Remora

LI saw the movie Chicago yesterday. We are a sucker for musicals. We notice that the New Yorker movie reviewer, Anthony Lane, is referentially lost on this one. Wet behind the ears. He is all about Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Chicago is all about the Three Penny Opera and Caberet. Lane goes into an unfortunate disquisition about the way audiences of yore could accept the musical's premise -- that people break into song and dance in ordinary life -- while audiences of today are much more cynical about that kind of thing. This just goes to show that Lane is reading too many pop sociology articles in the New Yorker. The contemporary audience is one of the most sentimental beasts ever conjured to the circus by fakirs and jugglers, there to be overawed by the most primitive tricks. Trained on happy endings and special effects, and cretinized, since childhood, by the grossly improbable logic of the standard movie narrative, this is not a cynical audience, so much as one expecting situation comedy to lie around every corner -- or a car chase. Theirs is a baby cynicism. Lane should watch MTV to see how, contra his supposition, the musical has taken over everyday life. It was the older audience, which had some vestigial sense of the modes of artifice allowable in art, who accepted the musical's premise for what it was -- a bracketing of, and so, at best, an intensification of, real life.

Speaking of the cynicism of babies, that flip side of the their utter gullibility... Chicago has one scene that is a real knockout. The lawyer, played by Richard Gere, gives a press conference with his client, played by Renee Zellinger. The conference turns into a dance scene with the press as marionnettes and the lawyer as the puppet-master. Watching this, I couldn't help but think of the press and Iraq. Puppetry is an over-used metaphor for control, but LI has nothing against an over-used metaphor if it works. It works in Chicago. It works in that other musical, too: Bush's War against Iraq.


Take the great nerve gas scare. On December 11, Washington Post's Barton Gellman came out with a story, breathlessly attributed to leaks from higher ups, that Iraq had delivered VX, a nerve gas, to an succadaneum of Al Qaeda -- a terrorist group in Lebanon named Asbat al-Ansar.

Gellman was much interviewed for this scoop, no doubt with the approval of WP's management. After all, it was good for the paper. He was on NPR and CNN, throwing off non-sequitors like:

"...there is no evidence that this transaction was approved or known by Saddam Hussein. There is a presumption that it would be very hard to take any of Iraq's secret cache of weapons out of Iraq without the government's knowledge. If the government did cooperate, it's also speculation, but the CIA reported it publicly not so long ago that the likeliest reason that Saddam would do so is if he believed he was in imminent danger of being unseated."


As Don Dwyer, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune pointed out, Gellman's story was gold to the Bush administration. The administration denied it -- but of course, the point was to get the story out there:

"Not surprisingly to Washington insiders, Bush administration spokesmen spent the day Dec. 12 denying the Post's report when other news organizations asked about it. It was thus able to have its cake and eat it too: It had gotten "evidence" of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection out to the American people through a respected reporter at a prestigious newspaper noted for its government reporting, while retaining the ability to deny the whole thing."

Iraq denied it too -- but the Iraqi government's denials are as convincing as their election results.

So -- the story is out there. The tattered honor of WP was gallantly upheld by the WP ombudsman, Michael Getler, who noted a week later that the story wavered between speculation, denial, and credible sources that were incredibly biased towards producing evidence of an al Qaida-Iraq tie in -- and were probably not leaking members of Asbat al-Ansar. But we all know that rumor, that many mouthed creature, perched (as Virgil saw) on the city gates, is what matters. The lawyer in Chicago didn't really care about the plausibility of his news releases, so much as the pervasity of them. So, too, the Bush administration can put the buzz in our ear and no later retraction, especially by an ombudsman, is going to be remembered.. Questions, of course, are for the unpatriotic.

Why, we ask unpatriotically, was Asbat al-ansar the intermediary in this little exchange of terror capital? The Center for Defense Information -- definitely steak tartar people -- has this to say about the group:


"Asbat al-Ansar has had a rather ineffectual history compared to many of the other groups on the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), yet its control of a tiny but significant piece of southern Lebanon threatens to return the country to civil war and derail the Middle East peace process."

The Council on Foreign Relations spots them at around 300 members. They share the al Qaida obsession with bringing back the caliphate. Now, if there is one thing Saddam Hussein is not all about, it is bringing back the caliphate. That would be the end of him. So we are forced back to the CIA's idea: Hussein, desperate to strike at the US, has decided to let this little matter of the caliphate lapse, and convey nerve gas through a group that is notorious for internal feuding to al Qaida. The upshot is that either Asbat al-Ansar or al-Qaida has the nerve gas.


The Guardian's Brian Whitacker has the best description of Gellman's story. The Guardian story came out four days after WP gave us the scoop:

"The reporter had clearly spoken to a lot of different people but he failed - not for want of effort - to substantiate the claim that Iraq provided al-Qaida with nerve gas. Although some officials were happy to describe the claim as "credible", none appeared willing to stand up and say that they, personally, believed it.

The sensible course of action at that stage would have been to abandon the story, or at least file it away in the hope of more evidence coming to light. That might have happened with any other story, but in the case of Iraq at present the temptation to publish is hard to resist."

"Sensible" begs Lenin's question: who benefits?

As for the WP -- what has happened in the three weeks since this paper clinched the tie between Saddam and Al Quaeda? There's been an odd silence. Look up Asbat al-Ansar on their search engine and you come up with no recent stories -- although one would expect a rush, as we try to determine if these mad 300 people possess the weapons to decimate D.C. and Falls Church, Va. in one fell swoop. We suspect that the story isn't going to be followed up. It has served its purpose.

Our upcoming war with Iraq is turning into a sad affair for the press -- it is all too reminiscent of the biz press pumping the bubble in '99. With bloodier consequences.