Kim Ghattas Book Reveals Personal Misgivings About US Power

The BBC’s State Department correspondent, Kim Ghattas, has a new book out about Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. A review of it is in the Murdoch-owned (but not tarnished by it) Wall Street Journal, written by their assistant books editor, Sohrab Ahmari. Ahmari came to the WSJ with a legal background, and has co-edited a book of essays from Middle Eastern dissidents entitled “Arab Spring Dreams”. So, much like Ms. Ghattas, he’s sympathetic to the plight of Arabs living under lousy rulers, although he clearly comes from a different direction than Ghattas.

Nowhere Left to Fly To

Hillary Clinton circled the globe 40 times in four years as secretary of state. But what did all this on-the-go diplomacy accomplish?

Clearly Ahmari comes with a not-very-positive perspective on Clinton’s accomplishments as Sec. of State, and was looking for something in Ghattas’ book. But my concern here is what his review says about Ghattas, and what she says about herself.

The material has world-historical heft, yet the treatment rarely carries weight.

Not a good start.

Ghattas clearly enjoys the access that her job entails and deems no detail of life in the State Department press corps too insignificant to share. There are seemingly endless anecdotes about the “chewy chocolate chip cookies” at the air bases that service the secretary of state’s plane; the chicken-salad dinners aboard the plane; the press packets handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing; the “Bulgari hand fresheners” inside the Saudi king’s tent. Did you know that one time Mrs. Clinton’s plane almost took off without “Arshad Mohammed from Reuters, who had overslept”?

Unfortunately rather shallow, it seems, and more about Ghattas’ job than about Clinton’s. But this comes as no surprise at all to those who have been watching her output for the BBC since 2008. Ghattas never hesitated to gush over Michelle Obama’s dresses or fawn over other superficial things. But that’s not the important bit. It begins here:

Ms. Ghattas adds to this banal reportage her reflections on the meaning and purpose of America’s superpower status.

As a globetrotting, experienced professional journalist, her insights here might be of value, no? Well….

The author, who is of Dutch-Lebanese origin and who grew up in Beirut in the 1980s during Lebanon’s civil war, says that she wrote the book in part to “come to terms with my personal misgivings about American power.”

Personal misgivings?

Her pro-Western family was dismayed when, in 1984, the Reagan administration, having resolved to stop Lebanon’s sectarian bloodletting, withdrew American forces in the wake of Hezbollah’s terror campaign against peacekeepers. Her own political awakening came as a teenager in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush greenlighted Syrian domination of Lebanon in return for Hafez al-Assad’s participation in the first Gulf War against Iraq.

In other words, the BBC chose somebody with a personal grudge against the very country she’s supposed to report on impartially. Just like they keep Jeremy Bowen, who has a personal grudge against Israel, as their Middle East editor, and sent someone full of hope and enthusiasm and the starry-eyed wonder of a small child to become the North America editor – Mark Mardell – to report on their beloved Obamessiah (even the jaded pros at DigitalSpy saw his worship for what it was early on). Or just like how they hired an Obamessiah campaigner to produce digital media material and other reports on the US, based in part on the strength of the video he made about his cross-country trip to get the vote out for Him (Matt Danzico, who continued to run a website for a while to “keep tabs” on the President from a Left-wing perspective, while working for the BBC). Or how they have an extreme Left-wing ideologue as the economics editor for Newsnight. Or, well, you get the idea.

Is Ghattas entitled to her opinion? Of course. Are her concerns about how the US uses its power valid? Irrelevant, even if these are issues genuinely worth examining and debating, because it clearly affects how she approaches her job either way. Is it right to have someone who is wrestling with what is really a personal animosity towards a country as the reporter for that country’s foreign policy activities? No.

Before any defenders of the indefensible get itchy fingers and start telling me I just want somebody who is partisan the other way, and will report only things I want to hear, let me just say that I actually want someone who does not come in with a connection or visceral bias one way or the other. Surely there must be someone the BBC could have brought in that doesn’t have such a deep personal issue like this.

The WSJ review also wonders about Ghattas’ usefulness, but from a different angle.

The lesson of these experiences—that America’s friends pay a steep price when the indispensable nation fails to engage morally—isn’t lost on Ms. Ghattas.

I bet it isn’t. All the  more reason why somebody with such an intimate issue shouldn’t be given the job.

