[THS] John Pilger: The new age of sea wars

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.newstatesman.com/middle-east/2010/06/north-korea-vietnam-pilger

The new age of sea wars

John Pilger

Published 03 June 2010


The CIA set a precedent with the Tonkin “incident”, sparking off the Vietnam war.
Today, we see the same arts of spin at work in Israel’s reasons for the bloody assault
on the Muslim aid ships to Gaza.

How do wars begin? With a "master illusion", according to Ralph McGehee, one of
the CIA's pioneers in "black propaganda", known today as "news management". In
1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an "incident" that became the
"conclusive proof of North Vietnam's aggression". This followed a claim, also fake,
that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf
of Tonkin in August 1964.

“The CIA," he said, "loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist
weapons - the agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around
the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. They shot it up and
made it look like a firefight, and they brought in the American press. Based on this
evidence, two marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the
American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam." An invasion that took
three million lives was under way.

The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre of peace
activists in international waters on 31 May was "spun" to the Israeli public for the
better part of the week, preparing them for yet more murder by their government,
with the unarmed flotilla of humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of
terrorists. The BBC was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a
"potential public relations disaster for Israel", the perspective of the killers, and a
disgrace for journalism.

Guilt trip

A similar master illusion now consumes Asian governments. On 20 May, South Korea
announced it had "overwhelming evidence" that a torpedo fired by a North Korean
submarine sank one of its warships, the Cheonan, in March with the loss of 46 sailors.
The US keeps 28,000 troops in South Korea, where the public has long supported
détente with Pyongyang.

On 26 May, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, flew to Seoul and demanded
that the "international community must respond" to "North Korea's outrage". She
flew on to Japan, where the new North Korean "threat" eclipsed the briefly
independent foreign policy of the Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, elected
last year with popular opposition to America's permanent military occupation of
Japan. (On 2 June Hatoyama resigned, having failed to move a US military base in
Okinawa.) The "overwhelming evidence" is a propeller that "had been corroding at
least for several months", reported the Korea Times. In April, the director of South
Korea's national intelligence, Won Se-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there
was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The defence
minister agreed. And the head of South Korea's military marine operations said, "No
North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took
place." The reference to an "accident" suggests the warship struck a reef and broke
in two.

To the American media, North Korea's guilt is beyond doubt, just as North Vietnam's
guilt was beyond doubt, just as Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,
just as Israel can terrorise with impunity. But, unlike Vietnam and Iraq, North Korea
has nuclear weapons, which helps to explain why it has not been attacked, not yet: a
salutary lesson to other countries, such as Iran, currently in the cross hairs.

In Britain, we have our own master illusions. Imagine someone on state benefits
caught claiming £40,000 of taxpayers' money in a second-home scam. A prison
sentence would almost certainly follow. But David Laws, chief secretary to the
Treasury, does the same and is described as follows: "I have always admired his
intelligence, his sense of public duty and his personal integrity" (Nick Clegg). "You
are a good and honourable man" (David Cameron). Laws is "a man of quite
exceptional nobility" (Julian Glover, the Guardian), and "a brilliant mind" (BBC).

The Oxbridge club and its associate members in politics and the media have tried to
link Laws's "error of judgement" and "naivety" to his "right to privacy" as a gay man,
an irrelevance. The "brilliant mind" is a wealthy, Cambridge-groomed investment
banker devoted to the noble task of cutting the public services of mostly poor and
honest people.

Crushing blow

Now imagine another public official, the force behind one of the great war criminals
and liars. This official "spun" the illegal invasion of a defenceless country that resulted
in the deaths of at least a million people and the dispossession of many more: in
effect, the crushing of a human society. If this was the Balkans or Africa, he would
very likely have been indicted by the International Criminal Court.

But crime pays for the clubbable. In quick step with the Laws affair, this truth was
demonstrated by the continuing celebration of Alastair Campbell, whose frequent
media appearances provide a vicarious thrill for the liberal intelligentsia. To the
Guardian, Campbell is "bullish, sometimes misdirected, but unafraid to press on
where others might have faltered". The Guardian's immediate interest is its
"exclusive" publication of Campbell's "politically explosive" and "uncut" diaries. Here is
a flavour: "Saturday 14 May. I called Peter [Mandelson] and asked why he didn't
return my calls yesterday. 'You know why.' 'No, I don't.' He said he was incandescent
at my Newsnight interview . . .'"

In a promotional interview with the Guardian, Campbell dispensed more of this dated
incest, referring just once to the bloodbath for which he was a principal apologist.
"Did Iraq lose us support in 2005?" he asked rhetorically. "Without a doubt . . ."
Thus, a criminal tragedy equal in scale to the Rwandan genocide was dismissed as a
"loss" for New Labour: a master illusion of notable profanity.