Hell for fake leather: 20 years after 9/11 and David Aaronovitch is still singing the same war songs...
The nightmares are still very powerful in the mind of a man whose answer is so often war.
Yesterday’s Times obituary of the Donald Zec, a famous Fleet Street showbiz hack of the 50s and 60s, who bantered with Monroe, bothered Lennon, and fell out with Frank Sinatra, contains a telling anecdote:
… still not a bona fide reporter [Zec] decided to take his chance at The Daily Mirror. His first assignment was covering a nightclub fire in Soho, clacking out 200 words that began with the turgid introduction:
“Firemen were called to extinguish a blaze”.
His news editor declared, “This is shit”, before handing it to an old hand who showed him the ropes:
“Clad only in her scanties, a blonde, 22-year-old nightclub hostess climbed along a 30ft parapet in a Soho fire last night to rescue her pet cat Timothy”.
As Zec observed in the British Journalism Review: “Here in a single sentence of slick hyperbole, were all the elements of popular journalism — sex, heroism, drama and pet worship.”
Zec, who did most of his memorable tabloid work in the years before Rupert Murdoch scorched through Fleet Street with The Sun (Zec left The Daily Mirror and daily newspaper journalism entirely in 1972) could be describing a tabloid of today. The formula remains the same. And just as the broadsheet writers of his era looked down on the ‘populars’, their modern successors see themselves as a cut above their red top compatriots.
I thought of Zec — who went from messenger boy to crime correspondent (he interviewed the ‘acid bath murderer John Haigh on the day he was arrested) onto covering politics and then the royals before finding his calling in chasing celebrity scoops — as I read the latest column from the endlessly wallet-inspected, fake leather jacket buyer David Aaronovitch in The Times.
Aaronovitch, whose own career began in TV before he shifted to print as a leader writer, critic, sketchwriter, and columnist for The Independent and Independent on Sunday in 1995, would likely baulk at being compared to Zec.
Zec, after all, was a servant of the grubby red tops, a chaser of stories about Marilyn Monroe1, Grace Kelly, Jayne Mansfield and Lauren Bacall. But where Zec’s citation for the Descriptive Writer of the Year award at the 1967 National Press Awards noted his “bland outrageousness and a dead certainty of aim”, Aaronovitch routinely delivers outrageous blandness and incompetent aim.
And while it’s arguable the worst Zec did in his 40-year career in newspapers was to hurt the feelings of some celebrities whose egos were apt for pricking (Liz Taylor called him “a shit” while Sinatra sent him a telegram after a piece of insufficiently bum lubricating coverage that read: “I thought you were my friend, but as of this morning, you blew it.”), Aaronovitch has been a self-satisfied and war drumming presence in public debate for over 25 years.
Aaronovitch’s latest Times column is a perfect example; joining the unwanted wave of columnist reminiscences about 9/11 in the week of the 20th anniversary of the attacks, his gives us a piece headlined We have learnt the wrong lessons from 9/11. It prompts the usual question (“Who’s ‘we’?”) and carries a familiar Alan Partridge-like tone of “Needless to say, I had the last laugh.”
After telling us where he was when he saw the planes hit the towers2 (he heard about it on the radio then turned on the TV), Aaronovitch reviews the column he wrote for the next day’s Independent:
I wrote about it that day, and although I think I partly comprehended its significance, my concern was that the administration of George W Bush might in effect declare war in the Muslim world. He didn’t.
Oddly the column that he’s referring to — Anger is the first response, but can we ever understand this barbarism? — is no longer available on The Independent website though a great many of his contributions to that paper still are. I had to hunt it down on the Irish Independent’s website, where it was syndicated.3
A line early in that piece is correct (“In 20 years these will be the images that define the year 2001.”) but Aaronovitch’s desire for war was quick and thirsty. The column was published on September 12 so he wrote these words even as the first horror was unfolding:
… if it was Osama Bin Laden, why don't we take Afghanistan out?
Especially since, with this week's suicide-assassination of the one remaining anti-Taliban leader in that cratered country, there is no one else there to prevent their total victory.
