02/08/08 – Isabel McDonald – The Scott Horton Show

I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller, I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her...
All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and our first guest today is Isabel McDonald.
She's the communications director at FAIR, that's Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Their website is FAIR.org, and we're running an article by them today as the spotlight on AntiWar.com.
It's called, The Humanitarian Temptation, Calling for War to Bring Peace to Darfur, by Julie Holler.
And so, welcome to the show, Isabel McDonald.
Nice to talk to you.
Hello to your listeners at AntiWar.com.
Well, we're very happy to have you today.
And I really like this article because it's a criticism from somewhere.
I don't mean to overcharacterize you or anything, because I don't really know your organization that well, but it seems to be a criticism of the left, from the left, somewhere in there.
It's the loudest voices in America, besides John McCain's, calling for American military intervention in the Sudan seems to come from do-gooder liberals, George Clooney types and so forth, who think that American power absolutely is required to intervene in the Sudan for humanitarian reasons.
And so, I'm always interested in arguments like that, where it's not one side attacking the other, but parts of one side attacking itself, so to speak.
Yeah, well, I think that it is very interesting to look at.
I mean, it's interesting that you contrast the calls for intervention in Darfur with the voices of Republicans like John McCain for continuing the Iraq war along the course that Bush has set.
Because it is, I mean, the comparison, there is rarely a comparison that is drawn between what is going on in Darfur and what is going on in Iraq.
But both, in effect, are large-scale humanitarian crises.
And you can see in a lot of the editorial pages in the U.S. media, that there is a much greater willingness to acknowledge crisis in Darfur than there is in Iraq, where there have been, there is a greater number, objectively, there is a much greater number of refugees, both internally and externally, displaced Iraqis who have been forced to leave their homes because of the dangers that have been wrought by continuing U.S. occupation in Iraq.
Right.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, and the way, the thing that Julie Holler, who is a contributing writer to Fares Magazine Extra, really takes up in this article, is the way that these media calls have really distorted what is going on in Darfur, misrepresenting the conflict in a way that could potentially, if these calls do result in an intervention, or surely they're having some effect because we're seeing political leaders talk about it increasingly, in terms of, like George Bush and other political leaders calling for some kind of intervention in Darfur.
And if we follow the course that these media pundits have been putting forth, most notably Christoph in the New York Times, we will actually see, possibly, a worsening of the situation.
All right, now, before we get through some of those distortions of the nature of the conflict, because I think that's all very important and worth going over, but first of all, I wanted to settle on that point for a minute about the idea that America, which caused the greatest humanitarian crisis on Earth right now in Iraq, is supposed to solve the crisis in Darfur, is a bit ironic.
And I wanted to kind of further elaborate on that point with pointing to the news from just, what, a couple of, I think just last week, right, that the United Nations said, or two weeks ago, the United Nations said that the American-caused crisis in Somalia, that is the proxy war being fought by Ethiopia's military and the so-called government of Somalia against the former government there, that that has replaced the crisis in Darfur and in the Darfur region of Sudan as the greatest humanitarian crisis in Africa.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it goes to show that what the media identify as the top priorities for U.S. intervention, it's not determined by how many lives are being affected, but it often has a direct relationship with American government interests.
Right, now, see, that's a very important point.
In fact, my understanding is that there's not too much oil in western Sudan, in the Darfur region, but really the oil is in the south where the old civil war that's now at peace between the Arabs and the Christian and animist black Africans in the south of the country, that that's really where the oil land is.
But it does seem like there's some imperialists just looking to get a foothold in there somewhere at this point.
Yeah, well, as Julie pointed out in this article, there are over six billion barrels and possibly more in proven oil reserves in Sudan, so I think it's quite correct, too, that you note that.
And there's oil in Somalia, too.
Pardon me?
And there's oil in Somalia, as well.
Yeah, and there is oil in Somalia, as well.
And both Somalia and Sudan were identified as strategic points in the Bush war on terror.
And we can even identify, too, the way that they try to scaremonger about China making deals with the Sudanese and developing those oil resources instead of us.
We can tell that their attention is on that issue.
Yeah, absolutely.
