-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,582606,00.html
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Politicians do it. Terrorists do it. Let's all exaggerate
Since September 11 everyone has banged their own drum ever louder
Peter Preston
Monday October 29, 2001
The Guardian
Small but naggingly necessary questions. Why can't the Ernst Stavro
Blofelds of the 21st century spell? Why does the mad anthrax chemist
who shivers our timbers think, in his note to Senator Daschle, that
"penicillin" is spelt "penacilin"? And could he write "exaggeration"
without reaching for a dictionary?
Or consider Osama bin Laden. He is bent on "biological, chemical and
even nuclear" attacks. (The prime minister tells us so, invoking
moral duties to stiffen sinews.) He runs a hi-tech network of terror
30,000 strong and flush with funds. We have to go to "war" to stop
him. And yet, over 10 years, the headline results are low- tech and
disproportionately puny. Two East Africa bombs in 1998 which killed
224; the attack on the USS Cole with 17 victims; and September 11.
To call that record "puny" is, of course, to be easily misunderstood. There is nothing
puny about the trail of death and destruction he leaves behind him. But nothing,
either, that would make old Eta or IRA hands fall mut
e with admiration. Suicide-bombings are his hoary stock in trade. Vans packed with
explosive which blow up in embassy compounds. Men with penknives who take over
passenger jets and - after a little Florida training - ram
them into skyscrapers.
The effect is shattering -because it is designed to kill the maximum number of people
(and perpetrators). But it is in no sense rocket science. Nor, by the terrorist
standards we got used to in the eighties, does it have
momentum. The strikes against Americans are occasional and random. They start and they
stop. The rotten House of Saud is shaken but not stirred. Thirty thousand men and
unlimited boodle have not, so far, changed even the
little bit of the globe that Bin Laden wants to make his own.
So to that word again: exaggeration. And to the basic text provided for Guardian
readers last August by the Swedish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. Why, Lomborg asked,
is the end of the world not quite as nigh as we somet
imes fear? Because, in part, "of the self-interest of environmental lobby groups".
These "selfless folk nevertheless share many of the characteristics of other lobby
groups. They need to be noticed by the mass media. They
also need to keep the money that sustains them rolling in. The temptation to
exaggerate is surely there."
I thought (laterally) of the Lomborg thesis a few days ago when two Afghan aid charity
chiefs - accused of excessive emotionalism by Clare Short - gave evidence to a Commons
select committee. Any contingency planning for
refugee handling or food provision, one of them explained, had to include a worst-case
estimate. And there was nothing wrong in citing that estimate alone to galvanise
governments or fundraisers, because worst cases somet
imes materialise.
A prudent, even laudable position. The more millions thought to face starvation
through Afghanistan's coming winter, the more cash and resolve there'll be to feed
them. But virtuous exaggeration is still exaggeration - an
d it combines too rancidly with another familiar trait in modern society: the
grotesque perversion of risk management.
Do you remember December 31 1999 and the way London's hospitals, all leave cancelled,
stood at full alert? Do you remember how the Queen Mum's gymnasium in Victoria was
cleared as an emergency mass mortuary? Millions migh
t come out to celebrate the new millennium and hundreds, nay thousands, might be
crushed to death. But it rained; and nothing happened.
See the same NHS syndrome today as anthrax alerts spread through hospital boards.
Watch Washington order 100m doses of the Bayer antibiotic it could, just conceivably,
require. Keep calm? How is that supposed to happen wh
en the authorities who guide us go frenziedly about their worst casework. So BSE (on
the latest research) will not kill hundreds of thousands? So cows' brains and sheep
brains got muddled up in the lab? So what? No one ev
er gets fired for overstating a risk. It's not spotting the risk which lands you in
the soup. (How often, since the autumn of 1987, has the Met Office failed to turn
brisk breezes into pending gales?)
No certainties, of course. Horrible things happen. The destruction of the twin towers
was uniquely horrible - and other attacks, other disasters, will flow in train. But
let's look at this current stew and think what Bjor
n Lomborg would say if he were an "expert on terrorism" rabbiting away to some cable
channel. Perhaps he'd bring Mandy Rice-Davies along to the studio and she'd intone her
famous phrase: "They would, wouldn't they?"
Three weeks into military action and little goes swimmingly. Donald Rumsfeld wonders
whether we'll ever catch Bin Laden, the new chief of the defence staff witters about
the most difficult campaign "since Korea" and Tony
Blair (who four weeks ago was denouncing such scaremongering) suddenly discovers the
nuclear threat which must stiffen all resolve. Well, he would, wouldn't he?
The west's intelligence services, breaking cover, begin delivering details on Bin
Laden's resources and supposed brilliance. He's now such a formidable genius that
their progress is slow going on non-existent - even when
the CIA mail room is pronounced spore-free. Well, they would, wouldn't they?
Newspapers and TV companies, lacking pictures or much eye-witness material, must toil
with the "experts" and covert briefers who foretell appalling revolutions gripping the
Middle East or plagues that could threaten manki
nd. WTW, WT?
Aid agencies, selfless and stretched, talk of 2m more refugees flooding into Pakistan
and then wonder why 15,000 miserable lost souls doesn't (yet) seem heartrending
enough. Is it millions more - or 400,000 in the mountai
ns beyond Herat - who will starve? Why, always, the worst-case scenarios? WTW,WT?
"September 11: how has your life really changed?" asks the front page of the Times.
There is one answer to that. It has changed because everyone for every possible reason
- good as well as bad - now swallows exaggeration
from the shortest spoon. Politicians with no end in sight do it. Defence chiefs with a
shopping list do it. Intelligence bosses with backs to cover do it. Northern Alliance
generals wanting air support do it. Taliban prop
agandists do it. Bin Laden in his cave does it. Journalists inevitably do it. Pressure
groups with a handy axe to grind do it. Even aid agencies wanting the attention they
must have do it.
Let's do it, let's exaggerate? Too many worst cases; too much
rhetoric feeding on itself; too little proper threat analysis. Is
this the most difficult war since Korea? In reality, it's not yet a
recognisable war, just poundings from the sky and scurryings on the
ground. And "war" - in its instantly, dismally conflated way - is the
most fatal exaggeration of the lot.
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