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Look out Newsnight, new pro-war kid on the block
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be the first to commentPosted by Tim Gopsill
There is a new and surprising cheerleader in the media rabble egging on our leaders to blunder into yet another stupid and pointless Middle East war: Channel 4 news.
Whenever they get the scent of war the press and TV – all of them really – start banging on the drum. So when the arousing prospect of bloodshed is suddenly whisked away from under their noses they inevitably get tetchy.
They've been grizzling ever since that Commons vote on August 22, when politicians did the right thing entirely by accident, goading David Cameron to hold another vote, even though both he and they know that in the new international climate it will likely fail again.
There are endless analyses of “what went wrong" - have you seen a single pundit ask “what went right?", or even, why did it happen?
The general conclusion is that Ed Miliband was the one to blame: poor Miliband, a bobbing cork, pulled this way and that by the currents around him. On Channel 4 News, on August 22 itself, I saw presenter Kathy Newman accuse him of “getting cold feet" because public opinion was against it. That's a good one, don't you think?
But that's been the tone of this once highly regarded bulletin. They had a “reconstruction" by Michael Crick, who at the BBC used to do some realty challenging stuff. Again the assumption was that the vote was a catastrophe, though he found the Tory whips as well as the hapless Miliband at fault.
He did not, for instance, ask, why the rush? Why did Cameron have to recall Parliament when it was meeting anyway four days later? And why did Obama have to bomb Syria the coming weekend?
These unanswered questions after all were what impelled MPs to vote everything down. They said so, many times. And the answers are clear enough: the US had to attack Syria before the UN weapons inspectors reported, in case they got it wrong. You can't trust weapons inspectors.
With Iraq, just ten year ago, opponents of the war remember Bush and Blair and their fantastic lies, but the warmongers remember Hans Blix and his inspectors who kept insisting there were no dirty weapons there - so much for the consensus that “nobody knew" - and had to be hauled out so that hostilities could commence.
Last week was just the same. The US bullied the hopeless UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to call them back early, before they could finish their tests, and he complied. But by then the UK Parliament, taken for granted by the Americans as slam-dunk certainty to fall into line, had mutinied and the weekend window was indeed slammed shut.
We might have expected Channel 4 News, if anyone, to look into this cynical attempt to abuse our national parliament for the purpose of legitimising an act of international aggression; you certainly couldn't expect it from the BBC, which in times of war or near-war defaults inevitably into Ministry of Information mode.
Perhaps it's because Jon Snow is away, but Kathy Newman and that stuffed waistcoat Krishnan Guru Murthy have relentlessly pushed the line that in failing to make war Britain has put itself in disgrace. Tonight KGM as he styles himself confronted the leader of the Syrian National Council, the cabal of businessmen sponsored by the west to “represent" the opposition and usher in western companies once they've got rid of Assad and the Baathists.
Ahmad al-Jarba was leading the team that had met William Hague and UK officials in London. Hague obviously thought this important enough to put off his departure for the G20 in Saint Petersburg, but KGM wanted to know why the Syrians had bothered to come at all, now that Britain “has lost its international standing" because of the vote.
Most people around the world probably think Britain has enhanced its standing, judging by the hostility to Cameron and Obama in Saint Petersburg. Ahmad al-Jarba didn't say that, obviously, and just mumbled that it had been a useful meeting.
“You mean it was too late to cancel the air tickets" said KGM. There was an awkward pause as the Syrian looked confused and fiddled with his earpiece. (People always do that when asked idiotic questions on TV, even though the sound is working fine, as if they can't believe what they're hearing.) “We didn't want to cancel the tickets" he said.
DATELINE: 20 June, 2014
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