And what we rarely see in the media discussion is the question of whether the United States has a right to the resources of other countries.
Now, wouldn't that be interesting to have that debate, huh?
It would be very interesting.
And I think that one would find that there was a difference in what the American public thought about that matter, about whether tax dollars that could be spent on health care should be invested in pursuing oil reserves for American oil companies or whether it would be better to keep that money for social programs.
I think that there would probably be a quite different consensus that would be found through a – if that question was posed directly to the American public, then what we see is the guiding assumptions underlying much of the American corporate media commentary.
Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that, especially when Adam Smith debunked the idea that it mattered who was in charge of doing the actual pumping 230 years ago.
And it really doesn't matter who pumps it.
It's a liquid on a world market.
It's going to get to market.
It doesn't matter who pumps it.
Yeah, so basically what we're looking at in the Darfur is a humanitarian crisis.
Most aid organizations agree that the scale of the crisis has decreased in terms of the number of people who are dying, particularly from violent attack, has actually declined in the last couple of years.
Right, it says here that the peak was really in 2004 and 2005 was the worst violence.
Yeah, exactly.
And this is not something that gets a lot of attention in the rather oversimplified media discussion of what is going on in Darfur.
So undoubtedly there is a severe humanitarian crisis and there are a lot of deaths, but at this point this is largely from lack of humanitarian services.
And so what the media, in contrast to that, what we're being fed in the media is this line about how, there's a quote in the Columbus Dispatch about how the conflict is basically about rampaging Arab militias, slaughtering black non-Arabs.
And I'd like to just unpack that a little bit, because first of all, as I just mentioned, the conflict, unlike this kind of representation, is not actually so much about deaths from violence at this stage.
And furthermore, the contrast that the media draw between the Arabs and the Africans, or the Arabs and the black non-Arabs, is very oversimplifying.
Right, they're really talking about that war, the old war that's over now in the South, the war in Darfur is between Sunni Arabs on both sides.
Yeah, so the way that these distinctions and the identities of the different groups are quite fluid, and this is something that people with expertise on this area will really point to, is that you really can't just draw that kind of a simple demarcation between Arab and black.
It really simplifies the narrative.
And what's more, it also really feeds in, I think for the purposes of media critique, we can see that it feeds into a discourse that is very prevalent in an era of the war on terror, where there is a maligned Arab enemy.
And it just, in this case, doesn't fit at all, and it really is an oversimplification that does not serve a public that is trying to seek to understand this issue better.
I have a friend named Bill Kelsey, who's a pilot for a non-governmental organization, a relief pilot, who flies UN types and very important people and so forth around, delivers food aid to refugee camps and that kind of thing.
And he's explained to me for years now that this is really all a battle between nomads and farmers, that you have the encroaching Sahara Desert, and you have nomads who are being pushed by geography, basically, into settled land, and they're letting their camels eat all the farmers' tomatoes.
And the farmers are fighting back, and eventually this turned into gang warfare.
And he said there's tinges of ethnicity in there, but like you said, it's so complicated and really a fluid situation as to who's on whose side.
But basically what we're talking about is a clash between nomads and farmers that's been going on for thousands of years.
This is certainly nothing a bunch of North Americans can solve over there.
Yeah, it's about resources.
I think as a lot of conflicts that get simplified in Western media coverage of conflict in Africa, they tend to emphasize ethnicity in a way that's often counterproductive, and erase these more fundamental questions about struggles over power and over resources, which are what politics is really made out of in most places in the world, right?
Yeah, and I really like the way this article is focused, not just on the truth underlying the matter, but on quote after quote after quote of these media people, who basically are having a policy discussion about a Sudan that exists in their imagination, rather than what's really happening in the world.
And this is supposed to be the cream of the crop of the American media, but for example, and I guess this is what you were just paraphrasing Christoph, saying quote, so far several hundred thousand black people have been slaughtered in Darfur.
He's basically talking about a place that exists in his mind, not actually what's happening in that country.
Absolutely, and the model that he then uses, because he's one of the prominent media commentators who has really pushed this issue into the national media agenda, and he is really relying on a very simplistic analysis of who the different groups are.