Yet it rarely impels her to question Mrs. Clinton’s lukewarm, often cynical, responses to the plight of dissidents and democrats from Iran to Russia to East Asia.

Yes, Ahmari is not a fan of Hillary, and was hoping for at least some criticism of her performance from a supposedly impartial, highly-experienced professional journalist.

Ms. Ghattas takes it for granted that “the world had become allergic to U.S. leadership by the end of the Bush administration” and that, therefore, Mrs. Clinton’s job was to “restore America’s lost face in the world.” Such assumptions lead her to frame age-old wisdom as the revolutionary innovations of the Obama administration. “In the twenty-first century America could no longer walk into a room and make demands; it had to build connections first,” she writes at one point—as if the notion would have shocked, say, Dean Acheson or Thomas Jefferson.

And there you have it. Ghattas came to the job with negative opinions. So even somebody on Ghattas’ side about how the US had negatively affected her fellow Arabs sees the blind worship of The Obamessiah for what it is.

Yet Ghattas has been the voice the BBC expects you to trust most about US foreign policy. Your license fee hard at work, paying people with personal grudges and emotion-based opinions to tell you what’s going on in the world.

 

 

USEFUL IDIOTS

Last week Washington saw the opening of Hemingway’s, an exclusive bar situated in the section of the Swiss embassy reserved for Cuba’s communist dictatorship. The master-stroke in this propaganda drive by the Cuban regime was its decision to invite the BBC to cover the event. In return for a few rum cocktails the Cubans have been rewarded with a couple of pieces of gushing PR that must have exceeded even their wildest hopes. For a small outlay on drinks and a band they have received an uncritical filmed report (although it does include possibly the most boring Hemingway anecdote ever, as told by former US diplomat Wayne Smith) and an article by Kate Dailey that would not look out of place in whatever passes for the society pages of Granma. Take this bit for example:

While mojitos and Cuba Libras were being poured in the small back room that houses the bar, a 12-piece band played Latin music in the front of the hall.

Sandra Levinson, resplendent in a sparkling black and blue blouse, spun and twirled with her partner. MS Levinson, executive director of the Center for Cuban Studies in New York City and director of the centre’s Cuban Art Space, learned to dance during her many trips to Cuba, and had travelled down to Washington specifically to attend the opening.

The “resplendent” Ms Levinson is a throwback to the days when New York socialites rubbed shoulders with the Blank Panthers, as immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic (see Levinson’s letter to the New York Review of Books in 1969 for a taste). She founded her Cuban Studies centre in 1972 and has been a loyal and much-valued supporter of Cuba’s dictatorship. The following description of her is taken from a Minnesota Star Tribune article in 1996:

“The Minneapolis native has become one of the most well-known North Americans in Cuba. She’s on a first-name basis with the who’s who in Havana – including Castro, with whom she has dined on several occasions. Castro has even met her mother.”

In an interview with CBS in 1988 Levinson complained that Cuban youth were an ungrateful bunch:

“there are a lot of young people who simply cannot appreciate … what the revolution has given them.”

So said the New York art gallery director who dines with the dictator.

And what of Hemingway and Cuba? Here’s an example of the sort of detail the BBC prefers to avoid when discussing the communist state’s history:

Hemingway, who had looked kindly on Leftist revolutions since the Spanish civil war, invited his friend George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, to witness the shooting of prisoners condemned by the tribunals under Guevara’s control. They watched as the men were trucked in, unloaded, shot, and taken away. As a result, Plimpton later refused to publish Guevara’s memoir, The Motorcycle Diaries.

While the likes of Kate Dailey and Kim Ghattas (who seems to have been in attendance in a purely social capacity) cheerfully glug the Cuban regime’s cocktails in the company of various limousine liberals, stories such as this continue to be ignored by the BBC:

Cuban human rights activist Yris Perez Aguilera was released from jail late Friday after she was arrested earlier in the day.
It was the second this week that Perez, the wife of the former political prisoner Jorge Luis Garcia Perez “Antunez”, had been detained by the Cuban second police.
Before she was released, a State Security official delivered an ominous threat if she again takes to the streets:
“Whatever happens, you cannot go out. … And every time you do, we’re going to wear you out with 72 hours of detention. We’re going to liquidate you little by little.”
Via his Twitter feed, Antunez called on the U.S. Congress to take up the cause of Cuban activists risking their lives to oppose the Castro regime.