...cause this is defintely a PUB conversation over a pint. Read on:
While We Were Sleeping
Where Was the Media Between Invasion and Murtha? Networks Gave Vietnam War Twice the Minutes Iraq Gets; Baghdad Bureaus Cut Back; Amanpour: ‘Patronizing’
By: Rebecca Dana, Lizzy Ratner
Date: 11/28/2005
Page: 1
On the morning of Aug. 3, 1965, a 33-year-old CBS correspondent named Morley Safer, in fatigues and with a bulky recording contraption on his hip, stood in Cam Ne, Vietnam, before a backdrop of burning thatch-roof huts. He clutched a battered metal microphone. Moments earlier, a unit of baby-faced American soldiers had set the huts on fire. Young women ran wailing, cradling babies; an elderly man hobbled toward Mr. Safer, pleading in Vietnamese.
“This is what the war in Vietnam is all about, the old and the very young,” Mr. Safer said, turning to face the camera.
Forty years later, the United States is in a desert war, transmitted instantly by satellite and broadband. There are no boundaries on our technical capabilities to cover events.
But there are other limits—commercial, political, editorial. And they have kept the war in Iraq marginal in the American media, from soon after the initial invasion in the spring of 2003 till last week, when Representative John Murtha hurled it back into the spotlight.
While Vietnam is remembered as the television war, Iraq has been the television-crawl war: a scrolling feed of bad-news bits, pushed to the margins by Brad and Jen, Robert Blake, Jacko and two and a half years of other anesthetizing fare. Americans could go days on end without engaging with the war, on TV or in print.
“There’s a dearth of seriousness in the coverage of news,” said veteran war correspondent Christiane Amanpour, “at a time when, in my view, it couldn’t be more serious.”
• Dead troops are invisible. The Bush administration’s ban on capturing flag-draped coffins is echoed in the press’ overall treatment of American war dead. A May 2005 survey by the Los Angeles Times found that over a six-month span, a set of leading United States newspapers and magazines ran “almost no pictures” of Americans killed in action, and they ran only 44 photos of wounded Westerners.
• Average monthly war coverage on the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts, combined, has been cut in half—from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in 2005.
• Major newspapers have cut back on the size of their Baghdad bureaus, with some closing them or allowing them to go unstaffed for stretches.
• Government regulation has spread over the battlefield, limiting mobility and access. Where Vietnam correspondents could hop a chopper to combat zones at will, Iraq reporters need to sign eight-page sheaves of rules and are pinned to single units. Health-care privacy law is invoked to keep reporters away from the wounded.
• Corporate security restrictions likewise stifle reporting. At CNN, reporters need clearance from the bureau chief to leave the network compound; similar rules apply at other networks.
The danger “really impedes our ability to get around the country to talk to average Iraqis, to get a really good sense of what’s going on on a daily basis,” said Paul Slavin, a senior vice president for ABC.
Many reporters have done heroic work in Iraq despite the obstacles. But it has failed to add up. There have been no moments like Cam Ne—in which Mr. Safer, a single Marianas-deep furrow between his brows, summarized the news and, in the process, signaled the birth of a bracing and immediate breed of war coverage: “The day’s operation burned down 150 homes, wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one Marine, and netted … four old men who could not answer questions put to them in English.”
That nightly jungle drama, bringing a futile war to American televisions, has no counterpart in today’s coverage.
“The problem is that people aren’t publishing the work,” said Stefan Zaklin of the European Pressphoto agency. Mr. Zaklin recalled taking a picture of a fallen U.S. Army captain during the November 2004 assault on Falluja. The soldiers, he said, “were O.K. with me taking that picture,” and it ran in Paris Match, the Bangkok Post, and on page 1 of Germany’s Bild-Zeitung, Europe’s highest-circulation newspaper. Its only exposure in the U.S., he said, was a two-hour spin on MSNBC.
“The U.S. press is even worse in terms of not publishing the complete story,” Mr. Zaklin said, “and I think it’s because of the perceived taste or tolerance levels of their audience.”
“Corporations don’t want and don’t feel particularly a responsibility to aggressively rock the boat,” said Michael Kirk, a documentary producer working for PBS’s Frontline. “I think that’s certainly true. Why would Viacom want to rock the boat?”
At the networks, Mr. Kirk said, “the imperative is not to let somebody spend the time and the energy and the resources to really know it.
“We just did this huge film about torture,” Mr. Kirk continued. “We called all the people who worked at Abu Ghraib—the military police, military-intelligence people, officers. Many, many of them said no reporter had ever contacted them. This was a public list; this was not a secret list. It’s basic journalism—I call one guy and say, ‘Who else can I talk to?’ He gives me two more names. And that person gives me four more names. They also said they had not been contacted by anyone in journalism.”
