Stories Not Worthy Of Coverage

The following is by Robert Tracinski of TIA Daily:

Stories I'm Not Covering,  And Why I'm Not Covering Them

I have so strongly resisted providing any coverage of the whole Valerie Plame-Joe Wilson-Scooter Libby non-scandal. And when I did cover it, it was only to argue that the most important thing about the story was how unimportant it was—that is, how it served as an attempt by the left to distract us from the war. ...

One story that gets close to being important is the election in Bolivia of a rabble-rousing socialist, Evo Morales, who recently nationalized Bolivia's natural gas fields.

This story is interesting because it displays all of the lurid details of a corrupt socialist mindset, like a page torn out of the later chapters of Atlas Shrugged. For example, here is the style of the takeover:

Wearing a hard hat and flanked by uniformed police officers, Andrés Soliz Rada, the energy minister, reiterated that multinational companies had six months to negotiate new contracts, many of which are likely to vastly increase the state's take.

But this is the best detail: the state-owned company that is taking over the natural gas fields has no money to develop them. But that's no problem, the Bolivian government declared, because foreign oil companies—the same companies the government had just expropriated—would be eager to invest in Bolivia.

The decree puts the Bolivian government's energy firm, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos, better known as YPFB, front and center. Instead of a small auditing firm, Yacimientos would, under Mr. Morales's decree, become an equal partner with giants like Repsol YPF SA of Spain and Total of France. In an interview, Jorge Alvarado, the president of the Bolivian company, who stood beside Mr. Soliz Rada at the news conference, admitted Yacimientos had no money. Asked how it would develop the country's gas fields if foreign investment evaporated, Mr. Alvarado said he was certain that foreign companies remained eager to continue in Bolivia.

"I want to be sincere," he said. "YPFB, because of the neoliberal [i.e., pro-free-market] model, has been reduced to a minimum. It has no economic resources. But we see that there is much interest by foreign companies that want to invest in the country."

Talk about depending on the sanction of the victim!

These details are colorful, but this story is still not important, because Bolivia is crushingly irrelevant to world affairs. The nationalization of the natural gas fields is a tragedy for the Bolivians, but it's no skin off our noses. The New York Times article makes that pretty clear:

Bolivia may have Latin America's second-largest gas reserves, but much of its riches are far from being developed. The landlocked country also has limited sales outlets.

It is a far cry from Venezuela, a major oil producer that has squeezed companies at will, with little chance that they will leave because of the huge profits to be made there.

"It's one thing to produce petroleum at $72 a barrel and have access to many markets, and it's another thing to produce gas that has only one market in the region, Brazil," said Carlos Alberto López, a consultant for foreign oil companies.

As Jack Wakeland put it to me in an e-mail on this story, "Bolivia will never amount to anything without a better culture and more rational leadership. Natural gas could have been their ticket to globalization. Now it will just become a welfare program that doubles the quality of their tin roofs, buys their first pair of shoes, makes their packed-dirt streets twice as wide, and fills their plates with yellow rice—kind of like the economic life of Baghdad under Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, it is my understanding that the natural gas deposits aren't big enough to empower Bolivia's petty-dictator-wannabe to become an international nuisance on a global scale, like Hugo Chavez."

Hugo Chavez is the only important part of this story. Chavez is empowered by his takeover of Venezuela's oil industry, and he is trying to lead a resurgence of the far left—one might almost say a resurgence of the discredited ideology of Communism—throughout Latin America. And worse, he's aligning himself with the worst dictators in the Middle East, especially Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That story is worth covering, and the next part that I will be covering, as it develops, is the presidential election in Mexico, where a leftist ally of Hugo Chavez has been leading in the polls. Chavez is a dangerous nuisance, but a Chavez-style socialist takeover on our southern border would be a calamity for the US.

Fortunately, it is looking as if this is less and less likely. The leftist challenger's own comically dictatorial arrogance is wrecking his campaign:

[M]any analysts say Lopez Obrador's worst enemy is his confrontational, stubborn nature—which may have led him to skip a nationally televised April 25 debate, which the other candidates attended.

