Jeff it nailed again...
I have come to believe that the biggest enemy of the Arab people is the Arab media. I never had a real cause to pay attention to it before, of course, being that I’m not an Arab, but now I receive excerpted articles everyday in the OSINT from networks like al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, and various online news sources that populate the Middle Eastern news community. To be fair, most reporting that finds its way onto the evening news for the average resident of Baqubah and Baghdad is local reporting that does its best to be fair and simply report what happens (that is, if you don’t happen to be watching a channel that candidly claims to speak for a specific sect or agenda, in which case the reporting is a concerted effort to paint a picture to feed that agenda), but the network news of the Middle East that beams its way across the region via satellite is possibly some of the most subtle bile that I’ve ever read. Most Iraqis receive satellite media; dishes dot the neighborhoods of Baqubah like dandelions in a cemetery, and the Arab culture thrives on news, opinion, and chatter, which is something that I always found personally endearing- I love good chatter. Intelligent chatter. Forceful, opinionated chatter that you can gesture along with, preferably by spreading your arms and shaking your hands upward. It’s a fine cultural feature of the Middle East that people stand around on street corners talking about stuff. We don’t do that enough.
But it’s not that the Arab news is inaccurate or biased. It is, moderately so, but I really don’t care. The Arab media doesn’t work for me; I’m an American. What I find so insidious is that the Arab media teaches Arabs to think like victims, reporting and commenting on the news to paint a picture of doom, helplessness, and fear. This is an article from al-Jazeera this weekend, and it’s not an editorial (those are far worse); it’s a legitimate news article. This isn’t a really outrageous example, but it’s a typical example. Observe:
The U.S. Won’t Leave Iraq Unless Iraqis Force it Out
The message is clear. Indeed, it's gigantic for all Iraqis, for the entire world to see. A 100 acre compound – ten times the size of the typical U.S. embassy, the size of 80 football fields, six times larger than the UN, the size of Vatican City. The U.S. Embassy Compound, in the middle of Baghdad – the center for U.S. domination of the Middle East and its resources. The compound towers above the Tigris River like a modern fortress. It will have its own sources of power and water and sit in the heart of Baghdad. If there is any thought that the U.S. is planning on leaving Iraq, the new embassy should make it clear 'We're staying! ‘The growing skyline of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is only the most recent indication that the U.S. has no intention of leaving. President Bush has already told us we're their until the end of his tenure. More important than words, building “permanent” military bases in Iraq reinforces the message of the huge embassy. The DoD does not like to use the word 'permanent' even for our bases in Germany and Korea. Euphemisms like “enduring bases” or “contingency operating bases” are used. They're less likely than 'permanent' to cause further anti-American unrest in Iraq. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations for the coalition in Iraq, told the Chicago Tribune in March 2004: “This is a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East.” Zoltan Grossman, a geographer at Evergreen State College in Olympia , Wash., told the Christian Science Monitor that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the U.S. has established a string of 35 new bases between Poland and Pakistan, not including the Iraqi bases. He maintains that the U.S. is establishing a “sphere of influence” in that region. Joseph Gerson, author of The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases also says the war and bases aim at maintaining U.S. control over the Middle East with its massive oil resources. The plan entails construction of long-lasting facilities in Iraq. The bases will include barracks and offices built of concrete blocks, rather than metal trailers and tents. The buildings are designed to withstand direct mortar strikes. Initial funding was provided in the $82 billion supplemental appropriations bill approved by Congress in May 2005.
The message is clear. Indeed, it’s gigantic for all Iraqis: “America hates you! America’s intention is to screw you over! No one is looking out for your best interests! I wouldn’t be surprised if you took matters into your own hands and did something extreme, so hopeless is your situation!” This article was sandwiched in between another report of defense contracting fraud (“See? The world is only here to rob you!”) and another about political deadlock being linked to the horrible security situation (“How could anyone expect you guys to succeed in such an abysmal state of affairs that you’ve been thrust into?”) The layout is usually the same format: take articles from the American media and report on their reporting, adding in subtle speculation and “probably’s” to stir up the emotions of fear and outrage. Do this day after day, and you eventually have a nation of victims, afraid of the world, expecting failure from everything, and paralyzed in inactivity, except to demand in frustration that someone take care of all the problems facing them. “You are not in charge of your own destiny. You poor, wretched nation of victims.” Maybe I’ve been reading too much Ayn Rand, but it’s been screaming at me lately, and I see the immense harm it is doing to the country of Iraq.