So the war, in its bloodless version, fails to disturb the national media mind.
“I don’t think the networks have been able to create a narrative or mythology for the war,” said Ron Simon, the television curator for the Museum of Television and Radio. “For a narrative, you have to have an answer to Norman Mailer’s famous question, ‘Why are we here?’ Two years later, they’re still struggling to ask that question.”
Without that overarching narrative, news organizations are left to report inconclusive results under dangerous and unhelpful conditions. “I have to say, from where I sit—and this is from being on the ground—it’s really hard to do much more than figure out what the narrative over the past 24 hours was,” said New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, on the phone from the paper’s Baghdad bureau.
Thus, in an entertainment-saturated media business, the Iraq feed has faded to an unattractive option—an option that even tends to be, with its distant and indistinct and repetitive strife, boring.
“News is news,” said John Paxson, CBS’s London bureau chief, who provides Iraq coverage to the network’s news programs. “A certain level of violence in Iraq, if it stays at that level for a period of weeks or months, it isn’t news. If it spikes upward, it’s news, and the amount of coverage on the air goes up.”
Asked if CBS is satisfying the American audience’s appetite for news from Iraq, he said, “I don’t know, because I’m not a consumer. I don’t watch American TV.”
The American news consumer is seeing far less of the war on television than Vietnam-era viewers did. In 1972, Ernest W. Lefever, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and senior fellow at the Ethics and public Policy Center, tabulated the CBS Evening News’ coverage of the Vietnam War, for a book meant to demonstrate that the network was excessively hostile to the Nixon administration. Mr. Lefever tallied 1,092 minutes of war coverage on the network that year, an average of 91 minutes a month.
Andrew Tyndall, a media analyst who tracks broadcast network news, reports that ABC, NBC and CBS combined have averaged 166 minutes a month on Iraq this year—which works out, per network, to roughly 55 minutes a month.
In 2003, after the invasion, media companies were warned not to feed the American news consumer too much material on the downside of war. The media-consulting firm Frank Magid Associates advised broadcast outlets that its survey results suggested that viewers had very little appetite for stories about casualties, prisoners of war and anti-war protests.
“There’s this kind of general, industry-wide view that Americans don’t like anything tough, don’t like anything complicated, don’t give a shit, don’t know how to spell the country much less care what’s going on there,” Ms. Amanpour said. “I find that a very patronizing attitude.”
Since the early days of round-the-clock shock and awe, as the war news has grown more ambiguous and dispiriting, Iraq’s share of broadcast time has diminished. According to Mr. Tyndall’s figures, coverage of combat in Iraq on the three top networks dropped from 133 minutes a month in 2003 to 113 minutes in 2004, then to 70 minutes in 2005.
“At the time, this looked like it was gonna have a happy ending,” Mr. Tyndall said. “There was the drama of the drive to Baghdad. The networks had time to plan for the invasion, to allocate all the resources, to get all the embeds organized. It was orchestrated as a spectacle.”
It’s not only combat that’s lost its share of TV time as the post-invasion era drags on. When Iraq’s interim government was formed in June 2004, the top three broadcast networks devoted 139 minutes that week to coverage, according to Mr. Tyndall. During the week of the January 2005 Constitutional Assembly elections, the networks spent 146 minutes, as Iraqis happily gathered around cameras waving their purple-tipped fingers.
But last month’s constitutional referendum got only 36 minutes of air time in the week it happened, Mr. Tyndall reported.
Reporters are still working the war zone, if not in the same waves as during the initial invasion. The broadcast networks and CNN are spending millions of dollars on Iraq newsgathering operations each year, and executives from the networks said that the financial commitment hasn’t dropped off.
“These are now fixed costs,” said Chris Cramer, the managing director of CNN International, who oversees Iraq coverage for the network. “They’re the price of doing business there, if you want to run a meaningful operation. We’re now spending several millions of dollars in security alone, and that’s before we get to staffing costs and accommodations.”
Print outlets, meanwhile, have gradually reduced their presence and expenses—with some withdrawing their foreign correspondents altogether. The Boston Globe no longer keeps a full-time staff journalist in Iraq; an Iraqi stringer maintains its offices in the Al Hamra hotel. Several weeks can pass between visits by Globe correspondents, said James Smith, the paper’s foreign editor.
“All bureaus are constricting to a degree,” said Rajiv Chandrasekaran, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post who was the paper’s Baghdad bureau chief from April 2003 to August 2004. In the early days, he said, The Post maintained four or five permanent reporters, with three or four additional reporters rotating through at any given time. Now, the number of permanent reporters is down to two, with two or three more dropping in.
