Time for more questions, not exclusively for hacks.
(At TS, I'd be roundly teased for a typical taliesineque thought-stream! I've not abandoned you people, but I do want to try my hand at a link-essay! If you're sitting comfortably...)
Baghdad is in chaos and the story's all over the media. Some of it. There's no more striking series of reports than in The Independent today (pity I can't "borrow" the AFP photo on its front page).
When I left for work this morning, the BBC was up in arms, rightly defending itself against Downing Street's blast against their man Andrew Gilligan for the way he saw the looting.
Donald Rumsfeld has also attacked the media as Washington turns its sights on Syria.
The same Rumsfeld whom I mentioned on March 31, for reportedly over-ruling his generals when they warned him ground forces would be overstretched. This was not merely a question of waging a war, it was also the little matter of planning for the aftermath. A perhaps overly cynical Senegalese newspaper (Le Matin' -- no website) editorialised today that chaos and looting may suit the US administration right now, the better to impose its own brand of "democracy" on Iraq later on.
The same Rumsfeld in January gave an interview to George Stephanopoulos of ABC -- the transcript is on the US Defense Department site -- of which a sizeable chunk is worth recalling:
"Stephanopoulos: Meanwhile, you have to prepare for war. I want to show up on the screen some guidelines you wrote for yourself that you think you have to think about before you commit forces to combat. They were printed in 'The New York Times.' It says: 'If there is a risk of casualties, that fact should be acknowledged at the outset, rather than allowing the public to believe an engagement can be executed antiseptically, on-the-cheap, with few casualties.' What should the public know right now about what a war with Iraq would look like and what the costs would be?
Rumsfeld: Cost in dollars or cost in lives?
Stephanopoulos: Dollars and human costs.
Rumsfeld: Well, the lesser important is the cost in dollars. Human life is a treasure. The Office of Management and Budget estimated it would be something under 50 billion dollars.
Stephanopoulos: Outside estimates say up to 300 billion.
Rumsfeld: Baloney. How much of that would be paid by the United States, how much by other countries is an open question. But if you think about it, September 11th, besides the 3,000 lives, cost this country hundreds of billions of dollars. So, yes, measure the risk of acting, but also the risk of not acting. And if we suffered a biological September 11th, the cost would just be many, many, many multiples of any conflict.
Stephanopoulos: But do you think the risk of an attack like that, another attack on the United States is increased by taking military action against Iraq?
Rumsfeld: It is clearly decreased, because every day that Iraq continues with its chemical, biological, and nuclear programs, they get that much more mature and that much closer to -- in the case of nuclear -- to his having a nuclear weapon.
Stephanopoulos: But might not an attack inspire other terrorists to try to attack the homeland?
Rumsfeld: I don't think the other terrorists need inspiration to attack us. They already have. They're trying to do it now. We're frustrating it all across the globe by arresting people and putting pressure on them.
In terms of human life, the other part of your question -- first of all, war is always unpredictable. It never plays out. We know he has chemical and biological weapons. Might he use them? Yes, he might.
Stephanopoulos: And we're prepared for that?
Rumsfeld: Our forces are prepared.
Stephanopoulos: How -- he's also said (...) Saddam Hussein did, and in that speech he said, 'Baghdad, its people and leadership is determined to force the Mongols of our age to commit suicide at its gates.' I guess that means he's saying if you want to come here, you're going to have to fight in the streets of Baghdad. What kind of challenges does that pose to the military?
Rumsfeld: Well, first, Saddam Hussein is a liar. He lies every single day. He's putting weapons systems right next to mosques, next to schools, next to hospitals, next to orphanages. He's talking about 'human shields.' He is still claiming that he won the war. His people are being told every day that they won. It was a great victory in 1991 when he was thrown out of Kuwait and chased back to Baghdad.
Now, it seems to me that almost every time you quote something from him, you should preface it by saying 'here's a man who has lied all the time and consistently.'"
On reading that last paragraph again, one may now legitimately ask, "How are we handling it, at AFP?" And many a journalist is doing so, now that the pressure has eased off a little.
Do we always "preface" some of our stories as we should? How much editorial freedom are we allowed? Is the multinational make-up of the agency adequately reflected in our coverage, from the "embeds" to Baghdad and around the world?
There can be no doubt from the daily "controls" measuring "performance" against Reuters and AP -- a standard, if often unreliable practice in all major media organisations -- and from the "pick-ups" in text, pictures and the broadcasters that the agency has so far done a remarkable job, with many journalists working in conditions I've not known myself for nigh on 20 years now. But are these stories sufficiently different from what the "competition" is saying in the ways that, according to many clients, distinguishes AFP from the others?
The debate is at once internal, not a matter for this weblog, and external, like the Gilligan affair, since it's of prime concern to the readers, listeners and viewers for whom we work. And thus, I simply want to say here -- before a week's holiday takes my mind off these issues -- that the discussion is open and I'm among others in the agency who would welcome views from colleagues wherever they may be.
zzz
I was amused by J., who has mellowed since becoming a mum, for the crisp bluntness of views born of a particularly tough American city and of worst-of-Lebanon experience that always marks her style, though she never allows these opinions to slide into her work. I think many of us had seen enough of Rumsfeld repeating his lines the other day when she simply declared, with a shrug of the shoulders: "He's an asshole. They're all assholes."
I have no idea who "all" was, nor whether this was J.'s considered verdict or a circumstantial outburst, but it surely eased much of the tension! And we had her to thank for getting first to a grand master of spin, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. (This site proved so popular that this morning there was simply a "place-holder", informing us that:
"4000 visitors per second showed up from around the world and overwhelmed this shared server for over 8 hours until we turned it off in self defense. It basically put a 100 other businesses out of business for a day. If we had known it was going to be this popular we would have put it on its own server from the beginning."
zzz
The wholesale pillage in Baghdad we journalists are supposed not to dwell on led the Beeb this afternoon to post the sorry story of the Iraqi National Museum. I'd looked for more about this earlier and found mainly details that become ironic with hindsight. It's little consolation to read that by July 2002, much of the damage had reportedly been already done. One gateway to the lost and many other treasures was put on the Web in March.
When and whether Britain, Washington, the European nations -- oh, and the Iraqi people -- will ever reconcile differences and form a government which genuinely suits everybody is anybody's guess, especially in the wake of Thursday's flag incident, which led Brian Flemming to consider 'The United States' Tragic Flaw' (via blogcritics) more comprehensively than I've ventured to do as a non-American, but so little has been learned from history.
Nearly 83 years ago, in British colonial times, while the United States was only developing an interest in what was to become Iraq and its oil, a soldier-scholar wrote:
"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster. (...)
"We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?"
If you haven't already guessed his name, it was Ex.-Lieut.-Col. T.E. Lawrence and this comes from a piece for The Sunday Times. By August 1920, a man who had no stomach at all for looters already knew that the vision he shared with the Arabs of their "nation" had been very largely sold out by his political "superiors".
Women in Uganda are not dealing with looters the way Lawrence of Arabia might have done were he not perhaps rotating in his grave, but some of them are giving a whole new spin to the concept of 'make love, not war'.
10:01:57 PM link 
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