NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9379

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Subject: SO, MAUL YA
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{From THE VILLAGE VOICE, December 15, 1992}
PRESS CLIPS
by Doug Ireland
SO, MAUL YA?

George Bush finally roused himself from the coma
of his post-defeat depression last week with a
quick fix of the global power-junkie's favorite
drug: military interventionism, this time in
Somalia. And his usual feckless disregard of the
Constitution and the War Powers Act is being
greeted among the governing classes with a chorus
of bipartisan gush greater even than that
elicited from the Democrats for Desert Storm. The
few mutters of cautionary protest one has heard
on the little screen have come largely from
members of Bush's own party, cost-cutting neo-
isolationists for the most part, like
Representative Toby Roth--who, on last Friday's
CROSSFIRE, ripped away the UN figleaf from the
word state: "This is an all-American operation.
It's not a UN operation. We are just going in
there under the guise of the UN....Everybody can
see through that."

one wishes there had been more reflections as
thoughtful as Charles Paul Freund's Sunday
WASHINGTON POST Outlook piece. Bush's televised
address to the nation last Friday, Freund wrote,
was an attempt "to define a policy free of
political interest. As a response to images of
appalling human suffering, that would seem not
only appropriate but necessary. But there is
another dimension to these images that we are,
thus far, choosing to ignore. Whether it is in
the president's statement or in much of the
discussion in the print and electronic press last
week, we are reacting to this imagery as if it
does not have a political context, whereas in
fact it does...Bush cast the United States as if
it were the Red Cross with a Pentagon. Perhaps
that is what a great power should be, but in fact
the United States remains a political force that,
in its every action, operates among other
political forces....Attrocity imagery is among
the most powerful political weapons of the 20th
century; sentimentalizing it is a mistake.
Because of the intense emotional reaction it
invites, it has been continuously abused as a
device to sway opinion, to support military
action, to engender hatred; it is the central
rhetorical device of modern manipulation."

Thus, almost entirely missing from the feeble
discussions of Somalia that aired last week was
the historical context that produced those
images--neatly and piquantly reviewed by my
colleague James Ridgeway on page 31 {December 15,
THE VILLAGE VOICE}. Daffy Dan Rather, who likes
to be close to the boom-boom, put on his travel-
tested safari jacket and jetted to Mogadishu, and
from there has been babbling breathless but
unenlightening reports on the young guns who
haunt the Somali capital--but has yet to mention
that the source for many of those weapons was the
United States. At least TIME, this week devoted a
page to Somalia's history (the only one of the
international newsweeklies to make the effort);
better than nothing, but if you read Sophfronia
Scott Greggory's piece too quickly you might have
missed the one slim paragraph she consecrated to
the Cold War petrotilt in favor of the
sanguineous deposed dictator Siad Barre when
Moscow abandoned him in the late 1970s:
"Washington was eager for a strategic outpost
near the Arabian oil fields and struck an
agreement to take over the old Soviet military
facilities. For the next 10 years the U.S. poured
hundreds of millions of dollars into arming the
country."

The near-total absence of Somalis, Africans
generally, and Muslims from the chatshows has
badly skewed the nature of televised discussion.
A ludicrous attempt to fill this vacuum came on
last Sunday's THIS WEEK WITH DAVID BRINKLEY,
which could find no more articulate counterweight
to the invited Bushliners--Larry Eagleburger and
a Marine general--than the high fashion model
Iman, Mrs. David Bowie to you, a well-meaning
Somali lady whom no one could ever confuse with a
political analyst. (By the way, this broadcast was
most notable for Brinkley's ringing endorsement
of Eagleburger as "a terrifically good leader at
the State Department." This is the same
Eagleburger who is about to return to his post as
the richly remunerated servant of corporate
interests and foreign governments at Kissinger
Associates; the man who presided at State during
the KGB-style digging in his department's
passport files for dirt on the Clintons, mere et
fils, and on Ross Perot---a smear search in
which, we learned last week, even the British
were employed; and the man who, as the most
prominent member of the Bush administration's
Belgrade Mafia, bears responsibility for the pro-
Serbian bias in U.S. policy that directly
encouraged the war crimes of Slobodan Milosevic ,
not to mention April Glaspie, Iraqgate, and the
unhappy invasion of Panama. Isn't it time to
retire Brinkley and his incestuous inside-the-
Beltway harrumphs?

