Nick Davies's "Flat Earth News"

Thanks to an anonymous commenter for the link to Nick Davies' talk to "Media Workers Against the War" on the subject of his coming book (it's the one that goes into the links between the Observer, MI6 spooks and the general bullshit industry). It certainly looks like an interesting book.

Item of interest to us is that he claims that the Iraq National Congress was an astroturf organisation set up by PR firms in the USA. Not sure about this; I have no reason to doubt Nick's analysis of how the organisation was set up, but the implication is that there's something bogus about the status of Kanan Makiya and Ahmed Chalabi[1] as Iraqi political figures and I don't think this is right. Both Makiya and Chalabi were proper opposition activists in Iraq, and both of them fled Iraq because they were about to be murdered by Saddam Hussein (Update: this has been challenged in the comments at least in the case of Chalabi). It is true that Chalabi is a chancer with some very murky business interests, but people like that will always be there in political movements so I don't think that's per se a reason to suspect the bona fides of INC.

Providing logistical and administrative support to groups like INC is a lot of what the CIA do, and there is a really interesting question about whether they should do it or not - in less bloodthirsty moments, something like this (usually illustrated with examples from Ukraine or Lebanon or Belarus) is thrown up by some of the more thoughtful Decents as a way of turning "solidarity with democrats" into a practical policy proposal. What do readers think about this sort of soft-imperialism?

The big advantage is of course that it isn't war. The disadvantages as I see them are 1) the local democracy movement may end up being compromised by the agenda of the Western intelligence services backing it, 2) the Western intelligence services may end up being compromised by the agenda of the local democracy movement - both of these seem to have happened at least a bit with respect to the INC and 3) it looks like the sort of policy that would be counterproductive if carried out openly, and there are surely a lot of general principles against making systematic use of policies that have to be carried out in secret, because they're deceitful.

So any way, without defending the actual activities of the INC (which I regard as wildly destructive), I don't think they can really be called a 100% artificial organisation. More to come on this, hopefully in the context of a discussion of Nick Davies' book when it gets published.

[1] Aaronovitch Watch, alone among media organisations with the possible and infrequent exception of Christopher Hitchens, refuses to take part in the airbrushing of Ahmed Chalabi out of the history of the INC. This was of course most scandalously done in "What's Left?" by Nick Cohen, which repeatedly mentions Kanan Makiya as if the INC was entirely his show, despite the fact that, before the war, several citations from Cohen's journalism demonstrate that his main contact was with Chalabi. I'd further note that Hitchens is right when he points out that the charges of being an Iranian intelligence assset have never been substantiated at all (he is wrong about the Jordanian bank fraud charges though). Chalabi has been dropped by the Decent Left simply because of political embarrassment and I think that's rather bad - unlike Makiya (who remains at Brandeis University), Chalabi has actually walked the talk and gone back to serve in the Iraqi government - he remains a popular figure there. I really need to do the Chalabi post don't I?