PRESS: Cry War!:
Powers, Thomas
CRY WAR! PRESS There was a period last fall when a new Arab-Israeli war appeared to be imminent. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's "step by step" approach to a Middle East settlement had bogged...
...in effect, to leave the large questions of war and peace to The Authorities, as if this were a situation which involved them, but not us...
...Bradlee didn't think so...
...War is not only too important to be left to the generals, after all...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...A fifth war would be bad enough...
...nor every exchange of small arms and artillery fire across the Israeli-Lebanese border...
...With the grammar untangled this means we would not use force in every circumstance, which I guess amounts to a threat...
...The trouble with laying out a paper according to the Noise Rule is that it allows officials to orchestrate an Official Noise Level, and officials, to put it calmly, are not infallible...
...A good example of the Noise Rule in operation is the recent controversy over proposals to invade Arabian oil producers in order to end Western oil dependency...
...Imagine for a moment the psychological shock throughout the entire world if Israel, hardpressed, were to use even one of the nuclear weapons she is thought to have...
...At the UN last November the PLO's leader Yassir Arafat outlined a settlement which the Israelis would never accept...
...This attitude might have made sense back in 1948, when the peace of the world was not involved, but it is simply feckless now...
...I am not proposing that every public utterance of every Middle Eastern leader...
...At first Bradlee suggested that the danger was exaggerated and there was no need for a special effort...
...I am thinking of long stories (a full page, say) on things like the following: - The Palestinians...
...It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the fact, or the depth of the response, and yet the events which more than a few sensible men believe are leading to precisely that result are reported, for the most part, with all the urgency of spot gold futures on the Chicago Commodity Exchange...
...In the meantime, the true pressures leading toward or away from war will go largely unreported...
...policy...
...Why do Arab-Israeli wars pose such a danger of American-Russian confrontation...
...the wars unfold rapidly, with sudden success or defeat...
...How many has she got...
...the Great Powers find themselves pressed to intervene...
...For his own reasons, Kissinger was deliberately raising the Official Noise Level...
...What sort of men are the Arab leaders...
...If the press' habit of waiting on events were to be written mathematically (where P stands for the Prominence of the Source, E for the Element of Violence, and CiN for Column inches of Newsprint), it might look like this: P x E2 = CiN...
...For a while things looked bad indeed, but then the Syrians agreed to extend the UN's role for an additional six months after the November 30 deadline and the danger of war appeared to ease...
...Wasn't there some way a newspaper might anticipate a war just as it does a national election...
...We have a man in Washington," he said, "a man in Cairo, a man in Beirut, a man in Tel Aviv and a man in Moscow...
...Eventually the press will be reminded of the conflict between the Arabs and Israelis and attention will turn back...
...Do they insist on a bi-national state throughout the whole of British Mandate Palestine...
...Professor Tucker's question was echoed almost immediately by Kissinger's now famous triple negative in the January 2 issue of Business Week: "I'm not saying there's no circumstances where we would not use force...
...A week or so before things quieted down I met Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post, and I asked him how the Post was preparing its readers for the possibility of war...
...How much does he really care...
...What does he mean by an Arab Jerusalem...
...It is clear that they are at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but it is not clear what they actually want and are determined to agitate to obtain...
...This is frequently reported but never explained in detail...
...I would like to know more about these tanks and planes, what they cost and what they do...
...Do they really insist on an end to Jewish immigration...
...Where questions of war and peace are concerned, newspapers tend to react passively, allowing events to dictate the length and prominence of their reports...
...The whole question of the relationship between the United States and Israel, for example, has been avoided like a minefield, which it is...
...The controversy had two sources...
...When George Wallace talks of his support for civil rights I know enough about him to be skeptical, but when Arafat hints he is prepared for compromise I don't know whether to believe him or not...
...Would an Israeli retreat to the borders of 1967 only begin a new phase of agitation and crisis...
...We need to understand more fully why and how the great powers are inevitably drawn into an Arab-Israeli war...
...When war seems imminent the papers generally publish lists of relative military strength compiled by the Institute of Strategic Studies in London...
...For short we will call this the Noise Rule...
...To some extent this is inevitable: a partial mobilization of the Israeli Army obviously demands more attention than a threat to do so, and a threat more space than another report of no progress on the negotiating front, and so on down to the international muttering reported in one-paragraph wire service dispatches tacked on to the bottom of the stories of the day...
