nobody@sind.hyperreal.art.pl is accused of writing:
As I recall, the name "Desert Fox" was a nickname held by a Nazi general. Fitting, that.
It's what Allied journalists called Erwin Rommel, who was a German general, if not exactly a Nazi. Sometimes said to be a military genius. IIRC he distinguished himself well as a Panzer commander under Guderian in the attack on France; commanded the Afrika Korps & was beaten by the Allies (doing his reputation little harm - they were strongly outnumbered and probably lasted longer than they were expected to); and then was injured in the D-day invasion, invalided out and accused of plotting to kill Hitler. He was murdered by the Nazis (in that he was told that if he commited suicide his wife and children would not be sent to a concentration camp, which counts as murder in my book). Once upon a time a code name for a military "operation" was just that, a code name. These days it is a brand label. Probably thought up by the same guys that Coca-Cola or Ford would hire to name a new product. For any British person over the age of about 30 "Desert Fox" will immediately bring to mind Rommel, WW2 and the "Desert Rats", the British 8th Army (in fact mostly Indian + Australian with contingents from all over the Empire) who fought against Rommel in North Africa. That reminds us of the long-range Desert Group & for those who have been paying attention, the SAS, (who get *heaps* of publicity here. There is a whole tacky genre of SAS books and magazines) which in turn is supposed to make us feel good (all that rhetoric about "punching above our weight" and the "best trained and most skilled army in the world", "the Professionals"). And "Fox" brings to mind foxhunting of course. The choice of name is meant to imply to British audiences that "our boys" are out there hunting Saddam, even though that has been officially denied by both UK and US government. All the publicity refers to "him" and "his" weapons. No-one ever says "we are at war with Iraq", it is always "we are denying *him* the use of *his* weapons of mass destruction". Maybe we will soon start to see planted media hints that there are, or have been, SAS on the ground in Iraq looking for *him* - which will be instantly denied in such away as to allow people to carry on thinking that it is true if they want to. The US may have a law against killing heads of state but we Brits don't (although apparently we are still unsure as to whether we have a law against extraditing them to Spain when accused of a mere 3,000 murders). I strongly suspect the news management for this war was handled by the Brits, possibly the same spin team that handled last years Labour general election victory. The first attack was about 4 minutes to 10 pm UK time. I heard it as a newsflash on the radio & then turned on the TV just in time for ITV's "News at Ten" program. One of their journalists was waiting outside that front door of 10 Downing Street, obviously tipped off about an "important announcement" and the PM came out sometime around 10 past 10 to make his speech (half an hour *before* Clinton, which must have been agreed between the governments) which ended just in time for the ad break. I suppose Clinton's speech would have been about lunchtime on the West Coast, late afternoon on the East Coast. A bit early from the POV of news management. It gives the networks a few hours to work on it before prime-time TV. One of the first rules of this sort of thing you want your own words to go over unedited if at all possible - the less time the networks get the more likely you are just to be given a live mike. That way you get to choose your own sound-bites. Or borrow them from Margaret "There is No Alternative" Thatcher. Of course she needed the Falklands War to get re-elected, and Clinton needs all the help he can get, but Blair is still master of all he surveys (Well, except for a few of us unreconstructed far-lefties, Peter Mandelson's private life, and Welsh Labour Party) so perhaps he can afford to be magnanimous in victory. Or perhaps he really thinks that there is no alternative. We could accuse them or timing the attack for TV, although I suspect 0100 Baghdad time was in fact a sensible H-hour. You'd want it after dark, and later rather than earlier if you were interested in minimising civilian casualties. I suppose 0300 or 0400 might have been better - but that would have missed UK evening TV and given the news media time to sort out their story for the morning (some of the "serious" papers here came out against the attack. Tabloids seem to be all for it of course). As it was everyone got the government announcement first. Ken Brown This all my opinion and nothing to do with my employers. (And I am certainly not even going to speculate about oil prices from this address).