All of the American media have come to rely more and more on Iraqi staff. Of the roughly 40 people in CNN’s Baghdad bureau, about 30 are Iraqis. ABC has 30 Iraqi staffers in a bureau of 55; CBS has about two dozen in a similarly sized bureau. Approximately half of Reuters’ 60-person crew is either Arab or Iraqi. Of the 11 Associated Press journalists awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking-news photography earlier this year, five were Iraqi photographers.
The increased role of Iraqi staff comes as reporters are less able to move freely about the country. The Iraq war has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in well over half a century. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 58 reporters and 22 media-support workers (such as translators and drivers) have already been killed covering the conflict.
“I do believe that our human-interest storytelling has been hurt by the fact that we are not free to roam the neighborhoods and spend as much time as we would want to with the average Iraqi family or businessperson or child,” said David Verdi, the vice president of world newsgathering for NBC News. “We don’t freely go to the schools and the hospitals and the mosques because of the safety issues. That part of the storytelling has been hurt.”
In Vietnam, only 66 reporters were killed in 20 years of warfare. Both sides tended to respect the neutrality of the press, and the Viet Cong would go so far as to court reporters, said veteran correspondent Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer for his Vietnam coverage and is now writing a book about Saddam’s last years before the invasion. (Mr. Arnett was fired from NBC in 2003 after saying on Iraqi television that the American war plan had “failed.”)
Back then, “you had the impression that the Western media was not specifically targeted,” Mr. Arnett recalled.
Now, Mr. Arnett said, when he goes out, he often hides under a blanket in the back seat of a car.
For some reporters, leaving their security-patrolled, double-barricaded hotels requires permission from their employers. Last year, CNN instituted a rule limiting its Baghdad staff to correspondents and producers who have already reported from the area. When they want to leave CNN’s compound, they must get permission from the bureau chief.
Reporting teams from the three broadcast networks must also get clearance and must be accompanied by a security detail. “There is not a movement that we take outside of our hotel that is not carefully planned,” said NBC’s Mr. Verdi.
The Iraqis who have taken up the most dangerous legwork are not safe either. Five Iraqi journalists are currently being held without charges by U.S. and Iraqi government troops. Since April 2003, between 10 and 13 have been killed by American gunfire.
“It really comes from all sides,” said Reuters global managing editor David Schlesinger, who has lost three Iraqi reporters to U.S. gunfire and three more to detention facilities. “Certainly there’s a huge risk from insurgents, either to be hurt or killed accidentally … but unfortunately, there’s also been an issue with U.S. troops.”
And agoraphobic reporting, unavoidable though it is, means that the war is less compelling for readers and viewers back home.
“I think certainly you could get out in the jungles in Vietnam and prowl around and show the landscape,” said NBC correspondent George Lewis, who began his career in 1970 as a 27-year-old Vietnam correspondent. “Reporters today don’t have that freedom to roam. That makes it less visually compelling, perhaps.”
The insurgents aren’t the only ones behind the demise of the roving Vietnam-style reporter. The military, which at first reacted to the Vietnam experience by stonewalling the press, eventually discovered how to incorporate roving into the official agenda, through the embedding process.
Much was written at the outset of the invasion about the perils of embedding: how it could breed over-reliance on the official message, how it could lull reporters into uncritical camaraderie with the troops, how it could force reporters to trade accuracy for access.
A number of reporters now downplay some of those theoretical concerns. But some conceded that embedding does impede reporting.
“There’s commanders out there who, if you do an embed and they see your coverage or a particular story is too critical, they won’t invite you back for an embed,” said Ellen Knickmeyer, The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief. “There’s parts of the country you won’t be able to go to. There’s a lot of good commanders out in the field, but sometimes their view of how you should be reporting doesn’t always get with how we’re used to covering things.”
“The military hasn’t stopped us,” said Alan Chin, a freelance photojournalist who covered the invasion in 2003, then returned for three months this past spring. “But they have made it hard at times.”
And as the war has devolved into a shapeless battle with insurgent forces, the role of embedment has shifted. It’s not an ethical calculation anymore, but a practical one.
“If you’re a [Western] print reporter,” Mr. Chandrasekaran said, “you’re pretty much confined to Baghdad. And if you want to go anywhere else, you basically have to be embedded.”
This also keeps the press working within an official, bureaucratic context. Jon Alpert, a filmmaker working on a documentary for HBO about military medicine, said that the MedEvac unit he embedded with for the project was surprisingly accommodating. But when injured troops reached the field hospital, officials invoked the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the same privacy law that has come to thwart stateside reporters.
