A Plea for Considered Coverage, lest Fear and Panic Drive us into the Pit of War

Listening to the BBC’s interview with Syria’s President Assad, I was struck by the way that Jeremy Bowen went on and on about ‘barrel bombs’. Try as I might, I can’t really see why this seemed so pressing. Mr Assad’s government is not known for its kindness or mercy. We know that it maintains torture chambers and prisons of great horror. It would not be surprising if it waged war pretty ruthlessly, especially in urban battles against forces which would return the Assad state’s treatment with interest if they won.

 

If you drop high-explosive on people from the sky, the results will be frightful, whether the explosive is in a barrel or a neat, western-designed bomb with fins and guidance devices.  The idea that such munitions can be dropped  in a  kindly or civilised way is hogwash. Western air attacks on Tripoli, as I mentioned here, http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/06/as-dave-does-the-talking-war-dead-are-sneaked-out-of-the-back-gate-.html

were not by any means ‘surgical’.

 

As I wrote at the time; ‘You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher: ‘In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more. Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.’

 

The previous day, Martin had written from the scene of an air strike in Souk- al-Juma, which is a centre of opposition to Colonel Gaddafi: ‘In the rooms still standing there were beds, a freezer full of food, plastic flowers, clothes, cushions and a children’s bedroom with a cot, bunks and a yellow teddy bear. The apartments had clearly been civilian and were manifestly in a residential area... There was no sign of any military or government installation. Locals insisted that there were none.’

 

Our side did these things. I left out some more gruesome details of the dead and injured.’

 

And anyone who uses bombs will do such things. There is no such thing as a ‘surgical strike’. What could be less ‘surgical’ than the death in fire and shrapnel (often prolonged) of an innocent ent human creature. ‘Collateral damage’ is a disgusting euphemism, meaning innocent civilians reduced to hunks of flesh and strings of intestines draped on ruins. We should stop using both these terms.

 

Had we intervened in Libya, we would have done them again (just as Israel repeatedly does them in its stupid, futile and politically unhinged attacks on Gaza, which do not stop rocket attacks on Israel in the long-term, but which do grave and irreparable  damage to Israel’s standing in the world.

 

Aerial bombing, with barrels or otherwise, is not nice. Personally, given the choice (and who knows the future, given the current frenzy for war? ) , I’d prefer to be attacked with ‘barrel bombs’ than with modern  cluster bombs, which scatter the ground with ‘bomblet’ booby traps , some of which do not detonate but lie ready to blow the limbs off any child who foolishly picks up one of these shiny baubles.

 

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. And there is no doubt at all that intervention, from the ‘west’ and the Gulf’ began the terrible Syrian civil war which has plunged countless people into misery and pain.

 

Considered coverage would recognise this fact. But there is so little considered coverage of anything.

 

Who would know from most media, for instance, that Ukraine is still just as corrupt as ever, and that its government is deep trouble over conscription, as most Ukrainian men are not especially anxious to serve in the war we have made in their eastern provinces. Note the fierce, and far from ‘democratic’ treatment of a protestor against the draft, as recounted in this story, creditably (though not prominently)  carried by the ‘Guardian’,

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/10/ukraine-draft-dodgers-jail-kiev-struggle-new-fighters

 

Then there’s that story about Russian ‘Bear’ bomber planes, described in one headline as having flown ‘over Bournemouth’. They didn’t. In fact, though readers might easily have formed a different impression, they didn’t enter UK airspace. The phrase ‘the English Channel’ was used in descriptions of their flight route, but ‘the Channel ‘ would be more correct. They stayed clearly outside UK territorial waters and airspace. Flights of this kind happen about three or four times a month, and were taking place long before the current confrontation in Ukraine.  I followed up the story by talking to informed defence sources, and the only new thing about the most recent flight was that it came right round the West of the British isles and eastwards along the Channel, rather than ( as more usually) towards the north-eastern coast of our islands.

 

The Russians do behave badly on these flights, by not using their ‘Identify Friend or Foe’ transponders and always have, but the risk to civil aircraft is very small. Civil air traffic control immediately picks them up and reports their position, speed, height and course to other traffic in plenty of time to avoid danger of collisions. Western aircraft do not behave in this fashion on the edges of Russian airspace (though western submarines certainly *used* to make forays very close to the Russian naval bases on the Kola peninsula, I do not know if they still do) . But we have recently begun to station troops, and hold exercises, quite close to the Russian border. Russia, having long ago (peacefully) ceded the Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltic States to Western control, cannot respond in the same way. The Warsaw Pact is gone and they cannot move troops around it to make a point.   Perhaps these flights by these ancient aircraft are a substitute.

 

In the light of these notes, the tone of much that is broadcast and written seems to me to be overblown. I do wish my trade would learn from Iraq, and try harder not to promote an atmosphere in which people are scared out of being reasonable.

 

And how swift, after that, is the descent into the steep-sided bottomless pit of war, from which many of those (people or countries) who slide into it will never emerge whole, or even emerge at all.