From: Hank Roth <pnews@igc.apc.org>
Subject: SO, MAUL YA
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 20:54:07 GMT

<<< via P_news/p.news >>>
{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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