Lopez Obrador's justification for missing the debate was that he didn't want to interrupt a whistle-stop campaign, where he is often greeted like a conquering hero and draped with flower garlands.

Isn't that the perfect image of the self-aggrandizing dictator, a man so insecure that he requires constant adulation?

There is one other interesting side-note on the Mexican election. I have occasionally linked to articles by Dick Morris, who is an expert handicapper of the political horserace. I used to do so with the standard disclaimer that Morris is "a former Clinton advisor and a soulless pragmatist—but I repeat myself." But I dropped that when I noticed that Morris has taken on a few political projects that seem like penance for his years as the political enabler of Bill and Hillary. In 2005, Morris was an advisor to Victor Yuschenko's Ukrainian campaign, which led to the Orange Revolution. Now, there are rumors that he is aiding the more pro-American candidate in Mexico's election. Good for him.

The leftist resurgence in Latin America is troubling, but it is still a second-tier story, far less important than what happens in China, or India, or, above all, the Middle East. That's why I'm only occasionally covering Latin America. There are a few other parts of the world that I am ignoring altogether, because while they may have been relevant during another decade, they are safely irrelevant now.

For example, there has been some turmoil recently in Haiti, but we don't have to worry that our president is going to send US troops there while he lets North Korea build atomic bombs (as Clinton did). Similarly, I have not been covering the corrupt government of Kosovo—another failed Clinton-era foreign policy priority. Nor am I covering the left's drumbeat for US involvement in Darfur in Sudan. It is a contradictory campaign, since the left wants us to sacrifice our interests in order to save the people of Darfur, while also opposing the use of American military force and therefore making it impossible for us to do anything at all—which is why I'm not covering this story.

And I won't even bore you with the details of the rebellion against King Gyanendra in Nepal, a country even more irrelevant than Bolivia.

It is the War on Terrorism, and the fact that we have committed to fighting that war in Iraq—and may be on the verge of committing to a death-struggle against the Iranian regime—that makes all of these stories pale into insignificance. In all of the complaints that we have about President Bush's leadership of the War on Terrorism, it is easy to forget the utter fecklessness of the previous administration, which ignored all of the major threats to America's interests while engaging in one minor adventure after another in irrelevant backwaters like Haiti and Bosnia (and Somalia, though President Clinton shares the blame for that fiasco with the elder President Bush). Now that we are grappling with real threats—however haltingly and imperfectly—we don't have to focus on the backwaters and sideshows.

Speaking of sideshows, some of you might have wondered why I haven't covered the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the September 11 plotters who was arrested before the attacks but kept silent about them in order to help them succeed. Part of the reason I haven't covered this trial is that I generally avoid the "crime" beat, which rarely has any larger cultural or geo-political significance. (For example, I have stayed blissfully mum about the latest addition to the illustrious legacy of the Kennedy family.) But there is another, more important reason why I don't usually cover the trials of Islamic terrorists.

After an astonishing five years of legal proceedings, Moussaoui was found guilty, but the jury blinked and gave him life in prison instead of the death penalty. Mark Steyn is all het up about this, declaring that is shows a lack of Western resolve against terrorism. But I think Steyn isn't fully grasping his own point. He points out that terrorism should be answered with war, not with criminal prosecutions. He's right, and that's precisely why I don't care about what happens to Moussaoui.

Moussaoui was removed as an actor in this conflict five years ago; where we store his carcass after that is a minor detail. The outcome of the war will be determined, not by what happens to him, but by what happens to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Muqtada al-Sadr and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

And besides, anyone concerned that Moussaoui is getting off lightly should check out a delightful little story carried recently in the Los Angeles Times about the "supermax" prison where Moussaoui will be stored on "bomber's row," along with the Unabomber and Oklahoma City co-conspirator Terry Nichols. It is a prison designed to inflict no physical harm on the inmates—while transforming them into mushrooms psychologically.