...All of these subjects have been touched in passing by reporters, of course, but they have not received the serious attention they deserve...
...It was taken that way, at any rate, and it was certainly intended that way...
...This is an important article which deserves to be read, if only for Professor Tucker's confidence the operation would be easy because the Eastern shore of the Persian Gulf has no trees for Arab guerrillas to hide behind...
...The press seems content to accept a passive role, to limit itself to reporting things as they happen...
...Finally, what sort of war are we talking about...
...He wanted to know, reasonably enough, specifically what I thought the papers ought to do and I couldn't tell him, but it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that journalists might, if they tried, find at least as much to say about a war before it begins as they do about a heavyweight title fight before it is fought...
...nor every new shipment of arms from the Russians to Syria, or the French to the Libyans, or the British to the Saudi Arabians, or the Americans to everyone, be given a triple column in red ink on the left lead of the front page...
...How would they be delivered...
...The first was an article in the January issue of Commentary by Professor Robert W. Tucker of Johns Hopkins University, who inquired, in calm academic prose, why the United States was not at least considering the use of military force against Arab oil nations...
...In this matter, particularly, passions run high...
...It will, in short, allow you to watch passively, but nothing more, and I would have thought we had had enough of that...
...The Syrians had been "massively" (that favorite word of journalists) re-armed by the Russians and Israel mobilized part of her army...
...Our best information in Washington," he said, "is that there will be no war while Kissinger and Ford are out of the country...
...If nothing occurs sooner, we can be confident of a new crisis or near-crisis when the current UN ceasefire mandate in the Golan Heights comes up for an extension again at the end of May...
...The first war in 1948 began with 5,000 Jews on one side and 24,000 Arabs, in five separate armies, on the other...
...Why does Syria's Assad seem so much more militant than Egypt's Sadat...
...What I would like to see is ambitious reporting which goes beyond the obligatory diplomatic dispatches, some attempt, at least, to explain why the Arab-Israeli conflict is so difficult to resolve...
...More particularly, I would like to know something about the nuclear weapons which Israel is presumed to possess...
...Presumably we are for a peaceful settlement, but if war breaks out anyway, what will we do...
...The Israelis, for example, have only a three-week inventory of ordnance, which means that any war which lasts longer than two weeks demands an immediate American supply effort...
...Apparently it is built into the situation...
...Wasn't the danger of war great enough to justify some special effort beforehand...
...The time to take all this seriously is now...
...Everybody knows what the front pages will look like after the tanks and planes cross the borders: screaming black 120 point banner headlines...
...They were hardly ignoring the story, of course, but it seemed to me that newspapers ought to do something more than simply report the day-to-day events leading toward an outbreak...
...The armaments on both sides seem to escalate each time around, making the fighting more desperate and the consequences of failure greater...
...This sounds self-evident, but I'm not sure it is...
...How powerful are they...
...The armies involved are huge...
...Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's "step by step" approach to a Middle East settlement had bogged down, the Syrians were angrily opposed to an extension of the United Nations' ceasefire role on the Golan Heights, the Arab nations had just voted to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization's right to Gaza and the West Bank, and Israel refused to have anything to do with "PLO terrorists...
...How much pressure are we prepared to put on Israel in the current negotiations...
...The odd thing about the endless analysis of Kissinger's motives which followed is that everyone was arguing the merits of starting a war over oil and forgetting, for the moment, the war which threatens all too clearly to start by itself...
...The point is not to agitate, after all, but to inform, and while a close reading of the papers now will give you most of the accessible facts, it will not give you a sense or a feel of the situation...
...If a major tragedy should take place in the Middle East this year, or next, or the year after, we know it will be followed by a period of anguished inquiry...
...What is U.S...
...King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, for example, has been widely quoted as having said he is determined to pray before he dies in an Arab Jerusalem...
...it is also too important to be left to the politicians...
...When the shooting starts they hit the typewriters...
...Since they were due back within the week I pressed him on the point...
...I imagine the relationship between the Russians and the Arabs is the same...
...What would they do to Cairo, or Damascus, or Baghdad...
Vol. 101 • February 1975 • No. 14
