“Iranian-backed Shiite militia”

I heard this phrase on the local New York news station in reference to a bomb attack, and it set off a whole belfry-full of alarms. It immediately conjured the 1970s civil war in Angola about which the U.S. news media couldn’t formulate two sentences without identifying one side as the ‘Cuban-led Soviet-backed’ forces. It was as if the networks had all been through a Baghwan Sri Rashneesh mantra training. They never called the other side the ‘apartheid-led, U.S.-backed UNITA’, which it was, because that would have been giving away the game.

Having assembled a perfectly Manichaean set of players, the white hats versus the black hats, it was easy to subtly justify the U.S. meddling on the side of the extremely dubious Jonas Savimbi and the UNITA ‘forces’. Had they been the bad guys, the papers would have called them ‘marxist insurgents’ or ‘guerrillas’ or today ‘terrorists’. I remember the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett telling a roomful of us about his time covering that war and once reading over the shoulder of the guy from Newsweek whose editor had cabled him, ‘Not interested in UNITA atrocities.’ The fix was in.

I raise this turn of phrase for two reasons: first, the claim, attributed to U.S. military sources, sounded bogus as hell because the bomb had just gone off. How on earth could anyone pretend to know who had set off the thing so soon? That made it sound like fitting the facts around the pre-established narrative, and we certainly do have some precedent for that practice in Mr Bush’s war.

Secondly, laying anything bad that happens at the feet of the bad guys du jour, i.e. the Iranians, is not only a good way to distract attention from the ongoing nightmare but also fits the disturbing rumors about an imminent attack on Iran. I’m going to be listening for more references to the ‘Iranian-backed Shiite militia’ to see if the trope becomes standard fare, which might be significant. I won’t repeat the many learned expositions of why it’s a perfectly meaningless and quite stupid formulation, nor how Bush’s bumbling policy has created a huge triumph for the Iranians. But we’d be naïve to think he’s incapable of making things worse.