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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Propaganda war escalates
along with military action
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
Europe has pledged thousands more ground troops for the war in Afghanistan, signaling almost certain invasion.
The Pentagon admits it is not only "carpet bombing" -- hardly designed to limit civilian casualties -- but also is dropping Daisy Cutters, 15,000-pound bombs that are the largest conventional weapon in the Air Force arsenal.
There will be no bombing pause for Ramadan in an air war clearly designed to soften Afghanistan for a major ground war. The only question is when it will begin in earnest -- soon enough for mountain snows to hamper U.S. and allied forces or next spring, after a winter of aerial bombardment?
As military action escalates, so does the propaganda war.
Explaining why there will be no letup for Ramadan, Voice of America broadcasts in 53 languages point out that Muslims themselves often waged war during the holy month so they should not expect non-Muslims to suspend hostilities. The Taliban, too, are using the air waves to warn American troops that they "face fiasco."
Their ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, has already been cautioned by the Islamabad government not to attack the United States in his almost daily briefings to newsmen, since that would violate the "third country rule" which forbids diplomats from using their diplomatic status to criticize other nations. But he is allowed to talk of casualties and refugees in his country.
Zaeef claims 95 U.S. soldiers have been killed; the Pentagon confirms three non-combat deaths. He also claims 1,500 Afghan civilians have been killed, a figure the Pentagon says is vastly exaggerated.
The Taliban are obviously trying to evoke sympathy and support from Arabs and Muslims worldwide. So are senior American envoys, some of them Arabic speakers, who now appear regularly on the Qatari satellite TV channel al-Jazeera. Having failed to pressure Qatar into stopping al-Jazeera from airing taped broadcasts by Osama bin Laden, Washington has decided "if you can't beat them join them."
Propaganda is a feature of every war. Its purpose, of course, is to make your side look good and the other side look bad.
The Americans have, in large part, failed to look good to the Muslim "street," which views Afghan civilians as innocent victims of Bush's war on terrorism and faults Washington's support of Israel. But bin Laden has also failed to look good to the silent majority of moderate Muslims and their rulers.
Meeting in Damascus over the weekend, foreign ministers of the 22-nation Arab League dismissed bin Laden's latest appeal to join his holy war against "infidel Christians and Jews," saying he did not speak for Arabs or Muslims.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that CNN, a staple source of news in many parts of the world, is so worried about sounding unpatriotic it risks becoming a propaganda platform for Washington spinmasters, thus losing its credibility.
The Washington Post reported last week that CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson sent a memo to correspondents covering the Afghan war telling them to concentrate less on the horrors inflicted by American bombing and more on the reasons for the bombing.
"We must talk of how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people," he wrote. A second memo leaked to the Post, from CNN chief of standards and practices Rick Davis, reinforced Isaacson's concerns and suggested language for correspondents and anchors to use -- "even though it may start sounding rote."
The "human shield" gambit is an old propaganda ploy, often used to vilify the enemy and justify the killing of civilians.
During the Gulf War, it explained away the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi women and children in a bomb shelter said to be a top secret headquarters of the Iraqi military. It wasn't. In Afghanistan so far, it has justified the bombing of Red Cross facilities and a home for the elderly.
Patriotism is not incompatible with good war reporting. No responsible journalist would ever divulge a military secret that jeopardized the lives of U.S. soldiers. But it is not unpatriotic to report the truth. The surest way to lose support for a war, as our leaders learned in Vietnam, is to lie about it to the American people.
November 8, 2001
Send your questions to international editor Holger Jensen, who will answer one each day. E-mail: hjens@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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