Halfway through the trial, prison expert James E. Aiken looked straight at jurors and told them what Zacarias Moussaoui could expect if they sent him away for the rest of his life. "I have seen them rot," he said. "They rot."…

In his trial testimony, Aiken said the whole point of Supermax was not just punishment, but "incapacitation."

There is no pretense that the prison is preparing the inmate for a return to society. Like the cellmate of the count of Monte Cristo who died an old, tired convict, Aiken said, "Moussaoui will deteriorate."

Christopher Boyce, a convicted spy who was incarcerated at Supermax, left the prison about 100 miles south of Denver with no regret. "You're slowly hung," he once told the Times. "You're ground down. You can barely keep your sanity."

And anyone concerned that the American jury has gone soft should read another interesting story in the LA Times about a little-reported case in central California in which a jury recently convicted a young Muslim man for conspiring to join a terrorist organization. This jury had no problem remembering the lessons of September 11—and July 7.

The tall, broad-shouldered foreman acknowledged he didn't believe, judging by Hayat's mild demeanor in court and his recent marriage, that the young Lodi resident posed much of a danger. But then he thought of the faces of the terrorists caught on video before last summer's London bombings. He thought they looked just as nonthreatening.

Scaccia said she hoped the jury verdict would be a deterrent in the war on terrorism. "I hope it gets the message out: Don't mess with the United States," she said. "It's not worth it."

There are other stories that do relate to the central battles for the future of the world, but which are too minor or ephemeral to bother with. For example, there has been a small-scale campaign recently to promote the idea of partitioning Iraq into three ethnic substates, one for Sunnis, one for Shiites, one for Kurds. This is an astonishingly bad idea, and a few commentators have pointed out some of the reasons why. But proposals like this are the political equivalent of those "fantasy baseball" leagues. They are excuses for inside-the-beltway policy wonks to bat around proposals to impress each other with their cleverness—which they can do safely, because no one who actually makes policy is really listening to them.

Finally, there are a few stories that I really like, personally, but I just can't justify linking to them because they have to take a back seat to more significant stories. I have in mind one recent story in particular, and the more I have thought about it, the more I have realized that I probably should take the time to cover it, because it is important in its own odd way. This story is about a set of videotapes found by the US military in an insurgent hideout in Iraq. The tapes had the raw footage used by Abu Musab al Zarqawi to produce a slick recruiting video for al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the US military took the outtakes and produced a "bloopers" reel, which they then distributed in a delicious little information warfare operation. According to the Washington Times:

At his weekly press briefing in Baghdad, Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch aired the outtakes of Zarqawi's most recent Internet recruitment ad, which had depicted him in warrior splendor. The blooper tape has Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq and organizer of mass-death suicide bombings, clumsily trying to move a machine gun into rapid-fire mode.

"He looks down. Can't figure it out," Gen. Lynch said, identifying the terror master's footwear as New Balance tennis shoes. It was obtained in a raid of a foreign fighter safe house.

Finally, a lieutenant walks over and unjams the gun. Zarqawi fires into the open desert. The shot over, he hands the smoking gun to a group of subordinates. As they walk away, one grabs the hot muzzle, burning himself….

"It makes you wonder," Gen. Lynch told reporters.

Yes, this is a small story that doesn't give us the "big picture" of tactics and strategy in Iraq. But come to think of it, it does illuminate the big picture in another way. It shows the enormous gulf in competence and rationality between our enemy in this war and our own fighting men—and it shows us that, in the broadest sense, it is a mistake to take this enemy too seriously or to regard him as too menacing and powerful. It is a reminder that, in the long run, terrorists are losers. And that is a story worth covering.

Yes, Senator Edward Kennedy's son doesn't deserve my time, neither does the Valerie Plame non-story.  However, the events in South America, Darfur, Mexico, are all very important and worthy of not only mentioning, but worthy of continued scrutiny.  The recent terror trials of Moussaoui and the Lodi father and son are, or were, extremely important.  What say you?