Spinning ... again

Oh how the spin works. Reading and watching the recent news I came across some very interesting examples of "spin." Here they are, not in any particular order.

Letting Hubble go
Watching The News Hour tonight, I saw the story of putting the Hubble telescope in the trash bin. It was an example of "balanced" spin. There were the Hubble supporters and scientists showing what Hubble had given us and what it might offer in the future. There were the sad NASA administrators arguing they loved the Hubble project, but it was too dangerous to send astronauts to replace the batteries. There was even a discussion about shifting money to the new Bush initiative to go back to the Moon and on to Mars.

What was left out? No one said a word about the fact that there is no military usage for Hubble. It is pure science. Heck, you can't even point it at Earth to spot "terrorist" targets.

Letting Iraq govern itself
We have all heard that the US is planning to turn over control of Iraq to the Iraqi's (kind of). Obviously, this is too dangerous a place for the US to step out of. Then there is the serious concern of Iraq turning into an "Islamist" state run by a fundementalist Islamic hierarchy. After all, didn't the US really invade Iraq to free the Iraqis, and give them a democracy?

Well here is an interesting bit of investigative journalism from Christopher Hayes at AlterNet (3/30/04), More Liberal Than Us. He points out that inspite of some very conservative voices on the Governing Council, that in many ways the "Transitional Administrative Law" (the new Iraqi constitution) is more progressive than the US constitution. For example:

Article 12: "All Iraqis are equal in their rights without regard to gender, sect, opinion, belief, nationality, religion, or origin, and they are equal before the law."

Article 13(H): "Each Iraqi has the right to privacy."

Article 14: "The individual has the right to security, education, health care, and social security."

Article 15: "No one may be unlawfully arrested or detained. ... Every person deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall have the right of recourse to a court to determine the legality of his arrest or detention without delay. ... Civilians may not be tried before a military tribunal. Special or exceptional courts may not be established."

Hayes adds nice comparisons to the US constitution, and I recommend the article. The spin here being that perhaps the public voicing of concerns about Iraqi self-governance are really that they will be too democratic. For all the hype, despots are actually much more controllable and predictable than democracies are.

Training the new Iraqi military
Obviously, Iraq needs its own military. US troops can't really leave until Iraqi's can defend themselves. There are two different articles related to this. The first was in the Washington Post on 3/28/04 - U.S. Plan Seeks to Build Civilian-Run Iraqi Army. The second is from Reuters 3/30/04 reports - U.S. Trains Iraqis to Serve in New Defense Ministry.

I don't know why the School of the Americas comes to mind, but it does. But one of the striking things for me is the "civilian-run" army. Excuse me, but doesn't army usually imply "civilian-run?" Armies that are not civilian-run are part of military regimes. Of course there are also "rebel forces" which I guess are also armies, but they too are by definition civilian-run as they are made up of rebelling civilians. Oh well, maybe I am just confused.

From the Post article: U.S. officials are moving rapidly to create a civilian-run Iraqi Defense Ministry that will work in tandem with the American military after the handover of Iraqi sovereignty on June 30 and could form the nucleus of a strategic alliance between the two countries.

Since February, about 50 Iraqi officials have been flown to Washington to attend a Pentagon-run school on how to recruit, train and equip a military that operates under civilian leadership, according to the retired U.S. Army colonel who directs the program. A class of 25 graduated on Friday from the three-week course, which included meetings with officials in Congress and the Defense and State departments.

In addition, a former militia leader has been picked to lead Iraq's new defense bureaucracy, according to two people familiar with the decision. Bruska Shaways, the former commander of an Iraqi Kurd paramilitary force, aided U.S. commanders in northern Iraq last year during the invasion of the country. His appointment comes as the U.S. military is seeking to disband independent Iraqi militias.

Yep, sounds very much like SOA.

And from Reuters: Gerald Thompson, a retired U.S. Army colonel who heads the training, said it focused on "thinking through strategy and resource allocation and management, but doing so in a system that is transparent and accountable and involves a participatory political system."

Like the transparency and accountability of the military in the US?

Finally, those elusive Iraqi WMDs
As we all know, after looking high and low, far and wide, and sifting tons of sand, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. Well, the US isn't giving up on the hunt, but the U.S. Weapons Hunt Shifts Focus to 'Intent' in Iraq (Reuters, 3/30/04):

The U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will continue despite the failure so far to find them but the focus now includes whether Saddam Hussein intended to develop such weapons, the chief U.S. arms hunter said on Tuesday.

Oh please. One of the hardest things to prove is "intent." Not only that, the US has had access to all known records in Iraq for almost a year. Don't you think that if anything proving intent were there that it would have been shouted from the roof tops? Of course, the plan is to substantiate the other part of selling the invasion of Iraq - that Hussein was just waiting for the chance to directly attack the US.

Oh well, interesting spins don't you think?

Posted by rowan at March 31, 2004 9:42 PM | TrackBack | [eMail this article!] |