If, of course, it was hard-line Iranians (as one pundit speculated yesterday), then that is more tricky. But hell, this is war. The stakes have been raised beyond a point that any have imagined possible. I would love to do this. I want to see cross-haired pictures of cruise missiles smacking into terrorist bunkers; I want to see A10 gunships blast camps; I want to see mad mullahs and fanatic sheikhs dragged from their bunkers to trial in the United States and Europe.
“Why don’t we take Afghanistan out?” The Aaronovitch of today, whose column feints towards notions of liberal intervention for humanitarian reasons and raises the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide as if that and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are comparable, doesn’t quote or even recognise the Aaronovitch of 20 years ago, who viscerally wanted war.
The Aaronovitch of 2001 drew a direct line between Palestinians and the 9/11 attacks, writing “Today's stone-throwers will want to kill our sons and daughters”, but had no notion that our dear ally Saudi Arabia had such a central place in the story (15 of the hijackers hailed from there as did Bin Laden). The Aaronovitch of 2021 finds a quote to absolve his past self:
In 1970 the American historian David Hackett Fischer wrote about what he called “the historians’ fallacy”. This consisted, partly, of “the tendency of historians, with their retrospective advantages, to forget that their subjects did not know what was coming next”.
It’s true that Aaronovitch (2001) did not know what was coming next, but he was grimly certain of what he wanted next:
It may be possible that renewed international cooperation will allow the precise targeting and the "surgical" removal of those who planned the events of September 11, 2001.
If so, I would not care in the least if they were all vapourised. But the best chance of preventing anything like this terrible day ever happening again lies in recalling the words of WBYeats. "Too long a sacrifice," he wrote, "can make a stone of the heart."
In the 20 years of other horrors that followed 9/11 — frequently horrors that happened ‘over there’ to ‘others’ — Aaronovitch has not really learned anything. In today’s column, he says he believes “the War on Terror” was a success and even all these years on he remains fully bought into the language and framing used by the neo-cons in the days, weeks, and years after September 11 2001. Take this section…
We’d had terrorism before. But the mass murder suicide terrorist was new. The 9/11 attackers wanted to die while killing as many people in America as possible and it didn’t matter much who those people were. It wasn’t stupid to ask what they would do if they got their hands on a “dirty bomb” or chemical or biological weapons. Imagine, for example, “Jihadi John” with access to novichok.
… which crams so many assumptions, ahistorical claims, propagandistic angles and distortions into a single paragraph that it’s like a tiny car disgorging clown after clown after clown.
Aaronovitch references Pearl Harbour elsewhere in the column but proposes that mass killing by suicidal attackers was new. He also ignores the 1994 Tokyo sarin gas attacks by followers of the Aum Shinrikyo cult which wanted to provoke a third world war and the suicide bombing of the USS Cole less than a year before the September 11 attacks. There are many other examples.
He then goes on to repeat the paranoid fantasies and exaggerations of 20 years ago. I was 17 in 2001 and found talk of biological and chemical weapons falling into the hands of the terrorists terrifying. The prospect of a dirty bomb felt even more horrifying. But ‘dirty bombs’ are one of the things that go bump in the night of the post-9/11 era.
In Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares (2004) — which is still on iPlayer — Dr Theodore Rockwelll, a nuclear expert of such standing that the Atomic Energy Commission renamed one of its prizes the Rockwell Award, says:
I don’t think [a dirty bomb] would kill anybody. You’ll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise.
He explains that the US Department of Energy simulated a dirty bomb explosion and that…
… they calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life threatening.
The test also assumed that no one fled the scene of the explosion for one year.
Almost 18 years after the Bush and Blair administrations’ lies about Iraq’s nuclear programme (the infamous ‘yellow cake’ claim) became apparent and experts — including former senior CIA agent Rolf Mowatt-Larssen — have written time again that rhetoric about Al-Qaeda’s plans to use chemical and biological weapons was wildly overblown, Aaronovitch repeats the ‘nightmares’.