“When we were in the hospital,” Mr. Alpert said, “I had to have a public-affairs officer with me all the time. Because it was a hospital, they were applying the HIPAA laws.”
The combination of structured access to U.S. forces and open hostility from insurgents has left reporters with lopsided sources. “Who are the insurgents?” said freelance photojournalist Kael Alford, who covered the invasion and the first three months of the occupation. “Who are these people and why are they fighting? That’s a really valuable perspective …. It’s the story we have all been trying to do all along, and very few journalists have been able to get it.”
Another advantage that Vietnam reporters have is that their performance already belongs to history. Through the early part of that war, voices like Mr. Safer’s were in the minority, as overall coverage echoed the tales of smashing success coming from the Pentagon’s Saigon press bureau. Hindsight has a way of seeing highlights, not the years and months of ineffectual reporting that may have surrounded those moments.
Still, those moments were there—as when Walter Cronkite addressed his CBS audience at the end of his Feb. 27, 1968, broadcast. An anti-war movement was gaining strength and volume at home, and the North Vietnamese had swept into the streets of Saigon with the shocking Tet offensive. Mr. Cronkite himself was just home from a trip to Vietnam.
“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion,” Mr. Cronkite said. “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
The declaration shook the press and the nation. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” President Lyndon Johnson told his aides, “I’ve lost Middle America.”
The current President has long since made it clear that he doesn’t care what the media have to say. Even if he did, there is no Walter Cronkite to say it.
On Monday, ABC announced that it will send an anchor to Baghdad: former chief White House correspondent Terry Moran, one of three rookie anchors replacing Ted Koppel on Nightline.
“The press is going through a very difficult time,” said Vietnam correspondent David Halberstam, “because the technology is changing under our feet …. You go from three or four channels to cable and the fragmentation of the audience. So that has tended to change the dynamic. First print is in decline, then the networks are in decline. The networks are utterly corporatized, not interested in news in the way the networks in the 60’s still cared …. Now you have these giant corporations that don’t really care that much about news. It is a tiny tail on a very large dog.”
If the public mood about the war is turning, it is turning less on the work of the press and more on the outrage of Mr. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and combat veteran who called for the troops to be withdrawn as soon as practicable. The Bush administration, which never hesitates to lash back at critical stories in the media, was left praising Mr. Murtha’s credentials while trying to counter his complaint.
“I think this is a very important increment,” said Mr. Halberstam. “Murtha is a guy who is really speaking for the military. So if you lose someone like Murtha, that may be the equivalent, in this new kind of war, of 500,000 people outside the Pentagon.”
While Mr. Murtha is bidding to write history, what has the press been doing?
New York Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns said, “Considering the impediments that there are here to travel and access … the American media in Iraq has done a pretty damned good job.”
But Mr. Burns acknowledged that he worries how posterity will judge his and his colleagues’ work.
“I spend some time, as one who has some responsibility for shaping our coverage here, asking myself what are they going to be saying in the journalism classes of 2025, 2030, about the New York Times coverage here, against whatever the outcome is? … Were we too Pollyanna-ish and too optimistic? Or were we too pessimistic?” Mr. Burns said. “I think one thing we would all have to plead guilty to is having perhaps underestimated the degree of difficulty accomplishing what the United States set out to do here.”
—Additional reporting by Brad Tytel, Nicole Pesce, Raegan Johnson and Anna Lindow
Comments
Media Advisory
Smoking Gun Memo?
Iraq Bombshell Goes Mostly Unreported in US Media
5/10/05
NOTE: Please see the Action Alert related to this Advisory.
Journalists typically condemn attempts to force their colleagues to disclose anonymous sources, saying that subpoenaing reporters will discourage efforts to expose government wrongdoing. But such warnings seem like mere self-congratulation when clear evidence of wrongdoing emerges, with no anonymous sources required-- and major news outlets virtually ignore it.
A leaked document that appeared in a British newspaper offered clear new evidence that U.S. intelligence was shaped to support the drive for war. Though the information rocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair's re-election campaign when it was revealed, it has received little attention in the U.S. press.
The document, first revealed by the London Times (5/1/05), was the minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting in Blair's office with the prime minister's close advisors. The meeting was held to discuss Bush administration policy on Iraq, and the likelihood that Britain would support a U.S. invasion of Iraq. "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided," the minutes state.
The minutes also recount a visit to Washington by Richard Dearlove, the head of the British intelligence service MI6: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
That last sentence is striking, to say the least, suggesting that the policy of invading Iraq was determining what the Bush administration was presenting as "facts" derived from intelligence. But it has provoked little media follow-up in the United States. The most widely circulated story in the mainstream press came from the Knight Ridder wire service (5/6/05), which quoted an anonymous U.S. official saying the memo was "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" during Dearlove's meetings in Washington.
