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MR. ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
Editor at Large, Washington Times and UPI
OPENING PLENARY SESSION
“How to View 9/ll One Year After”
Thank you for that very generous introduction. Thank you for recalling some of those anecdotes, which I’d rather forget about. You know, criticism is prejudice made plausible. I didn’t say that. It was H.L. Mencken, one of our most famous journalists and social critics. He died in the twenties but had a great impact by writing about American English as opposed to English English, and I think his characterization of journalists is still an evergreen: “The only qualities for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability. The capacity to steal other people’s ideas and phrases is also invaluable.”
Prior to 9/11—I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but we’ve got to see where we’ve come from—most of the English-language newspapers in the developing world carried more foreign news than our two or three top dailies in this country combined. Since the end of the Cold War, what has happened, of course, and after the Gulf War, was that American editors and TV producers decided in their infinite wisdom that Americans didn’t care about foreign news, and they focused instead on domestic stories, which were easier to cover and certainly less expensive. This led to what I call the constant melodrama of constant trivia.
We had Monica Lewinsky, we had Gary Condit—he was, incidentally, liberated by Osama bin Laden. We had two years of O.J. Simpson. Monica Lewinsky was 14 months. This blinded us, it seems to me, to the new forces shaping the developing world, particularly the Muslim world. During most of the 1990s, editors and TV producers in this country—my criticism does not apply to foreign journalism—ignored what I consider to be some of the most important stories in the world, to which Bill Richardson alluded.
For the major conglomerates and mega-companies that own the media giants in this country, the bottom line reigned supreme. The public good became, in my judgment, a quaint concept relegated to academic debates, as was the journalistic duty of taking what is important and making it interesting. Thus, two very important reports prior to 9/11—presidential commission reports known as the Hart-Rudman report and the Bremer Commission report—which warned us that major acts of terrorism were going to be taking place in the United States and would cause thousands of casualties, were promptly ignored by the media. They were really quite prescient about what was about to happen in the United States, and one was just one year before 9/11.
The dumbing down of the media led to the dumbing down of America during that period. W.C. Fields, who was a man not exactly noted for his religious convictions, was on his deathbed one day reading the Bible, and a friend said, what are you doing? He said, looking for loopholes. Which is an appropriate allegory for how most governments and the media have been behaving since our twin victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War, all the way up to 9/11, that is.
Now, as Bill Richardson said, we have television 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, filling airtime with people who don’t have the faintest idea what they’re talking about but they say it very well. You have pundits and journalists today interchangeable on the airways. That shouldn’t be, but it is. And you have today a new journalism of assertion, which has replaced a journalism that I grew up with, which is journalism of verification. What’s true or not true is no longer the compass bearing, as rumor, gossip, innuendo, factoid, disinformation, and misinformation frequently travel as fast as this new universal town crier called the Internet will carry it. Churchill used to say, a lie can travel halfway around the world before truth can put its shoes on. Today, of course, it travels around the world many times before anyone can catch up.
The talking heads in this country—I’m sure you’ve noticed it since you arrived—on television are frequently an embarrassment to the profession. These are the shows where you have to give an opinion, right or wrong, informed or not. There is no penalty for absurdity. You even get your own show. We had Larry King interviewing Chris Matthews and Chris Matthews interviewing Larry King, which is what I call incestuous journalism.
Prior to 9/11, 99 percent of Americans did not know that Osama bin Laden, whom I first met as a young man in Jedda when he was 14 years old, had a global terror network that spanned some 60 countries. Nor did we know about Pakistan’s Koranic schools. In the last 11 years practically 4 million kids have been taught in these free Koranic schools that you’ve read much about, known as madrassas, where they learn the Koran by heart. But interspersed with all of this are hate-America, hate-Israel, and hate-India messages. This is where, of course, the recruits came from for the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan across the border.
Nor did 99 percent of Americans realize that the madrassas were funded by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia. There was a deal going back to 1979 when the grand mosque in Mecca was occupied by extremists, terrorists at the time, and it took three weeks to get them out of the catacombs. The French had to come in with special equipment and actually did the job for the Saudis. This is, of course denied, as no non-Muslim is supposed to set foot in Mecca. The deal was made at that time: You, the clergy, do not criticize us, the royal family, and in exchange you will get our largesse to spread the good word of Wahhabism around the world.
