BETTER INFORMATION AND LESS PROPAGANDA

Map showing "the expanding battleground" of ISIL or ISIS (Financial Times)

Perhaps it is because the UK is a major centre of the global religion known as commercial sport, of which the ageing media cleric Rupert Murdoch is a high priest, and with many newly-constructed shrines in need of dedicated patrons and pilgrims, that the BBC's coverage of world news, along with that of other British "informational" institutions, has declined in recent years. The recent history of Iraq illustrates this problem very well, and many of us beyond London's political-media classes are now engaged in a continuous pilgrimage on the World Wide Web in search of reliable information sources. However, although Iraq is an extreme news problem, as I'm now going to show, it is not exceptional.

At the end of last month, the UK Royal United Services Association published a study -
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/british-wars-iraq-afghanistan-29bn-failure-131807825.html#u2PIG17 - reported in the International Business Times, whose story was syndicated by Yahoo, to the effect that: "Britain's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost £29bn in government money and were strategic failures..... The 2003 invasion of Iraq fuelled the spread of radical Islam and terrorism in the UK and across the globe, according to the report by defence think-tank,  (RUSI)." In short, Iraq is bad news and this may account why the most recent outbreak of sectarianism has been poorly covered here.

I'm writing, of course, about the ISIL invasion of Iraq - http://www.ibtimes.com/it-isis-or-isil-jihadist-group-expanding-iraq-has-two-names-one-goal-1601346 - which is reported in another IBT - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Business_Times -  article. This clearly explains the evolution of ISIL, or ISIS (an acronym used by the BBC): "The group changed its name in 2012 from the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), from the Arabic term for Levant, al-Sham. That is sometimes translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). It wanted to change its name to include a broader swathe of land, as its goal was to create an Islamic state based on Sharia, or Islamic law..." effectively from Iraq to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Wikipedia also has a comprehensive entry for ISIL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant - which maintains that the group "have captured and currently use American weapons, vehicles and uniforms in their operations..." or as one commentator to an Israeli news site's coverage of ISIL put it earlier this week: "....they're driving Toyotas"! However, to understand how ISIL functions and, more importantly, what is being done to stop its advance in Iraq, one really needs to look to a range of sources, including the BBC, as the following articles show: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27789770; https://uk.news.yahoo.com/iraq-kurds-seize-kirkuk-sunni-militants-surge-toward-093901288.html#AWqpBsf ; http://rt.com/usa/165612-us-iran-allies-iraq-insurgency/

The Russian news agency RT article from Friday 13th June entitled "US air strikes to support Iranian Revolutionary Guard's offensive in Iraq?" is perhaps the most interesting "spin" on just how far the politics of this region have changed in recent years. In answering the question, the article states: "If so, US may find itself assisting its archnemesis in the Middle East to fight against Sunni militias that enjoy support from one of America's closest allies in the region, Saudi Arabia. The ruling family of the kingdom has long been accused of supplying jihadists all over the region with arms and financial support, the New York Times reported".

Map from Wikipedia (included in RT article) showing "Islam by country"

Included in the RT article is the above map which shows "Islam by country". Iran's isolation as the major centre of Shia Islam is obvious. With the exception of parts of Iraq, Sunni Muslims dominate the remainder of the Islamic world. However, the importance of this narrative is usually over-looked in the British media and the regional significance of Iran misunderstood, something I commented upon in a post of 22 April: http://janetmackinnon.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-history-of-very-iranian-revolution.html Such oversights may be partly the result of Arab and Israeli propaganda, with the latter sort promulgated today in The Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Israeli-ambassador-to-UN-Iran-is-the-worlds-primary-sponsor-of-terrorism-359366

All this illustrates the complexity of the situation in the Middle East, and not least the ambiguous role played by so-called Western allies like Saudi Arabia and, possibly "stakeholders" within other Gulf States such as  Kuwait (whose experience of invasion from Iraq may have been forgotten), in both sponsoring extreme Islamist groups whilst ostensibly helping to combat terrorism in the region. It also suggests that the vast amount of Western money and other resources pumped in to Iraq after the 2003 US-UK led invasion has itself fuelled regional instability. However, it may be that a more liberal Iran can now play a constructive role in helping to tackle this.

News coverage that recognises this complexity and reports all the facts as far as difficult circumstances allow is essential. Equally important, adequate news time needs to be allocated. Given BBC programmes and schedules that seem to be filled with increasing trivia this should not be difficult. However, given the deep-rooted problems which the Corporation seems to have in reporting news from beyond the Home Counties (ie problems of the Home rather than the World Service) - as reflected in this recent BBC debate on housing http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2014/06/20140609t1830vOT.aspx -  I will continue to multi-source both my international and national news feeds.

Postscript of 18 June 2014 - Since I wrote the above post, there's been a great improvement in the BBC's coverage of these issues and I very much hope this will extend to some other subjects.