Maidhc Ó Cathail
Launched in 1995, Antiwar.com describes itself
as a site “devoted to the cause of non-interventionism” whose “initial
project was to fight against intervention in the Balkans under the
Clinton presidency.” Explaining their “key role” in the battle for public opinion during that seminal “humanitarian intervention,” the editors write:
Our goal was not only to inform but also to mobilize informed citizens in concerted action to stop the war. The war at home was an information war: an attempt by the government to both limit and shape the information that Americans had. It was, above all, a propaganda war, one in which the American government and its allies in the media were bombing and strafing their own people with hi-tech lies.
Back in the early days of the internet, Antiwar.com did indeed do a
very good job of countering the interventionist narrative. Writers such
as John Laughland, Chad Nagle, Justin Raimondo, Christine Stone, and George Szamuely
showed readers what was really going on in the Balkans and elsewhere,
helping many to understand the imperative of non-interventionism. Today,
only Raimondo still writes for Antiwar.com.
By 2011, the information war had shifted from the former Yugoslavia
to the Middle East and North Africa, as country after country was being
destabilized by a wave of supposedly “spontaneous” uprisings against the region’s dictators — not unlike the one that toppled Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 — dubbed an “Arab Spring” by some dubious cheerleaders (the term was originally used by Israel partisans such as Charles Krauthammer to refer to an “initial flourishing of democracy” in 2005) and an “Arab Awakening”
by others. But while the people were still being bombed and strafed by
the interventionists’ lies, Antiwar.com appeared to be either missing in
action or even to have gone over to the other side.
As the media focus quickly shifted from a “liberated” but devastated
Libya to a besieged Syria, there was disturbingly little to distinguish
between mainstream reports and those in Antiwar.com. Apparently having
forgotten the interventionists’ need to “limit and shape the
information” getting to the public, Antiwar.com managed to limit and
shape it even further by providing a largely uncritical daily synopsis
of mainstream reporting of suspect opposition claims, without even the mainstream’s caveat that “the opposition claims could not be independently verified.”
Its reliance on the interventionists’ “allies in the media” for its
“news” on Syria can be gauged from examining its research editor’s
choice of sources. In a survey of 10 news reports on Syria between
December 14 and December 27, Jason Ditz linked to a total of 24 outside
sources, 16 of which were from mainstream media such as the BBC, New York Times and Haaretz; two were from Voice of America, the official external broadcast institution of the US government and a key instrument of its regime change agenda;
two from Monsters and Critics, a web-only entertainment/celebrity news
and review publication with political commentary and news; and one was
from Human Rights Watch, to which billionaire hedge fund manager and
prominent “pro-democracy” advocate George Soros (astutely described in an excellent February 2001 Antiwar column as a “False Prophet-At-Large”) pledged $100 million
last year, enabling it “to deepen its research presence on countries of
concern.” The remaining three were taken from SANA, the Syrian Arab
News Agency, whose claims were briefly mentioned only to be dismissed with a cynicism clearly absent in the credulous treatment of opposition sources.
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