I realize this must sound surreal to Americans who are chiefly concerned with the Iraq War and our involvement in it. As you should- that’s what we care about, because it is what we can control. But 90% of the problems in Iraq right now have nothing to do with the war. They don’t even have much to do with Saddam, save the long legacy of socialism and governmental ineptitude he left in his wake. Ninety percent of the violence in Iraq happens nowhere near American soldiers, but happens because this one group of outraged Iraqis is fighting with this other group of outraged Iraqis, and they deal with us only to try to sway us to their side. News reports bluntly state that Coalition Forces have failed to establish security in Iraq, which is technically true, but it amounts to saying the White Man couldn’t keep the Sioux from fighting with the Cherokee. It tends to insult the victim more than the perpetrator. The government was stalled in deadlock for four months because the disparate political groups have trouble working together, despite the fact that no real ideas or platforms have been proffered. These aren’t the problems of a beleaguered, victimized country, but rather one that simply doesn’t know how to practically solve routine problems. The culprit is chiefly a dysfunctional culture that the Arabic media perpetuates by scapegoating everything BUT the people with the power to fix it.
You’ll find this same problem in reverse in American media, which is preoccupied with blaming ourselves for everything. If you have to err on any side, I guess this is the safe side to err on. “Are we getting too fat? Are we getting too wasteful? Are we consuming too much? Is politics getting too mean and nasty? Have we alienated our friends? Does the world hate us?” Even if hypothetically the answers to all these questions is “no,” at least we asked the questions. It’s called taking responsibility for your own culture, which is half the reason I love independent documentaries. Supersize Me was kind of a cheap shot, only because it implied blame on the culture rather than the individual, but I loved it anyway. I love films and media that examine a part of our collective culture and ask whether it’s a bad habit we should really be getting rid of. It’s a healthy part of self-examination. But imagine if our media did the opposite- “Has Iran been putting pollutants in our water? Is Canada going to screw timber prices and make our houses unaffordable? Has Mexico been purposely releasing criminals across our border? Are terrorists preventing your children from getting school lunch?” These stories are healthy in accurate moderation, but a steady diet of them will make you one paranoid individual. Why? Because 90% of the issues influencing our collective lives are under our control, as a culture and as a country. And it’s not just because we’re All Powerful America- this is true wherever you go. Things like crime and drugs and hatred and racism are not forced upon people from the outside- they are symptoms of an unhealthy culture that develops bad habits based on bad ideas.
I don’t mind the fact that the Arab media is hostile to the West. If there is anything this region needs, it’s certainly self-determination and empowerment, which is something US intervention can never give you- you’ve got to cultivate it from the inside. So I could completely accept a media that distrusted outsiders and empowered its people. But that’s not what this media does. This media blames outsiders for everything and shelters its people from any sense that they should really be getting to the business of taking charge of their lives. It has all the energy of indignation, but none of the energy that motivates and constructs. “America is pursuing its own agenda, but what do we care? We don’t need them to succeed!” It's the difference between saying your obsessive, meddlesome mother needs to move out of your house and let you take over, and saying she is actually trying to poison you with Drano, and it’s all you can do to cower under the sofa in terror. So the Arab media has a great responsibility in encouraging the Middle East to constructively take charge of its own destiny, but it's getting sidetracked into encouraging the Middle East to hate and blame everyone who remotely influences their destiny. This might sound a tad bastardly, given all they’ve been through in the past 30 years, but there is no reason the Iraqi people cannot succeed right now. They have gobs of money for reconstruction, courtesy of the taxpaying American public, and they have the politically correct support of the UN and the whole right-thinking world; everyone is pulling for them. They have a resource-rich country with a large population situated in the center of multiple trade routes and key seaports. Iran will be a problem, but the West will be much more aggressive with them than Arabs need ever be. Really, the only people actively working against Iraqis are the extreme and hateful members of their own culture, and a sensational media that tells them that extremism and hate are natural reactions to the injustices they’ve been subjected to.
