The media is getting played again...
I’ve been amazed, in the last thirty-six hours or so, at the breathless coverage I’ve seen of the latest strikes on Syria. It’s driving me nuts that every time the media gets hold of footage of a missile being fired from a ship, they suspend all critical thought, and their job, it seems, becomes merely on-air reading of verbatim data printed on military press releases.
I tend to think that any appearance of conflict between Trump and Putin is completely manufactured. We’ve been told again and again that Trump and Putin have talked on the phone, but we rarely get details of what they talk about. How about ongoing collusion? If Trump and Putin did in fact collude to steal the election — and even if they didn’t, for that matter — it’s clear that Trump’s now being president is good for both of them, so they both have a motive to make it appear as though they are not now, and never have, worked in concert. What better way to make it appear as if they’re actually at one another’s throats than to drop a few bombs in Syria?
So what would that look like?
Well, first, have Trump claim that he wants to get out of Syria, to appeal to his isolationist base. Check. Next, have Syria flare up again so that Trump can self-righteously not make good on the promise he just made, despite having in the past ignored children dying in gas attacks to criticize his predecessor’s involvement in Syria. Also, new attacks in Syria will also have the effect of giving Trump’s isolationist base a hard on for firing off a few more missiles.
Check.
Now have Trump telegraph his intention to bomb Syria, despite his having criticized this kind of tactic in the past. This accomplishes a few things. It makes him sound tough, and it lets the Russians, and the Syrians, get the hell out of the way. Without Hans Blix creeping around in the country to verify the location of the chemical weapons, how do we know that Syria didn’t just move their stockpiles? Wouldn’t you have moved them to a non-bombable location, given the fact that Trump gave you a 48-hour heads up of what he was going to do?
Check.
Of course, impending bombs won’t play great in Russia given Putin’s tough talk, so have Putin threaten to shoot American missiles down. There’s no need to actually do so, because you can suppress the news inside Russia — but it sounds good, so put out the threat so that it looks like Putin is really steaming mad at Trump. Check.
Now, bomb Syria. Don’t target personnel — you don’t want to kill any Russians! — and aim for the the most likely targets, the ones you know were probably emptied out, because you gave them tons of warning. Make sure all the media outlets are informed, and wait until the Michael Cohen news breaks, and, most important, wait until Friday night so that bombing coverage wins the weekend.
If you do all this, the Russians won’t fire a missile at you, and, notably, there will be no attempt to even engage American aircraft.
Check.
Last, declare “Mission Accomplished” when there’s no one who can actually check up on what exactly was accomplished. When Bush got hamstrung with this, he didn’t actually utter the phrase, “Mission Accomplished,” though he said a bunch of other stupid stuff. The banner was for the ship’s celebration, and the ship’s narrow “mission,” particular to that crew, was in fact accomplished — so what Bush was really guilty of was moronically terrible optics. But you can have Trump actually say it, because there won’t be any media on the ground, and they’ll be reduced to reporting on how many missiles were fired, and endlessly repeating footage of missiles taking off from ships — because that’s all they’ve got on the story.
Check.
There’s no downside to this as a strategy. Sure, you can’t completely kill the Cohen story, but every story that appears that isn’t about Cohen takes up space that would otherwise be about Cohen. It’s win-win for you, and yet another win because you don’t have to pay for it — the American public owns all those missiles.
Last, having the military declare the strikes a resounding success — we have no embedded reporters now, so we’ll just have to take their word for it.
Check.
After the strikes, more than one foreign correspondent, excitedly reporting live before haunting foreign cityscapes, commented on just how complete the military’s reports on the strikes were this time around. They don’t usually do that! I wonder why.
And I wonder when a war reporter will have the courage to ask, on air, whether they are being used as a pawn, and whether the real news is not the strike at all, but the malfeasance the strike is supposed to disguise.