Few other outlets have pursued the leaked memo's key charge that the "facts were being fixed around the policy." The New York Times (5/2/05) offered a passing mention, and the Charleston (W.V.) Gazette (5/5/05) wrote an editorial about the memo and the Iraq War. A columnist for the Cox News Service (5/8/05) also mentioned the memo, as did Molly Ivins (WorkingForChange.com, 5/10/05). Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler (5/8/05) noted that Post readers had complained about the lack of reporting on the memo, but offered no explanation for why the paper virtually ignored the story.
In a brief segment on hot topics in the blogosphere (5/6/05), CNN correspondent Jackie Schechner reported that the memo was receiving attention on various websites, where bloggers were "wondering why it's not getting more coverage in the U.S. media." But acknowledging the lack of coverage hasn't prompted much CNN coverage; the network mentioned the memo in two earlier stories regarding its impact on Blair's political campaign (5/1/05, 5/2/05), and on May 7, a short CNN item reported that 90 Congressional Democrats sent a letter to the White House about the memo-- but neglected to mention the possible manipulation of intelligence that was mentioned in the memo and the Democrats' letter.
Salon columnist Joe Conason posed this question about the story:
"Are Americans so jaded about the deceptions perpetrated by our own government to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer interested in fresh and damning evidence of those lies? Or are the editors and producers who oversee the American news industry simply too timid to report that proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?"
As far as the media are concerned, the answer to Conason's second question would seem to be yes. A May 8 New York Times news article asserted that "critics who accused the Bush administration of improperly using political influence to shape intelligence assessments have, for the most part, failed to make the charge stick." It's hard for charges to stick when major media are determined to ignore the evidence behind them.
....see what happens when a holiday comes around? You start catching up on yoru reading and all kinds of revolutionary crazy stuf starts to get read...
It makes you feel mad, desperate, disencouraged, cynical etc..
Don't know what to say really.
THE AGENDA: HYPOTHETICALS
If America Left Iraq
The case for cutting and running
by Nir Rosen
At some point—whether sooner or later—U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it to be sooner. As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqis chafe at its failure to provide stability or even electricity, and they have grown to hate the explosions, gunfire, and constant war, and also the daily annoyances: having to wait hours in traffic because the Americans have closed off half the city; having to sit in that traffic behind a U.S. military vehicle pointing its weapons at them; having to endure constant searches and arrests. Before the January 30 elections this year the Association of Muslim Scholars—Iraq’s most important Sunni Arab body, and one closely tied to the indigenous majority of the insurgency—called for a commitment to a timely U.S. withdrawal as a condition for its participation in the vote. (In exchange the association promised to rein in the resistance.) It’s not just Sunnis who have demanded a withdrawal: the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is immensely popular among the young and the poor, has made a similar demand. So has the mainstream leader of the Shiites’ Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who made his first call for U.S. withdrawal as early as April 23, 2003.
If the people the U.S. military is ostensibly protecting want it to go, why do the soldiers stay? The most common answer is that it would be irresponsible for the United States to depart before some measure of peace has been assured. The American presence, this argument goes, is the only thing keeping Iraq from an all-out civil war that could take millions of lives and would profoundly destabilize the region. But is that really the case? Let’s consider the key questions surrounding the prospect of an imminent American withdrawal.
Would the withdrawal of U.S. troops ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites?
No. That civil war is already under way—in large part because of the American presence. The longer the United States stays, the more it fuels Sunni hostility toward Shiite “collaborators.” Were America not in Iraq, Sunni leaders could negotiate and participate without fear that they themselves would be branded traitors and collaborators by their constituents. Sunni leaders have said this in official public statements; leaders of the resistance have told me the same thing in private. The Iraqi government, which is currently dominated by Shiites, would lose its quisling stigma. Iraq’s security forces, also primarily Shiite, would no longer be working on behalf of foreign infidels against fellow Iraqis, but would be able to function independently and recruit Sunnis to a truly national force. The mere announcement of an intended U.S. withdrawal would allow Sunnis to come to the table and participate in defining the new Iraq.
But if American troops aren’t in Baghdad, what’s to stop the Sunnis from launching an assault and seizing control of the city?