But increasingly, people who are working on the ground in Darfur, especially humanitarian assistance organizations, report that there are many sides in the conflict, and violence is being perpetrated by not just these so-called Arab Janjaweed fighters, but by many different groups, and the number of groups has been proliferating.
And when you look at what organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, argues, what is at stake?
Because there are so many different actors in the conflict, and the situation is so complicated, is that by launching a military intervention, the situation could really worsen, and the humanitarian crisis, which is how they characterize the crisis right now, is not a genocide as some people have described it, but is a humanitarian crisis.
The humanitarian activities would, in the case of a military intervention, be cut off, which would undoubtedly be much worse for the citizens of Darfur.
So that's something that's really missing from the media discussion, but it is something that a lot of humanitarian groups are saying.
Everybody, I'm talking with Isabel McDonald.
She's the communications director from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and something else that's not brought up here, well, anywhere else except, I guess, in your article, is the fact that we can already see how the failure to put this in realistic terms in the Western debate has already caused problems, where the author here of this article describes a peace deal that was a ceasefire agreement, basically, that almost worked out, and yet because of the emphasis on the UN must do something, NATO must do something, peacekeeping force from somewhere else must come and impose peace, etc., the actual deal that was being brokered between warring factions fell away.
Yeah, and Julie Holler, the author of the article, actually argues that there's a case to be made that it's the media's focus on military intervention that is, in part, perhaps to blame for the peace process breaking down, because what has happened with all these pushes for a military intervention, which is misnamed a humanitarian intervention in the media, is that it gives unrealistic hopes to the rebels who are fighting against the Sudanese government that they will have the backing of these powerful foreign militaries.
And actually, one of the rebel leaders refused to sign a peace agreement saying that he wanted a guarantee of implementation, as happened in Bosnia, which, in other words, means that he wanted an assurance that there would be military intervention to back up his position.
And that is obviously a problem if one is looking towards reaching a peace deal.
And in normal scenarios, I think one thing that is important that this article brings out is the effect of the framing of what's happening in Darfur as a genocide, because under international law, you would only have military intervention as a last resort, right?
You would have an attempt at a peace agreement that precedes the very last resort, which is military intervention.
So the theory goes, anyway, yeah.
But this is something that we've really seen shift over the last several years, and the Kosovo War was very important in setting a precedent for a kind of humanitarian intervention that did not follow that normal procedure.
And the definition of what is going on in a crisis zone like Darfur as genocide is extremely instrumental in changing the framework that is used in international law.
So I think that the media culpability also has to be seen at that level.
Let me make sure I understand you now.
You're saying when Western powers are trying to justify intervening in somebody else's country, say, for example, a civil war like it could be described in Sudan or in Kosovo in the 1990s, the Kosovo-Serbia situation, that by calling it genocide, they get to circumvent the normal procedures for at least trying or pretending to try to work out a real peace deal.
They get to skip those steps and go right to war by hurling the word genocide around.
Exactly.
Because the UN Genocide Convention obliges nations that ratify it, which includes the United States, to stand up to genocide.
Very interesting.
And, of course, the so-called peace deal, which I appreciate the fact that you don't count this because they did sort of pretend in the case of Kosovo to have a peace deal called the Rambouillet Accord that said, Milosevic, you get to let NATO occupy all of your country, including your Capitol building, or we're going to bomb you.
And that was the Rambouillet Peace Accord.
So I'm glad you don't count that because it doesn't really count.
Yeah, well, this is what Noam Chomsky has referred to as the new military humanism, right?
Kosovo is a really instrumental precedent for the move towards this kind of intervention, military intervention masquerading as humanitarianism.
And the media has, I mean, to this day holds up Kosovo as an example of a war that was where the U.S. was on the right side.
It was a moral war.
This is what we hear repeatedly in the media.
And it's now being brought into the discussion of possible courses of action in Darfur as a precedent.
And, in fact, Christoph in the Times has written about how because NATO intervened in Kosovo after white people were killed in his very simplistic analysis of the role of race in these conflicts, they should now intervene in Darfur to save the black people who have been killed.
Oh, well, yeah, it's only fair.
Yeah, and again, no question whether our government has the right to do this.