The single best TV segment on Somalia--the only
one I've seen that adequately explored U.S.
culpability for the current tragedy--was
Charlayne Hunter-Gault's lengthy and well-
reported "FOCUS" piece on last Wednesday's MAC-
NEIL/LEHRER NEWSHOUR. (It's undoubtedly no
accident that this excellent dissection was
produced by one of national television's few
prominent black journalists.) Among those
interviewed was Human Rights Watch's Holly
Burkhalter, who gave the lie to claims by Reagan
and Bush administration defenders that U.S.
pressure had moderated Siad Barre's murderous
impulses; after pointing out that in 1988 Barre
received some $50 million in "security-related
assistance," Burkhalter noted that this was
"precisely" the "time that U.S. policy makers are
not telling you that they were able to modulate
[Barre's] behavior. [He] engaged in a
counterinsurgency effort against the North that
by our calculations left about 50,000 Somali
civilians dead, forced a half million....Somali
civilians across the borders into the desert of
Ethiopia...If that's, you know, moderate
behavior, I'd like to know what their definition
of extreme behavior would be." The point was
hammered home by TransAfrica's Randall Robinson;
"Certainly when Siad Barre was overthrown [in
1991], he was long a client of the United States
with American weapons to use against his own
people. By then we might have stepped in and seen
to it that the country democratized and moved in
the right direction. But we did nothing then,
either. We simply flew in a plane to evacuate
both Americans and Soviets in the region, any
whites, leaving Somalis to kill each other with
American and Soviet weapons." It's all too
familiar: there are clear parallels between the
Republican's arming of Siad Barre and their
rearming of Saddam Hussein. But this stuff isn't
sexy enough for commercial TV, which prefers to
run hot-button stories about our brave boys going
up against drug-crazed Somali gun-toters.

This sanitized aproach too often characterizes
the first draft of history we get from our
national dailies. THE WASHINGTON POSTS'S coverage
has been a cut above that of THE NEW YORK TIMES
(with the exception of Jane Perlez's energetic
work), but if you believed Don Oberdorfer's
Sunday front-pager, headed "THE PATH TO
INTERVENTION: A Massive Tragedy `We Could do
Something About,'" which purported to be an
inside account of the decision-making process,
questions of Bush's own image never came into it.
That's absurd on its face, as Michael Wines
revealed in his Sunday TIMES article, "AIDES SAY
U.S. ROLE IN SOMALIA GIVES BUSH A WAY TO EXIT IN
GLORY," which cited a "senior official" to the
effect that "the President wishes to be seen
ending his term as a decisive leaders, not as a
vanquished politican. To the extent that pictures
of starving Somalians can be replaced by Jan. 20
with images of American troops handing out food,
that aid said, Mr Bush will leave the White House
a content man."

There is also the distinct possiblity that the
mass media are giving an inaccurate portrayal of
the situation on the ground. That's the view of
Said Samatar, a Somali who is a Rutgers professor
of African history and managing editor of the
HORN OF AFRICA JOURNAL (there's one smart Somali
even Brinkley's producers should have been able
to find: he was interviewed by Hunter-Gault on
MACNEIL/LEHRER). In an article in THE GUARDIAN
(U.K.) last Thursday Samatar wrote that "the
intended projection of so large [an intervention]
force rests on some dangerous misconceptions. The
first is that Somalia as a country has gone
completely to hell and is under the sway of
random violence and mass starvation. In fact,
these horrors are occuring only in a limited
portion of Somalia, notably in the....southwest
between Mogadishu, the capital, and the regions
surrounding Baidoa and Kismayu. The rest of the
country is relatively peaceful and well governed
by an alliance of traditional elders and local
leaders that has re-emerged in the wake of the
collapse of the central authority....A second
[is] that Somalia is a country crawling with
warlords. In the entire country there is only
one---General Aidiid--worthy of the name. And
even he does not exercise supreme authority over
a horde of followers whom he can deliver either
to the field of battle or to the negotiating
table...The other, smaller warlords can be easily
defeated." Since most reporting is coming out of
Mogadishu, are we getting an exaggerated a view
of the armed opposition American troops will face
as we did during the Gulf War, when spoon-fed
journalists relayed to us faithfully the
overestimations of the fighting abilities of
Saddam's conscript army?

The implications of all this were spelled out
this Monday on MACNEIL/LEHRER by THE
PROGRESSIVE'S Erwin Knoll during the show's
roundtable of editors: We're not being told,
Knoll said, that the costs of the intervention
in Somalia will be some $400 million, a figure
which, he properly noted, may well double, if
past experience in such matters is any guide. Is
it conceivable that this money could have been
better used to structure a more permanent
solution to the problem?

That, of course, is what debate in a democratic
society is supposed to uncover. But, right to the
last, Bush has---by electoral cowardice--avoided
that debate, one that should have taken place
BEFORE the First Tuesday in November. Sadly, many
more Somalis--and, quite possibly, some
Americans--will now have to die before we will
have the definitive answer.

Research: Christine Hausman and MAtthew Fleischer
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PRESS CLIPS is a regular feature of the "liberal/left" VILLAGE
VOICE. To subscribe call: 1-800 336-0686.
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