The irony of this is always that the institution keeping the people down is the institution thinking it is helping them. The reporter sitting in his office in Saudi Arabia railing against the Zionists and western colonialists (spouting ideas constructed by liberal Western authors, of course) thinks he is doing his countrymen a favor. He is feeding the fires that rebel and tear down, that fight against the unjust imperial machine committing untold atrocities. Such sentiment is easy to come by and sold on the cheap. But when a country is in shambles and needs to unite and build, these same great minds have nothing to say. They know no language of construction and establishment. Building and maintaining anything is a foreign concept to them, the same ones who tear down and destroy with ease and delight. This, to me, is the biggest lesson of Iraq- it is very easy to destroy evil establishments, but quite difficult to build any good ones. The ground war that unseated Saddam was over in 21 days, but reconstructing Iraq has dragged on for years. The anti-Western rebel in the Middle East can bomb and shoot at the evil American power, but has nothing to offer an Arab country building from scratch. There are plenty of great minds who write books and give speeches on the evils of establishments, but virtually none who have any good ideas on how to build any. This is one glaring difference between Germany in 1945 and Iraq in 2006. Western academia sincerely wanted to reconstruct Germany, and there were economists and professors and authors and industrialists who all wanted to pitch in and get their hands dirty. College campuses actually debated relevant questions of policy. Sixty years later, Western intellectuals have no positive ideas to help Iraq. There are American bureaucrats but no great American thinkers in Baghdad. College campuses only debate the evils of war and the administration they think lied and cheated. Politicians scramble for acceptable positions that will minimize any negative fallout from the war. American media pundits are concerned with the American military’s death toll and how much longer it will be before we can come home, and every March 18th and new 1000th death reopen the debate on whether the whole thing was right to do in the first place. You will not hear any debate on the best course for a new Iraq because that debate does not exist. But such willful inattention is forgivable for American intellectuals- quite frankly, they don’t have to care about Iraq. But for Arab intellectuals, it is inexcusable.
When I leave Iraq in November, I hope I will be able to say with pride that I was part of a great undertaking, but only as far as we could take it. The U.S. military gave the people of Iraq a chance. But that is all. We released them from the binds of one bad regime and gave them a chance to build a new one. As I write, three years after the Baath Party’s unseating, they still have this chance. They will have it until the day that they decide to forfeit it to any government that will promise them salvation without responsibility, a government that will crush evildoers and shower blessings at the cost of their control and freedom. My frustrated Army colleagues often say “I understand why Saddam was the only person who could control these people. They are ungovernable.” But if this is true, they are only ungovernable because they cannot envision governing themselves. They have been taught to think themselves helpless and victimized, like lame men waiting for a savior to ride by and provide for them. I do not condemn them, but I see in their future an endless repetition of history, the history of men who believe lies. Where are their authors and anchors and professors? They are off writing spiteful pieces of hate that seek to attack powers they will never hurt, and offend people who aren’t reading what they write. They will only hurt themselves by signing off at the end of the day, having done nothing more than the day previous. They condemn their readership to a hell of paralysis. The people of Iraq deserve much better from them, and I pray will soon start expecting it.
Thanks for reading. You all rule.