Sunni forces could not mount such an assault. The preponderance of power now lies with the majority Shiites and the Kurds, and the Sunnis know this. Sunni fighters wield only small arms and explosives, not Saddam’s tanks and helicopters, and are very weak compared with the cohesive, better armed, and numerically superior Shiite and Kurdish militias. Most important, Iraqi nationalism—not intramural rivalry—is the chief motivator for both Shiites and Sunnis. Most insurgency groups view themselves as waging a muqawama—a resistance—rather than a jihad. This is evident in their names and in their propaganda. For instance, the units commanded by the Association of Muslim Scholars are named after the 1920 revolt against the British. Others have names such as Iraqi Islamic Army and Flame of Iraq. They display the Iraqi flag rather than a flag of jihad. Insurgent attacks are meant primarily to punish those who have collaborated with the Americans and to deter future collaboration.
Wouldn’t a U.S. withdrawal embolden the insurgency?
No. If the occupation were to end, so, too, would the insurgency. After all, what the resistance movement has been resisting is the occupation. Who would the insurgents fight if the enemy left? When I asked Sunni Arab fighters and the clerics who support them why they were fighting, they all gave me the same one-word answer: intiqaam—revenge. Revenge for the destruction of their homes, for the shame they felt when Americans forced them to the ground and stepped on them, for the killing of their friends and relatives by U.S. soldiers either in combat or during raids.
But what about the foreign jihadi element of the resistance? Wouldn’t it be empowered by a U.S. withdrawal?
The foreign jihadi element—commanded by the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—is numerically insignificant; the bulk of the resistance has no connection to al-Qaeda or its offshoots. (Zarqawi and his followers have benefited greatly from U.S. propaganda blaming him for all attacks in Iraq, because he is now seen by Arabs around the world as more powerful than he is; we have been his best recruiting tool.) It is true that the Sunni resistance welcomed the foreign fighters (and to some extent still do), because they were far more willing to die than indigenous Iraqis were. But what Zarqawi wants fundamentally conflicts with what Iraqi Sunnis want: Zarqawi seeks re-establishment of the Muslim caliphate and a Manichean confrontation with infidels around the world, to last until Judgment Day; the mainstream Iraqi resistance just wants the Americans out. If U.S. forces were to leave, the foreigners in Zarqawi’s movement would find little support—and perhaps significant animosity—among Iraqi Sunnis, who want wealth and power, not jihad until death. They have already lost much of their support: many Iraqis have begun turning on them. In the heavily Shia Sadr City foreign jihadis had burning tires placed around their necks. The foreigners have not managed to establish themselves decisively in any large cities. Even at the height of their power in Fallujah they could control only one neighborhood, the Julan, and they were hated by the city’s resistance council. Today foreign fighters hide in small villages and are used opportunistically by the nationalist resistance.
When the Americans depart and Sunnis join the Iraqi government, some of the foreign jihadis in Iraq may try to continue the struggle—but they will have committed enemies in both Baghdad and the Shiite south, and the entire Sunni triangle will be against them. They will have nowhere to hide. Nor can they merely take their battle to the West. The jihadis need a failed state like Iraq in which to operate. When they leave Iraq, they will be hounded by Arab and Western security agencies.
What about the Kurds? Won’t they secede if the United States leaves?
Yes, but that’s going to happen anyway. All Iraqi Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. They do not feel Iraqi. They’ve effectively had more than a decade of autonomy, thanks to the UN-imposed no-fly zone; they want nothing to do with the chaos that is Iraq. Kurdish independence is inevitable—and positive. (Few peoples on earth deserve a state more than the Kurds.) For the moment the Kurdish government in the north is officially participating in the federalist plan—but the Kurds are preparing for secession. They have their own troops, the peshmerga, thought to contain 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. They essentially control the oil city of Kirkuk. They also happen to be the most America-loving people I have ever met; their leaders openly seek to become, like Israel, a proxy for American interests. If what the United States wants is long-term bases in the region, the Kurds are its partners.
Would Turkey invade in response to a Kurdish secession?
For the moment Turkey is more concerned with EU membership than with Iraq’s Kurds—who in any event have expressed no ambitions to expand into Turkey. Iraq’s Kurds speak a dialect different from Turkey’s, and, in fact, have a history of animosity toward Turkish Kurds. Besides, Turkey, as a member of NATO, would be reluctant to attack in defiance of the United States. Turkey would be satisfied with guarantees that it would have continued access to Kurdish oil and trade and that Iraqi Kurds would not incite rebellion in Turkey.
Would Iran effectively take over Iraq?
No. Iraqis are fiercely nationalist—even the country’s Shiites resent Iranian meddling. (It is true that some Iraqi Shiites view Iran as an ally, because many of their leaders found safe haven there when exiled by Saddam—but thousands of other Iraqi Shiites experienced years of misery as prisoners of war in Iran.) Even in southeastern towns near the border I encountered only hostility toward Iran.
What about the goal of creating a secular democracy in Iraq that respects the rights of women and non-Muslims?