Of course, if one of the states within the union turned into a bloody tyranny, then the national government of this country is obligated in the Constitution to guarantee a Republican form of government to every state in this union.
And that would certainly, if necessary, would be within their jurisdiction to send in troops to make sure that there's a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary and so forth to guarantee the rights of the people in a state in this union.
But it doesn't say that about the whole world anywhere in there.
Yeah.
It really is the question that nobody asks.
This is a debate that, unfortunately, often does not happen in the corporate media.
We have to rely on alternative media outlets like this one to raise these really pressing issues.
Well, and I really like the way you guys got it right in your article here.
Let me see if I can find the quote paging through here.
Somebody bragging that, yeah, we stopped the genocide in Kosovo after only 10,000 had died, which completely ignored the fact that they told us that hundreds of thousands were dying, and that's why we had to intervene.
The 10,000, that wasn't a genocide at all.
Those were battle deaths.
Yeah.
Actually, before NATO intervened in Kosovo, there were 2,500 people who'd been killed.
2,500.
Hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced.
And I think this is really instructive in terms of the cautions that we're getting from humanitarian organizations that are working in Darfur, because the NATO intervention in Kosovo should be a lesson in how Western intervention in conflict, even though it calls itself humanitarian, can actually escalate problems.
Because after NATO started bombing, the number of people killed escalated, and there were 10,000 people who were killed.
There were more than a million people who were displaced.
And to this day, Kosovo is under UN occupation.
There are severe divisions in terms of ethnicity.
There has been a lot of violence.
So it's really not a model that one should look to.
But unfortunately, the media narrative that is being painted really whitewashing the history of the hugely negative impact that the NATO intervention had in Kosovo makes it possible for pundits today to hold it up as a prime example of a successful NATO intervention.
Right.
And I think that that conventional wisdom actually has stuck, that Kosovo was a good war, that people who don't know really anything about it but that it happened would tend to say, well, that one worked out, right?
As far as they know, it did.
And, you know, when you brought up the race angle that, oh, we saved the white people in Kosovo, which it was actually fighting against the Western Christians in favor of the Bosnian, or not the Bosnian, but the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo.
So that's not even really right.
But anyway, so therefore we have to go intervene in Darfur just to show how colorblind we are.
And that was actually a big part of the same argument for the Bush policy in not just Iraq, but across the Middle East.
In fact, Connelisa Rice once even said the kind of people who were opposed to going and liberating the Arabs, because you don't believe they can have democracy like we do, you're the kind of people who kept Rosa Parks at the back of the bus, you racist bigots, you who don't believe in the quality of Arabs to live like we do.
Yeah, well I think that Iraq is another example of a conflict where simplistic media reporting really does not do justice to the complexity of the groups and the identities of Iraqis, and actually is part and parcel of the American strategy of dividing Iraq along sectarian lines.
So I think that often the media reporting reflects policies of escalating divisions between groups in places where the U.S. is intervening.
And certainly I think that this has been the case in Darfur, and I would say it's also been the case in Iraq.
So what's interesting about this, I guess sort of the first point you made, right, or one of the first points you made was that the violence now is actually more from food deprivation and the upsetting of society and the breakdown of trade and that kind of thing, rather than outright violence, as opposed to, I mean, we're talking about the most basic facts of the situation at that point, and yet what we have here is, well I guess an economist would say, David Henderson would say, imperfect information.
We're supposed to go intervene in a place where really the best we know is what we read from Christoph or Jamie Kirchick over at the New Republic is the best information we have about the situation.
And it reminded me of a story I read in I think the New York Times just a few months ago, where just on basic, never even mind troops and peacekeepers and baby blue helmets and all that kind of thing, but even just food aid.
There was a guy who had, in some poor African country, created a business making vegetable oil, and he was employing hundreds of people and driving around in a Lexus, and things were going really well.
And then the do-gooders came in with the food aid from Western Europe and dumped however many million tons of vegetable oil on the market and completely destroyed his business and destroyed the livelihoods of all the people who were working for him and everything else.
And it's that imperfect information or the lack of local information to even know how to help, even if your intentions have nothing to do with oil, even if your intentions are as big-hearted as they claim, the interventionists can't really know what to do in order to help the people who really need it.
