The Quieter Approach

The BBC has gone rather quiet over the quagmire that was Iraq. Paul Reynolds still keeps throwing up the spectre of Vietnam ('there is an interesting precedent...After the Vietnam War'- previously linked on this site), not because it was similar (that hope has evaporated), but because he's still hopeful of manipulating opinion in the same way. It can be like Vietnam for him and his ideology. Anytime there's a 'bang', you can guarantee the BBC will report it the loudest, but still, things are quiet.

Recently they took a break from making their lengthy compendiums of Iraq violence (often stretching over several days) to make separate reports- both of which linked to the anti-war protesters who parade with the BBC's heart with them alongside the mock coffins.

In their report about the marchers, or about the latest 'bangs', they don't find time to allude to trends like this (reg required), reported by Belgravia Despatch, though they do mention that 100,000 casualty figure produced by the Lancet and hotly disputed ever since.

However, in addition to highlighting Turkish anti-Americanism, they found time to bring to everyone's attention that Leftist professor Cole who tried to discredit IraqtheModel. The world according to Cole is a world of US neoImperialist oppression, and the Iraqi democracy's a sham. It's a subtler argument than usual, in that instead of condemning US attempts to bring democracy to the undemocratic, it criticises the imperfection of that attempt as all part of the evil conspiracy.

Meantime the insidious attempt to reconfigure Saddam as our fault in the first place was given a boost by the Dutch (and occupied BBC frontpage space for quite a while). This is pure scapegoatism (not that the Dutchman deserves any sympathy), but when you consider that brand new French missiles were fired at US forces in Iraq in the last two years, you have to say that the Euros are highlighting old chesnuts to deflect attention from newer ones. The same muddying tactics are working on the UNscam situation. To my mind the failures of the international community were greater in the 90's than in the 80's (all things considered) but it's much more convenient to root around in almost defunct criminality than to dig up less decayed corpses.

The BBC demonstrates again and again its commitment to the transnationalism of the UN and the EU, and all agencies in between.