Give it up. It’s not going to happen. Apart from the Kurds, who revel in their secularism, Iraqis overwhelmingly seek a Muslim state. Although Iraq may have been officially secular during the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam encouraged Islamism during the 1990s, and the difficulties of the past decades have strengthened the resurgence of Islam. In the absence of any other social institutions, the mosques and the clergy assumed the dominant role in Iraq following the invasion. Even Baathist resistance leaders told me they have returned to Islam to atone for their sins under Saddam. Most Shiites, too, follow one cleric or another. Ayatollah al-Sistani—supposedly a moderate—wants Islam to be the source of law. The invasion of Iraq has led to a theocracy, which can only grow more hostile to America as long as U.S. soldiers are present. Does Iraqi history offer any lessons?
The British occupation of Iraq, in the first half of the twentieth century, may be instructive. The British faced several uprisings and coups. The Iraqi government, then as now, was unable to suppress the rebels on its own and relied on the occupying military. In 1958, when the government the British helped install finally fell, those who had collaborated with them could find no popular support; some, including the former prime minister Nuri Said, were murdered and mutilated. Said had once been a respected figure, but he became tainted by his collaboration with the British. That year, when revolutionary officers overthrew the government, Said disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape. He was discovered, shot in the head, and buried. The next day a mob dug up his corpse and dragged it through the street—an act that would be repeated so often in Iraq that it earned its own word: sahil. With the British-sponsored government gone, both Sunni and Shiite Arabs embraced the Iraqi identity. The Kurds still resent the British perfidy that made them part of Iraq.
What can the United States do to repair Iraq?
There is no panacea. Iraq is a destroyed and fissiparous country. Iranians and Saudis I’ve spoken to worry that it might be impossible to keep Iraq from disintegrating. But they agree that the best hope of avoiding this scenario is if the United States leaves; perhaps then Iraqi nationalism will keep at least the Arabs united. The sooner America withdraws and allows Iraqis to assume control of their own country, the better the chances that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari won’t face sahil. It may be decades before Iraq recovers from the current maelstrom. By then its borders may be different, its vaunted secularism a distant relic. But a continued U.S. occupation can only get in the way.
Spin
However, by then, even Canada won't be safe.
Spin
How about the embassy bombings?
The USS Cole?
The first WTC bombing?
The wider world community must be considered and yes, to a large degree America did have respect prior to Iraq.
It's like the Hero and Villlain fighting it out on the world stage.
The hero has committed some dastardly acts,
and the audience is booing him off the stage.
and a few too many kids in the audience are now cheering the Villain.
Don't blame me for the analogy, I didn't stage the show!
OBL had a hand in the first WTC bombing, the USS cole, etc.
Saddam had nothing to do with them other than providing verbal support, etc as any enemy would do in propaganda given his nature.
Let's not mix up our enemies, SH didn't like OBL not radical Islam as it would have been a potential competitor to hsi regime. Only in the last 3-4 years of his rule did he permit any religious scripts.
Now, while I have never thought that the US had a valid reason for going into Iraq, as everything that was said as a rationale was either a well known fact to 2-3 previous presidential administrations, was compeltely agasint the intel we had been getting for several years, was a complete change in MOO for SH, or just plain didn't make sense for SH to say or do the things he was accused of as he, frankly, was just not that stupid.
Is it better that he is gone? YES! Was there many valid reasons for removing him? YES! Where those reasons presented to the US electorate? NO.
Now, that is all water under the bridge. I also maintained, before we went in, that IF we went in we better be prepared to suffer the body bags flying back to the US for at minimum the next 10 years. My opinion then, and now, is that the politicians in congrees whom did not have the balls to say no to the riot of public opinion to go to war better have the balls to stick it our until we rebuild the country so that we on't have to go back in and do it all over in 5, 10 or 15 years.
Now, I am paying close attention to whether we have completed our mission or if this is all just short term political posturing in preparation for the election in 2006 and 2008.
Iraq is a mess and how peace and harmony is ever going to happen there is a mystery. It's a shame the war started but whats the soloution now?
The USA has huge respect here!
Let me be clear, I'm not talking down the troops or the good people who want a safe and just America.
But you can't promote western values and stifle debate and facts at the same time. It took Bush and Cheney too long to admit peoples right to disagree, and unfortunately I suspect that their doing that belatedly has more to do with trying to get asharing of responsibility forthe inevitable pullback.
Bernie, the long term commitment thing could have worked with a proper plan that was attractive to most Iraqis.
The US was never close to having a proper plan because they decided they had to run the whole show instead of the Iraqis. The Iraqis knew their history, so did the Brits, the French, Germans, Italians and quite a few Aussies. The when you come to saying there wasn't any leadership you could trust, that was one of the problems in rushing in the way Bush did.