Yeah, well I think that what you just raised is an example.
I mean, policies of dumping food aid are really an important part of the picture.
If we had a responsible press that actually informed us about different parts of the world that we rarely hear any substantive coverage about, and I think that most of Africa definitely falls into that category, we would know about the history of American food dumping, which has had a really devastating effect in many parts of the world on undermining local production.
And we would also have information about the structural, economic structural constraints on a lot of countries in Africa that are essential to understand if we're going to talk about issues of poverty and the underlying issues that the do-gooders would want to address in helping.
So I think that overall there is a huge amount of room for U.S. media to provide much better coverage of Africa generally.
And in the case of Darfur, I think where they could start would be by reporting the conflict not through the prism of a genocide, which humanitarian groups working there claim it is not.
There just isn't evidence that that is what's going on and that that makes sense as the framework, unless you're just ideologically committed to the idea of military intervention.
But it shouldn't be the role of the press to precipitate a military intervention that might be counterproductive.
The press should be reporting on the facts.
And so that would mean reporting it as a humanitarian crisis, which it is.
And it would entail a much more accurate depiction of who the various groups who have a stake in this issue are, getting beyond the simplistic dichotomy that has been set up by many American media commentators about how this conflict pits Arabs against Blacks, which is, as we've discussed, is not accurate.
It really distorts the fluid identities of these different groups, and it's completely a mismention of the underlying struggles over resources that are at play.
And there would be better reporting on the peace process, so that people would really understand about the other options, the peaceful options for resolving the conflict, and people would not feel that there needed to be an intervention in order to save lives in Darfur, because that's just not true.
But that is what we're getting from the media, which is a disgrace.
Yeah.
Well, it's just like with torture or with, well, any kind of bureaucracy.
They all have their own weight, and they all want an excuse to keep going.
We have an African command now.
We have to use it for something.
And this is something that I would like to see reported more in media when they talk about Darfur and Sudan and Somalia, for that matter, is that this policy, by the way, a policy which, and correct me if I'm wrong, the co-frontrunners over there on the Democratic side, Hillary and Obama, and John McCain, the frontrunner on the Republican side, all hold in common that something must be done in Darfur.
This is exactly what Osama bin Laden wants and, in fact, predicted.
And it was a Reuters story back in the summer of 2006 where he said, you know, if you're a true Mujahideen warrior and you love God, well, hey, look out, because the Americans are going to Somalia and the Americans are going to Sudan, and God calls you to go there and fight them, et cetera.
And is this really what we want to do, is to spread the war on terrorism all the way, what, to Morocco?
I mean, at what point are we going to learn the lesson that Osama bin Laden is trying to bait us into these places as best he can and use them to further his cause at our expense?
Well, I think the African command is also the Bush administration's cause.
I don't think it's, I think that they're playing to the, they're sort of working from the same script, the Bush administration and Osama bin Laden.
And I think that it's the job of the media to really question that, right?
Right.
Well, and the same thing goes for Iran.
You know, there's been al-Qaida letters and so forth that have been published where they literally are, the real al-Qaida in Pakistan are telling the pretend al-Qaida in Iraq, do everything you can to try to foment an American war against Iran.
They're next on our hit list, the Shiite mullahs there.
So, yeah, you're right.
It's just the same story five years later, still doing exactly what Osama bin Laden wants us to do.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
Thank you very much.
I was about to say that.
All right.
And have a great afternoon.
She's the communications director at Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting.
The article is by Julie Holler.
It's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
The humanitarian temptation calling for war to bring peace to Darfur.
Thanks very much for your time.
You're welcome.
Oh, and your listeners can also, if you're interested in more media analysis of the kind that we heard about today with Julie Holler's great article on Darfur, you can check out the FAIR website at www.fair.org, so www.fair.org.
And you can actually sign up to get online articles from our magazine sent to your inbox as soon as they come out so that you can stay on top of the latest media criticism of American intervention plans.
Great.
That sounds great.
I think I will sign right up for that.
That's www.fair.org.
Okay, great.
Thanks very much, Isabel.
All right.
Bye-bye.