A devalued War on Terror

The BOBW team has returned from a rather brief week in Ireland. While our pre-departure message did mention our belief that there would be lots of news over the Christmas break, 150,000 corpses in South and Southeast Asia was not what we had in mind. In trying to keep track of the disaster from outside our usual abode, we had plenty of excellent TV coverage from a dish, and good access to newspapers, but in terms of understanding how the coverage was playing in the US, our single source was Fox News, which is carried on the Sky dish in Britain and Ireland. Which made for an interesting experiment in terms of how to relate what they were saying to the actual mood in the States.

Leaving aside the frightening thought that some Sky viewers might be watching Fox without making the necessary adjustments, Fox functioned quite well as an iceberg model of US political news -- anything threatening that they hinted at above the surface indicated much more serious problems underneath. So, with the disaster having happened early last Sunday morning, Fox was trying to get into the spirit of understanding the importance of the story, even when it didn't fall into their usual politics/terrorism beat. The anchors used their grave dismay tone a lot, which had been previously been reserved for tales of statuettes of the baby Jesus allegedly being removed from government facilities.

They tried so damned hard to get the pronunciations right, even though they should already know how to pronounce Aceh [as Atch-ay] since the Indonesian government has skillfully rolled the separarist rebellion there into just another entry in the War on Terror. But by Tuesday, Fox was exhibiting a noticeable defensiveness about the White House response to the crisis -- signalled not so much by reporting that there was domestic and foreign criticism of the response, but by pre-emptive attacks on such critics. Who had lots to attack.

The Dr Evil-esque initial contribution of $15m. The complete invisibility of any top US officials, not least Dubya himself, until the lame duck Secretary of State, Colin Powell, could be found to hold a news conference. And then the rejoicing when there was evidence that Dubya was actually doing something, although 'something' consisted of having a meeting at his vacation home in Texas and holding a news conference afterwards*, for which technical problems put the poor dears at Fox in the position of having to broadcast audio only, not helping the sense that Dubya's heart is just not in this global affairs stuff.

And what of the implications of the disaster itself for Dubya's War on Terror and the quest to rid the world of Islamic WMDs? It's hard to see how the next WoT/WMD speech to an international audience can have much weight with the world, since it's so easy to do a calculation of the relative number of deaths from Saddam's WMDs versus this disaster. And given the coordination failures evident in the failure to limit the death toll, it's surely time to talk about the clear sapping of global political effort by the US preoccupation with the WoT and WMDs. The garden variety international summit was never a great forum to begin with, given the pre-written communiques and the boosterish bromides about making everyone better off, but the ineffectiveness has only increased with the compulsory agenda items of WoT/WMD crowding out other issues.

Indeed, there were some signs of sense recently when the Association of South East Asian nations indicated that they might bar Australia from future meetings, since PM John Howard's attempts to direct the agenda towards Dubya's pet topics had been so disruptive. But anyway, our point is that it surely would have helped if some Asian summit over the last 10 years had gotten around to discussing a tsunami warning system. A different USA -- a previous more benevolent, more paternalistic, less single-issue participant in international affairs, might have pushed this process along. But not the current one, which thus faces a world that is starting to tune it out. What's the frequency Dubya?

*UPDATE: The closing exchange of this news conference show that for Dubya, steady leadership in a time of change means staying focused on priorities even in times of turmoil:

Q Any plans for New Year's Eve?
THE PRESIDENT: Early to bed.
Q New Year's resolutions?
THE PRESIDENT: I'll let you know. Already gave you a hint on one, which is my waistline. I'm trying to set an example.
Thank you all.