Just to try to figure out where all of this is going, remember what was happening at the turn of the nineteenth century. At that time Hitler was 11. Mussolini was a pacifist, 17 years old, and Lenin was 30 and about to go into exile after a brief internment in Siberia. No one had ever heard in those days of Nazis or fascists, and communists were socialists without a sense of humor. Four years into the twentieth century, Japan suddenly burst onto the world stage by sinking the entire Russian fleet in 24 hours. In 1910 a runaway international best-seller by Norman Angel was called The Grand Illusion. Its thesis was that the great powers were now so economically interdependent that war was unthinkable. Of course, we had the war to end all wars four years later, started by one assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo. In other words, political forecasting and economic prognostication has made astrology look respectable.
Saul Bellow once said that a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep, and as we know, the need for illusion is an evergreen commodity. In his book The Pursuit of the Ideal, Isaiah Berlin wrote that utopias have their value. Nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities, but as a guide to conduct they can prove literally fatal.
All I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that the world today is a lot safer today than it will be 10 years from now. Much global turmoil lies ahead as the forces of nationalism, fundamentalism, globalism, and increasingly a new term, “transnationalism” sort themselves out. I guarantee you today that somebody somewhere is planning to take the lead in a post-capitalist world, a system that the teeming, impoverished millions all over the world can identify with.
If present trends continue, with democratic governments dominated by political leaders whose main concern is how to get themselves reelected, democracy and the public good may be deemed incompatible again, as indeed it was in Europe in the twenties and thirties.
I don’t think it takes rocket science to figure out the damage done to America’s image as the citadel of democratic capitalism by the age of gluttony on Wall Street. These crypto-capitalist saboteurs are the fodder that feeds transnational progressivism. This is the new liberal ideology rooted in NGOs. We journalists, it seems to me, tend to lose sight of our principal duty, which of course is to inform, but also to illuminate and dramatize major trends so that our political leaders can muster the courage to resort to unpopular measures that will later be seen as acts of visionary statesmanship. The Middle East and our Israel-can-do-no-wrong and Sharon-is-a-man-of-peace policy is an obvious case in point.
After five assignments in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India since 9/11, it is hard for me to escape the conclusion that we do not understand enough about our new enemies. During the Cold War we nurtured an army of specialists and experts on everything to do with the Soviet Union, its satellites, communism in general. They had a perfect understanding of the subversive enterprises of our major enemies, down to the individual personalities of their leaders. We knew who they were, their histories, numbers, location, habits, routine movements, et cetera. But now we have the rising specter of asymmetric warfare, and it is forcing us to reexamine virtually all aspects of intelligence, war fighting, and public safety.
Situational awareness has a whole new meaning when the battle space now encompasses our homes and our families. Our new enemies possess a combination of strong will, knowledge of our society, significant human and financial resources, and an intense hatred of just about everything we stand for. The Internet has provided the transnational terror network with cheap, secure, robust point-to-point communications and a cultural tool of unprecedented power.
I’d like to talk about the current crisis about Iraq. I’ve known that country since 1952. I covered it when it was struggling for democracy, and I was there for the assassination of King Faisal and Prime Minister Nuri Said. But it seems to me that the current focus on Iraq, which has now pushed the war against terrorism aside, is a function of the fact that Afghanistan has not been the roaring success that we have read about in the papers. It’s also a function of the fact that today there is already a new Afghanistan, and that is called Pakistan. Al-Qaeda today and the Taliban have thousands of their people in Pakistan, protected in large part by an extremist religious network, the madrassas, the mosques, but also key elements of the Interservices intelligence agency, the infamous ISI.
So why suddenly the focus on Iraq? I think it is to detract from the fact that the war against international terrorism is not going as well as we had been led to expect. And it seems to me, too, another thing that always amazes me is how we can go on repeating at the highest level in this country that there is no connection between transnational terrorism and the fact that half of humanity is getting along on two dollars a day or less. That we have today 2 billion people—that’s one-third of humanity—who are 14 years of age or less, and most of them are in the impoverished parts of the world.
Clearly despair does indeed have a direct link to terrorism. One should study, and I’ve studied this very carefully, the origins of al-Qaeda, the origins of Osama bin Laden’s thinking. But all of this has suddenly been forgotten about because Iraq is the most important thing we have to face. It is an imminent danger. Well, that, I’m sorry, happens to be in my judgment twaddle in all its unrationed splendor. It is not an imminent danger. It could become imminent. Let’s assume that he does obtain one nuclear or two nuclear weapons in the next few months or the next few years. Where is Saddam going to use them? If he were going to use them, he would disappear as a country the next day.
I’m just trying to inject a little dose of reality, and I’m sure we'll have plenty of opportunity to talk later on. Thank you.
