Think before you bomb

If there is a crisis in a remote place, and governments, newspapers and aid agencies start to agitate for ‘action’, you naturally begin to suspect that much of the information you are being fed is false. When Tony Blair starts talking about intervention, your suspicion turns into virtual certainty. This is not necessarily because journalists, officials, agencies and Blair are ignorant of the facts (although ignorance is invariably a contributing factor); it’s because the tragedy and the publicity exist in different universes. On the one hand, there is how things are — the grim, confusing, recalcitrant reality of events; on the other hand, there’s how the tragedy is presented, how it is packaged and sold, as a news story, as a political cause, as a fund-raising opportunity. Before long, the publicity takes on a life of its own, following a predictable cycle of distortion leading, very often, to excitement, impatience and, finally, error.