly 37 minutes in, here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b049ysn8

 

Here’s my own transcript. I may have left out a few ums, ers and y’knows.

 

 

Sarah Montague introduced this hugely significant story (with which - in my view - the programme should have led its bulletins) saying :’Senior American intelligence officials say they have no evidence of direct Russian involvement in the shooting down of the Malaysian airlines plane over Ukraine.’

 

Mr Maqbool then said : ‘We were expecting something quite different when we heard that intelligence officials were going to be briefing journalists and what we got was a statement saying that it was believed that rebels had shot down this plane but they had done so by mistake, and that we were also told that there was no empirical evidence that Russia was directly involved, the Russian government was directly involved.

 

‘And that’s all fine of course, except over the previous days we have been told quite different things, it felt,  certainly the tone was very different, from officials in Washington over the weekend, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a whole raft of interviews where he very firmly pointed the finger of blame at Russia and he talked about all kinds of evidence that had appeared on the Internet, for example, what Ukrainian officials had been talking about where they apparently had seen surface to air missile launchers being moved soon after the crash from Ukraine into Russia and things like that - and we were told that we were going to see that evidence in coming days . As I say, it’s fine if they haven’t found that evidence,  but that’s not the impression that we were given before.’

 

Sarah Montague then interjected : ’There was also  a suggestion that actually rebels couldn’t have been able to fire these weapons without Russian military expertise.’

 

Aleem Maqbool responded: ‘Yes, I mean, they’ve always said that ultimately in terms of expertise, in terms of training in terms of hardware, that may well have come,  that is likely of course to have come from Russia and that is still the line but, as I say, it feels like a ratcheting down of the kind of rhetoric that we have heard from Washington in recent days and the question then is why, and it perhaps points to the fact that when Secretary of State Kerry was saying these things,  when President Obama was pointing the finger at Moscow,  the next question that they were asked was “What are you going to do about it? If Russia is directly involved then what are the consequences that Vladimir Putin is going to feel?”

 

‘And of course that's a very tricky question for the whole world,  not just America,  because Russia is so intricately linked in so many diplomatic processes around the world and so there are a lot of countries around the world saying well, we can’t afford to isolate Russia so, if the United States, if others come out with this empirical evidence that Russia is involved it could actually be quite problematic because the question of course that everybody will ask is “What are you going to do about that?”' 

**

 

I particularly loved ‘we were expecting something quite different, and ‘that’s all fine of course’ , which seemed gloriously peevish to me. What I also much enjoyed was the suggestion that Washington was withdrawing from its previous position not because the evidence for its previous claims isn’t there - but because Russia is not a pushover and the truth is therefore inconvenient or unwelcome. Of course this is not impossible, though Russia is no more tied in to global diplomacy and trade than it was when very senior persons were raising the temperature to boiling point at the end of last week. Nor is Russia’s importance on the world chessboard a secret. Indeed, most of the anti-Kremlin lobby are busy exaggerating Moscow’s importance. So the 'let's not tangle with the evil bear' explanation lacks a certain something.

 

There’s an alternative explanation, which fits rather better with Washington’s recent record in intelligence matters. It is that people may have believed last week what they wanted to believe, and so given the impression they knew things they didn’t.

 

I was personally most impressed by the speed and power of Ukraine’s propaganda machine on the day of the atrocity. Kiev set the agenda from the start, introducing the word 'terror' into the coverage very quickly, and by Sunday most normal people in the West pretty much believed that Vladimir Putin was some sort of terrorist murderer, or at least a sponsor of terrorist murder. The far more likely explanation, that an incompetent moron had shot down the passenger plane by mistake, which is horrible but simply doesn’t have the same significance as a deliberate action, was much less politically useful, and harder to moralise about.

 

By the way, I’d just like to make a small comment about an article by the Mayor of London, Al 'Boris' Johnson, in the Daily Telegraph of Monday 21st July. It seeks to deal with the comparison some people (including me) made between the MH17 atrocity and the shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner by the USS Vincennes in 1988.

 

Mr Johnson (who is or was a US citizen by right of birth – he once said he was planning to renounce this privilege after a tangle with the US immigration authorities) , said in this article

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10979460/This-is-Putins-war-and-this-disaster-is-his-responsibility.html

 

  ‘I will not pretend that the Americans were perfect in their handling of the Airbus tragedy. They never made a formal apology to Iran, and for some (incredible) reason the captain of the USS Vincennes was later awarded the Legion of Merit. But the first and most important difference was that when America erred, there was no significant attempt to deny the truth, or to cover up the enormity of what had happened. An inquiry was held, and it was accepted that there was absolutely no fault on the side of the Iranian plane. It was concluded that the bridge crew had essentially made a disastrous error in thinking the plane looked hostile, and this was ascribed to "scenario fulfilment", whereby people trained to respond to a certain scenario (attack by air) carry out every detail of the procedure without thinking hard enough whether reality corresponds to the scenario.’

 

Harrumph. I will here quote from the Wikipedia account of the event which is seriously sourced (if you have time it is well worth reading the entry and following the notes) :

 

 

 

‘Three years after the incident, Admiral William J. Crowe admitted on American television show Nightline that the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters when it launched the missiles.[34] This contradicted earlier Navy statements. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) report of December 1988 placed the USS Vincennes well inside Iran's territorial waters.[35]’.

 

Whether this flexibility about Iranian territorial waters was a ‘significant attempt to deny the truth’, I will leave it to readers to judge.

 

I will make one other small point, given the way in which the charnel-house horror of the crash site at Grabovo has been depicted over the past few days. in 1988, the Airbus and its passengers and crew fell into the sea, not on to land, and while we need have no doubt the debris and the human carnage were as horrible as any in Ukraine,  there are, as a result, no images of this event to compare with those at Grabovo, which is perhaps one of many reasons why the Vincennes episode is largely forgotten. I’ll only say that this and other comparable incidents confront all of us, and all governments, and anyone who ever controls a weapon,  with severe moral problems. They fill me with a horror of war which has grown greater all through my life,  the more I have known about war.