The War Next Time?

The media and the Acela corridor are fixated today on the Michael Cohen saga like a hungry kid outside a candy store, looking for a sugar rush to sate their Trump Derangement Syndrome. But it is still rather amazing that even our ego-centric, Beltway-obsessed media is giving almost no attention to the possibility that full scale war may be about to break out between India and Pakistan. I’m having to scour the European press, like the Irish Times, to find any reporting.

India has sent some warplanes into Pakistani-held territory around Kashmir, and it is reported that Pakistan has apparently shot down at least one Indian fighter jet. India and Pakistan have long disputed Kashmir, but recently a Pakistani-linked militant group carried out an attack in Kashmir that killed 40 Indian soldiers. The first Indian counterattack by air is reported to have killed 300 Pakistanis.

As everyone knows, India and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons, and it is still not widely known on the Acela corridor that India and Pakistan were close to war once in the late 1990s, and it supposedly required the strenuous interventions of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to keep that crisis from escalating.

I’m guessing some of our media’s lack of interest in this current crisis is that they haven’t figured out how to blame it on Trump yet. Plus they’d have to do some actual work to report the story. Ben Rhodes was right: most journalists today are so ignorant they probably can’t find Kashmir on a map (maybe the map to the Kashmir sweater department at Bergdorf-Goodman), let alone tell you anything about the background of the conflict.

JOHN adds: I believe they did actually fight a couple of wars in 1965 and 1971, not to mention fighting and massive casualties at the time of the partition. But I think Steve is right, the press is past caring about anything that doesn’t relate to Trump.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses