The UN Secretary General was reported on
March 3 saying that he had received "grisly
reports" that Syrian government forces were
arbitrarily executing, imprisoning and torturing
people in Homs after retaking control of the Baba
Amr district from insurgents. Did he really
believe this; or was he just "saying it"?
"One of the defining bifurcations of the
future will be the conflict between information
masters and information victims" the US officer
assigned to the Deputy Chief of Staff
(Intelligence), charged with defining the future
of warfare, wrote in the US Army War College
Quarterly in 1997.
"But fear not", he
writes later in the article, for "we are already
masters of information warfare ... Hollywood is
'preparing the battlefield' ... Information
destroys traditional jobs and traditional
cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains
invulnerable. How can
you [possibly]
counterattack the information [warfare] others
have turned upon you? [1]
"Our
sophistication in handling it will enable us to
outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures
... Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage
the flow of information simply will not be
competitive. They might master the technological
wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be
writing the scripts, producing them, and
collecting the royalties. Our creativity is
devastating."
This information warfare
will not be couched in the rationale of
geopolitics, the author suggests, but will be
"spawned" - like any Hollywood drama - out of raw
emotions. "Hatred, jealousy, and greed - emotions,
rather than strategy - will set the terms of
[information warfare] struggles".
Not only
the US army, but it seems mainstream Western media
insist that the struggle in Syria must be scripted
in emotional image and moralistic statements that
always - as the War College article rightly
asserts - trump rational analysis.
The UN
Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry
condemns the Syrian government of crimes against
humanity, but only on the basis of what the
opposition says, and without having investigated
evidence of opposition "crimes": and then proceeds
to "charge" the Syrian government with this
process based simply on "reasonable suspicion": Do
they really believe what they have written, or is
it just a part of "writing the script"? [2]
Having quite forgotten what US Marines did
to Falluja in 2004 (6,000 dead and 60% of the city
destroyed) when armed insurgents there also sought
to establish a Salafist "Emirate" - the Western
media focus on Homs gives vent to the indignant
cry that "something must be done" to save the
people of Homs from "massacre". The question of
what effect exactly that something - whether
external military intervention or providing
heavier weapons for the insurgents - might be, and
what its wider consequences might entail,
meanwhile recedes entirely from view. Those with
the temerity to get in the way of "this narrative"
by arguing that external intervention would be
disastrous, are roundly condemned as complicit in
President Assad's crimes against humanity.
This school of journalism - the Guardian
and Channel Four are good examples of this
"I-was-there" reporting - that emphasizes the
reporter as participant, and indeed victim, a
co-sufferer amid the charged, heart-tugging
emotional sufferings of war, uses emotive images
precisely to underline that "something must be
done". By focussing on mutilated bodies and
weeping bereaved women they assert and determine
that the conflict must be viewed as being of
utmost moral simplicity - one of victims and
aggressors.
"In Baba Amr. Sickening.
Cannot understand how the world can stand by.
Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel: doctors could
do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and
heaved until he stopped. Feeling helpless". [3]
Those who try to argue that Western
intervention can only exacerbate the crisis, are
confronted by this unanswerable riposte of dead
babies - literally. As the War College article so
rightly states: how can you counter attack this
manner of "information warfare" unleashed against
the Syrian government who are on the receiving end
of those "writing the scripts, producing them, and
collecting the royalties"?
I too, saw such
terrible sights in Afghanistan in the 1980s: It
does of course create an emotional abyss into
which the helpless spectator slips; but do these
reporters really believe that innocents and
children are not always the victims of conflict?
Do they believe their personal distress to be
somehow so primary that it must set aside all
complexities, and all potential possibilities? Is
more conflict the answer to the awful death of an
infant?
This reductionist, emotional ardor
is but a form of concealed political advocacy -
little different to that of an information
"warrior" such as AVAAZ, who help write and
produce those info-war videos. [4] And while
nobody openly endorses such "journalism of
participation", this approach seems to have
triumphed in certain journalistic quarters. And
indeed it is creeping further: increasingly we see
even certain Western diplomats acting as though
they are "activists" and participants in the
internal struggles of the states to which they are
posted. What sort of reporting must their
governments be getting?
Are we now to
understand that the armed opposition, who
originally brought Western journalists to Homs -
and then insisted to exfiltrate them perilously,
and at the cost of many lives, via Lebanon, rather
than through the good offices of the Red Crescent
to the nearest airport, were not motivated by a
desire to advocate, and impel the argument for
externally-imposed humanitarian corridors to be
opened to Homs? In other words, were not witness
to the construction of une piece de theatre
in favor of a type of external intervention? Will
a Kosovo-type solution will make things better in
Syria?
What has become so striking is
that, whilst this "information warfare" may have
been almost irreversibly effective in demonizing
President Assad in the West, it has also had the
effect of "unanchoring" European and American
foreign policy. It has become cast adrift from any
real geo-strategic mooring. This has led to a
situation in which European policy has become
wholly suggestible to such "advocacy reporting",
and the need to respond to it, moment-by- moment,
in emotive, moralistic blasts of sound-bites
accusing President Assad of having "blood on its
hands".
In one sense the West inevitably
has fallen hostage to its own information warfare:
it has locked itself into a single understanding,
stuck to a "singleness" of meaning: a simplistic
victims-and-aggressor meme, which demands only the
toppling of the aggressor. Europe, in this manner,
effectively is cutting itself off from other
options - precisely because the humanitarian
theme, which policy-makers may have thought would
suffice to see Assad easily deposed, now impedes
any shift towards other options - such as a
peaceful negotiated outcome.
But does
anyone really believe American and European
objectives in Syria were ever purely humanitarian?
Is it not the case - given that the turnout of
events in the Middle East are taking such an
ominous and dangerous turn - that it has now
becoming somewhat awkward openly to admit that
their info-war was never primarily about reforming
Syria, but about "regime change", and that it was
that even from before the first protest erupted in
Dera'a?
In his recent interview with
Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, [5] given in
advance of President Obama's American Israel
Public Affairs Committee speech, the president,
inter alia, was questioned about Syria. His
response was very clear:
GOLDBERG: Can you just talk about
Syria as a strategic issue? Talk about it as a
humanitarian issue, as well; but it would seem
to me that one way to weaken and further isolate
Iran is to remove or help remove Iran's only
Arab ally.
PRESIDENT OBAMA:
Absolutely.
Do these Western
interventionist proselytizers really believe that
the onslaught on Syria is only about democracy and
reform? Obama said it plainly. It was always about
Iran. And, as Europe and America increasingly
become bystanders to a Qatari and Saudi frenzy to
overthrow a fellow Arab leader by any means it
takes, do these "apostles" truly think that these
absolute Arab monarchies simply share the
Guardian's or Channel
Four's nice humanitarian aspirations for
Syria's future? Do these reporters really believe
that the armed insurgents that Gulf states are
financing and arming are nothing more than
well-intentioned reformists, who have simply been
driven to violence through Assad's incalcitrance?
Some perhaps do, but others perhaps are simply
"saying these things" to prepare the battlefield?
Alastair Crooke is
founder and director of Conflicts Forum and is a
former adviser to the former EU Foreign Policy
Chief, Javier Solana, from 1997-2003.
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