Another dung beetle on the feedlot of power

“The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.” (John F. Kennedy)

Driving home yesterday we listened for a while to NPR, not expecting much and not disappointed. During the Vietnam war protesters had managed to use various local radio outlets to spread their message, and the result was widespread dissemination of information that the government did not want. NPR, which went on the air in 1971, is not without an accomplishment here and there, such as exposing Archer Daniels Midlands corruption in the mid-1990’s. (ADM promptly began funding NPR, so that never happened again.) But the effective result of NPR and its 900 stations is to suck up bandwidth. Those pirate community stations are almost all gone now, blanded out of existence. NPR has replaced them with news indistinguishable from any other major outlet, and cultural programming. I listen to some of it, but have long given up on NPR as a meaningful alternative to government-managed news as presented to us by the other major outlets.

We listened to Talk of the Nation Yesterday as the host interviewed Washington Post editor Jackson Diehl. (Transcript here.) He appears to have all of the credentials of an ‘Op”, or government intelligence employee placed at a critical junction as a news filter in the private news media*. He’s a Yalie, and pro-military aggression and war all the way, including an advocate of the attack and invasion of Iraq in 2003. News, after all, is too important to be left in independent hands. If Diehl is not an op, he’s very dumb.

Here’s what we found out yesterday as Neil Conan interviewed Diehl:

DIEHL: Well – and I think we’re seeing an experiment on that just now, because we have stayed out of Syria for the last two years, and the result has been a disaster. It’s looking like it could be much greater than Iraq, and including a bigger disaster for the United States.

CONAN: And upwards of 70,000 Syrians killed, but that is still well short of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in the U.S. occupation of Iraq and, of course, the many Americans who died, as well.

DIEHL: That’s right, although there was far fewer than 70,000 Iraqis killed in the first two years of the U.S. invasion. And, in fact, there’s twice as many people who’ve been killed in Syria in the last two years than were killed in the first two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And if the numbers that the U.N. is keeping are – turn out to be accurate, there will be 50 percent more refugees from Syria by the end of this year than there were in the total time after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

CONAN: But there’s no – how could we know whether it’s going to last another eight years?

DIEHL: Well, there’s nobody stopping it. We know that. Whereas the U.S. intervention eventually stopped the civil war in Iraq, no one is stopping the civil war in Syria, and there’s no end to it in sight.

CONAN: So the U.S. buffer, as you say, tamped down what would have been a civil war inside Iraq.

DIEHL: Well, there was a civil war inside Iraq, and it was a civil war that’s very similar to the civil war that’s going on Syria, a sectarian war, a war in which other countries were intervening. The United States managed to stop the war in Iraq far short of where it might have gone. No one is stopping it in Syria.

CONAN: And you say the countries are similar in that Iraq was ruled by a Sunni minority. And, eventually, once the strongman was removed, that the Shias, the majority, were going to restore – try to reestablish their rights. And similarly in Syria, where it is, in this case, the Alawites who are the minority, who are running the country or parts of it now, and the majority Sunnis who are agitating for more representation.

DIEHL: That’s right. The two countries are really similar. They were both drawn on a map in 1916 by the British and French diplomats. Neither one is really a natural country. They’re both made up of an amalgam of ethic and religious groups that are often hostile to each other, and the only thing that’s held them together has been dictatorships. And so it was kind of inevitable, in my view, that once the dictatorships decline, you were going to have this explosion of competition among these groups. And the difference is, in Syria, it’s turning out to be far more bloody and dangerous than it was in Iraq.

You heard it on NPR! That’s the “liberal media.” First, he’s assuming that the NATO-funded and sponsored war in Syria these last two years is actually a spontaneous uprising, and secondly that the US intervened in civil war in Iraq. We were aghast yesterday that nonsense like this is parroted by an apparent government dupe or agent, and basically unchallenged.

The lesson to be drawn is that the US, in Syria, intends to use the Libya blueprint – to create chaos and then claim humanitarian intervention. In Libya NATO was authorized only to enforce a no-fly zone, and then launched a full-scale air bombardment, eventually overthrowing that government. The chaos there has spread to Mali, and “Al Qaeda” fighters in Syria are now receiving training in Libya, Kosovo and Saudi Arabia. (There’s an interesting counter-official history of Al Qaeda here, which claims that it is a “Anglo-American intelligence network of terrorist assets used to advance American and NATO imperial objectives in various regions around the world.” I realize that this is counter-intuitive.)

Syria is not a democratic country, and that is often paraded as a reason for US aggression. The ease with which this is done is discouraging, as it doesn’t stand a minute’s scrutiny. There will be no such insight on NPR unless someone sneaks through now and then by lying to the call screener. That did not happen yesterday.

Those of our intellectual class are the dung beetles on the feedlots of power, and are charged with rewriting history as we go. Jackson Diehl, if not an op, is at least a dupe. Civil war my ass!
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*The Church Committee in the late 1970’s conducted the only-ever investigation of CIA activities and found that the agency had flooded the news media with ops, as many as 400 at that time in critical positions. Oddly, this has never been widely reported in the media – however, a 25,000 word article by Carl Bernstein, printed in Rolling Stone Magazine in 1977, is must reading. Here’s just one snippet from that article:

The CIA’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about 10 CIA employees were provided cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzburger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy – set by Sulzburger – to provide assistance to the CIA wherever possible.