Meanwhile, his claim that the War on Terror was a success — perhaps we should put that debating point to the dead via ouija board — is the product of a dream world. He writes:
The War on Terror — much-derided and blamed — has, I would argue, been a success. This may seem a strange thing to say in a week when the Manchester concert bombing inquiry is continuing and the Bataclan trial in Paris is opening. But the fact is that most terrorism in the last decade in the global north has been conducted by single attackers or small groups using the most basic of weapons. The knife and the lorry have become the tools of the bloody trade.
In 2004, Professor Bill Durodié, then director of the International Centre for Security Analysis at King’s College London, told The Guardian:
The reality [of the Al-Qaeda threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off… there’s no real evidence that all these groups are connected.
In the same piece, Crispin Black, a former senior government intelligence analyst, said there was “a gulf between the terrorists’ ambition and their ability to pull it off,” while Jonathan Eyal, then director of RUSI, said:
Al-Qaeda managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly, it is also being sustained by the way we rather cavalierly stick the name Al-Qaeda on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, you then exaggerate it.
Aaronovitch was a big supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, subsequently retconning that decision to make it about ‘liberating’ the Iraqis rather than hunting down Saddam Hussein’s spectral weapons of mass destruction. But in 2003, he wrote:
If nothing is eventually found, I — as a supporter of the war — will never believe another thing that I am told by our government or that of the US ever again. And more to the point, neither will anyone else. The weapons had better be somewhere.
Narrator: The weapons were not, in fact, somewhere. They were nowhere.
And yet Aaronovitch, as is a professional necessity for a British newspaper columnist, has never stopped believing what governments tell him.
Back in 2018, he described people who ask him about that 2003 column as “lamebrains” as he’d already dealt with the issue in a 2004 column (Was I Wrong About Iraq?) which concluded:
So much for WMD. For "liberal interventionists", however, the Iraq issue had another, more significant dimension. Wasn't war, in the end, the only way of bringing down the tyranny of Saddam, and wouldn't that war end in an Iraq - and a Middle East - that was safer and freer than before?
“Was I wrong about Iraq? No! It is the children who are wrong about Iraq!”
In 2013, the same year that Aaronovitch succeeded Jonathan Dimbleby as the chairman of Index on Censorship, he used a column in The Spectator to call Ed Miliband “a vulture not a leader” for not advocating military action in Syria.
Aaronovitch has never met a foreign policy issue that he couldn’t conclude would be solved with Cruise missiles and some “boots on the ground”, provided that the feet in those boots would not belong to him or any other member of his family.
Rubbing his crystal balls, Aaronovitch says in his column today:
My instinct is that were another Rwandan genocide to loom before us in the next period, made horribly and intimately apparent by the magic of social media, we would do as little as we did in the 1990s.
Only there was international intervention in Rwanda. It came from the French and in April 2021 the Rwandan government released a report that accused France of playing “a significant role in enabling a foreseeable genocide". Meanwhile, the US claimed it did nothing to help because of memories of Black Hawk Down/Battle of Mogadishu the year before. The former US deputy special envoy to Somalia, Walter Clarke, said in the PBS Frontline documentary Ambush in Mogadishu:
The ghosts of Somalia continue to haunt US policy.
Our lack of response in Rwanda was a fear of getting involved in something like a Somalia all over again.
It’s a cheap move for Aaronovitch to raise the ghosts of Rwanda in his latest bout of answering the question, “War: What is it good for?” with the reply: “Practically everything.” The conclusion of today’s column is equally cheap:
And that was always the one enduring lesson of 9/11. In your town or country the war may be “over”, the sun shining on a cloudless day. You may feel very distant from the troubles of others. And then the world comes to you.
The Aaronovitch of 2021 wants to make his readers as scared as him, just as the Aaronovitch of 2001 did when he hoped for enemies to be “vaporised”. The only lesson that he has learned in 20 years is that he will always get away with it.
Once, when Monroe and Zec were in a plane that suffered an engine fire, she passed him a note with a line he could use in his story if it crashed and he survived but she didn’t: “Here lies Marilyn Monroe, 38-23-36.”
I was in school when the planes hit the towers and I heard about the attacks from the driver of the school bus on the way home. I first saw the footage of the towers on fire in the window of an electronics store, playing on 15 screens at once.
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