I don't see how you can say how long you will be there without first the reality check then an agreed plan.
At the moment there is little agreement on objectives, let alone a plan.
Spin
Ger, hey perhaps therre's an idea in there somewhere. I have heard that there are still quite a few disenfranchised IRA types running about and seething for a fight. Maybe if we took some fo these wolfe tone types and pointed them at those islamic terrorists...hmmmm. I think the IRA is more effective and better trained than any of these pretty boys who grew up on oil money and now have a 'cause"
The Islamic Terrorist and his 40 virgins promise is brainwashed into suicide. You cannot win against this type of warfare. Euope is becoming a minefield with the huge migration of Muslims. OK a huge percentage are law biding and hard working but its scary to think what will happen in 20 years as the Musilm population grows or if Turkey gets into the EU.
How would the IRA fare in combat with Islamic enemy. Poorly!
The wolf was never behind the door in Iraq. Iraq had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 and it's disgusting to use those 3000 dead to continue to justify incompetence.
You don't think that the Islamofacists planned 9/11 once GWB was elected do you?
No, it would have happened if Gore was elected as well.
Respect IS an issue that needs to be reestablished. My kind as well as yours.
Don - keep living in Candyland.
From 1996-2004 we had a "right" government.
Our then president was big friends with GW Bush and the government supported USA and GB with their attack on Irak.
Last year on March 14 there were elections.
Just 3 days before the elections Al Qaida bombed the train stations in Madrid.
The "left" party won the elections. Now we have a "left" government that immediately called back all troops from Irak.
Al Qaida has expressed their delight about how Spanish people voted.
Now you can think about those facts and make up your mind!!
Just wait until the next time they want something.
Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
BTW - Gore was elected, Bush was selected.
Franklin was right however, I wonder what he'd have thought about something like the Patriot Act?
Ger - You Rummy, Red Nosed, Potatoeater Mick, Towelhead? :rolleyes:
I agree though that it should ALWAYS have a sunset clause in it - i believe that for most laws actually - but the PA should be reviewed and modified on a regula r basis.
http://www.glennbeck.com/news/01302004.shtml
Yes to all the above except Towelhead!
Believe it or not as a kid growing up in New York on our street there was a synagog/jJewish School and what I believe was called the Bronx Institute of Islamic Studies another school. Me I went to St Helenas catholic a few blocks away. All the kids going to these schools lived in the area and played together. In fact the only fighting was between the Irish and Italians!
Im not racist but I have a fear of Islam and the multiple plays on it's teachings. There does not seem to be any one leader of this religion. Where is it's center Mecca? It seems the more radical you are the more religious you are.
Like I said earlier its a pity the war started. In hindsight it should have never happened the way it did. Should 9/11 be used as the reason to invade Iraq? Me I am not sure. I do believe that the stampeed of Islamic terror has to be stopped. I think the Saudis and Pakistanis are a huge future threat and these guys need looking at. (Britian is facing major racial issues).
I just wonder as a question what is the situation in Iraq going to be like in 5 Years? Will we be saying This new democratic Iraq is a testimony to the war and removal of Sadam or will we say what a F**k up this place is?
Keep digging Don.
BTW - as I expected you would fall back to your normal position of divert divert deny and make counter accusations.
Oh and your center left for the next 50 years? When your girl Hillary starts talking tough on illegals I have a hard time thinking that we are going center left anythime soon!
ahem, I have met several candian businessmen who have had some recent diffculty with some of the border guards. My own experience and observation has been that a certain level of arrogance and demand for respect has madee certain border guards more concerend about making sure everyone know s that they got big dicks instead of doing their job properly. I have been a first hand witness to this. bow down, kiss kiss and then no search of the vehicle. That is not right. that is a direct result of the patriot act. very flawed to let litte boys and girls with very little power get this kind of power to exploit. very poor on our part as this is how the US presents itself to our very best neighbor and ally
If you think I'm deflecting about US citizens being negatively effected by the Patriot Act (I love that name, it's so Orwellian isn't it) take your pick, personally I like using it as a fig leaf for rounding up homeless folks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act_abuses
I however am still awaiting your reply as to the number of folks prosecuted for terrorism under it.
[Edited on 29/11/2005 by dst]
'bout the same number that the Brady Law put behind bars in its ten year life span. If I remember correctly you just LOVED that law.
Unfortunately they didn't have much intelligence at all. Rather ham handed try at deflecting. We'll just stipulate it's low, VERY low. OK? Now tell me again why it's neccessary.
Do you have something to hide?