August 4, 2010

DETRITUS — THE CRUMBLING TV NEWS

Arshad M. Khan

I haven’t watched network news in some time.  But this is the Friday following the WikiLeaks bombshell; I am looking for end of week assessments: nothing.  Katie Couric looks visibly older; Diane Sawyer is not getting any younger; the peacock — not in the corner of the screen — is flicking invisible dust off his immaculate suit, hair brushed neater than the women.  The news plods on ending with the usual uplifting short — the breaks for pharmaceuticals directed at the elderly, a clue to the watchers’ demographics.  Whatever happened to the solid edifice of independent journalism, the rock-like anchors — solid, reliable — the ferreting journalists delivering scoops.  It’s more show now and, of course, exorbitant salaries.

I switch to PBS’ Newshour; Jim Lehrer does not look well.  Pasty faced, he looks surprisingly like a benign Cushing crawled out of his coffin for a night’s work.  His deference to power notwithstanding, one feels sorry for him.  I remember he had heart problems and related surgery a few years ago.  His bearded sidekick is much balder, still obsequious, still crouched looking down at the table, still with a fearful look as if ready to hide under the table if a guest says boo, or terrified of offending the establishment.  Their take is two ‘experts’ talking about IEDs.  The main cause of casualties, they stress the indiscriminate killing of civilians by the Taliban through them.  If only we could conquer the IEDs, now personified into the embodiment of enemy, we could win.  The expert with Iraq experience implies victory in Iraq.  With the killings of Iraqis rising rapidly again, it is too much.

We paid off the Sunni insurgents not to attack us.  They obliged.  Why?  Because their immediate quarrel is with the Shia and the Kurds.  Since its inception, Iraq has been ruled by a Sunni elite.  They held political, commercial, military and administrative power.  We have installed Kurds in the north and majority Shia over the rest of the country.  So we have displaced a Sunni-controlled secular regime, which had a Christian, Tariq Aziz, as its face, by a Shia-run religious majority whose leaders were exiles in Iran and therefore have close ties there.  The moment we leave they will be locked together in close embrace.  Alternatively, if the Sunnis win, they, who have been the major victims of this war, have no great love for us.

The Kurds have ambitions in southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran where the rest of the Kurds live.  The Kurds’ ambitions and recent Israeli activities have the Turks upset.  The Turkish population now views us more negatively than ever before and the government will eventually have to respond.  So the Kurds and Israel are costing us the goodwill of our most important ally in the Middle East. 

On the Iran side, we have been supporting an insurgency against the government just as we are doing in the Baloch region in the Southeast.  It does not endear us to Iran and their response is not unexpected.  Having used our bungling in Iraq to great advantage, they are now doing the same in Afghanistan, capitalizing on the centrifugal forces we have generated to influence and wean away the Persian speaking Shia population in the West. 

The experts on PBS continue their discussion of how to import the Iraq victory into Afghanistan.  Apparently emplacement of IEDs requires the active cooperation of locals because the batteries have a short life.  So we are back to winning hearts and minds.  No mention of Task Force 373, revealed in the WikiLeaks documents, that serves as judge, jury, executioner not only of ‘high-value targets’ but of their families, friends, women, children, including, the unborn.  The atrocities are there for the world to read about if they take the trouble but no one is going to see them highlighted on TV.  And the fifty-two civilians killed this Friday … well, nobody expected that to be covered in depth — certainly not until the military has prepared its version.

 

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