Jeff
But it’s not that the Arab news is inaccurate or biased. It is, moderately so, but I really don’t care. The Arab media doesn’t work for me; I’m an American. What I find so insidious is that the Arab media teaches Arabs to think like victims, reporting and commenting on the news to paint a picture of doom, helplessness, and fear. This is an article from al-Jazeera this weekend, and it’s not an editorial (those are far worse); it’s a legitimate news article. This isn’t a really outrageous example, but it’s a typical example. Observe:
The U.S. Won’t Leave Iraq Unless Iraqis Force it Out
The message is clear. Indeed, it's gigantic for all Iraqis, for the entire world to see. A 100 acre compound – ten times the size of the typical U.S. embassy, the size of 80 football fields, six times larger than the UN, the size of Vatican City. The U.S. Embassy Compound, in the middle of Baghdad – the center for U.S. domination of the Middle East and its resources. The compound towers above the Tigris River like a modern fortress. It will have its own sources of power and water and sit in the heart of Baghdad. If there is any thought that the U.S. is planning on leaving Iraq, the new embassy should make it clear 'We're staying! ‘The growing skyline of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is only the most recent indication that the U.S. has no intention of leaving. President Bush has already told us we're their until the end of his tenure. More important than words, building “permanent” military bases in Iraq reinforces the message of the huge embassy. The DoD does not like to use the word 'permanent' even for our bases in Germany and Korea. Euphemisms like “enduring bases” or “contingency operating bases” are used. They're less likely than 'permanent' to cause further anti-American unrest in Iraq. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations for the coalition in Iraq, told the Chicago Tribune in March 2004: “This is a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East.” Zoltan Grossman, a geographer at Evergreen State College in Olympia , Wash., told the Christian Science Monitor that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the U.S. has established a string of 35 new bases between Poland and Pakistan, not including the Iraqi bases. He maintains that the U.S. is establishing a “sphere of influence” in that region. Joseph Gerson, author of The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases also says the war and bases aim at maintaining U.S. control over the Middle East with its massive oil resources. The plan entails construction of long-lasting facilities in Iraq. The bases will include barracks and offices built of concrete blocks, rather than metal trailers and tents. The buildings are designed to withstand direct mortar strikes. Initial funding was provided in the $82 billion supplemental appropriations bill approved by Congress in May 2005.
The message is clear. Indeed, it’s gigantic for all Iraqis: “America hates you! America’s intention is to screw you over! No one is looking out for your best interests! I wouldn’t be surprised if you took matters into your own hands and did something extreme, so hopeless is your situation!” This article was sandwiched in between another report of defense contracting fraud (“See? The world is only here to rob you!”) and another about political deadlock being linked to the horrible security situation (“How could anyone expect you guys to succeed in such an abysmal state of affairs that you’ve been thrust into?”) The layout is usually the same format: take articles from the American media and report on their reporting, adding in subtle speculation and “probably’s” to stir up the emotions of fear and outrage. Do this day after day, and you eventually have a nation of victims, afraid of the world, expecting failure from everything, and paralyzed in inactivity, except to demand in frustration that someone take care of all the problems facing them. “You are not in charge of your own destiny. You poor, wretched nation of victims.” Maybe I’ve been reading too much Ayn Rand, but it’s been screaming at me lately, and I see the immense harm it is doing to the country of Iraq.
I realize this must sound surreal to Americans who are chiefly concerned with the Iraq War and our involvement in it. As you should- that’s what we care about, because it is what we can control. But 90% of the problems in Iraq right now have nothing to do with the war. They don’t even have much to do with Saddam, save the long legacy of socialism and governmental ineptitude he left in his wake. Ninety percent of the violence in Iraq happens nowhere near American soldiers, but happens because this one group of outraged Iraqis is fighting with this other group of outraged Iraqis, and they deal with us only to try to sway us to their side. News reports bluntly state that Coalition Forces have failed to establish security in Iraq, which is technically true, but it amounts to saying the White Man couldn’t keep the Sioux from fighting with the Cherokee. It tends to insult the victim more than the perpetrator. The government was stalled in deadlock for four months because the disparate political groups have trouble working together, despite the fact that no real ideas or platforms have been proffered. These aren’t the problems of a beleaguered, victimized country, but rather one that simply doesn’t know how to practically solve routine problems. The culprit is chiefly a dysfunctional culture that the Arabic media perpetuates by scapegoating everything BUT the people with the power to fix it.
You’ll find this same problem in reverse in American media, which is preoccupied with blaming ourselves for everything. If you have to err on any side, I guess this is the safe side to err on. “Are we getting too fat? Are we getting too wasteful? Are we consuming too much? Is politics getting too mean and nasty? Have we alienated our friends? Does the world hate us?” Even if hypothetically the answers to all these questions is “no,” at least we asked the questions. It’s called taking responsibility for your own culture, which is half the reason I love independent documentaries. Supersize Me was kind of a cheap shot, only because it implied blame on the culture rather than the individual, but I loved it anyway. I love films and media that examine a part of our collective culture and ask whether it’s a bad habit we should really be getting rid of. It’s a healthy part of self-examination. But imagine if our media did the opposite- “Has Iran been putting pollutants in our water? Is Canada going to screw timber prices and make our houses unaffordable? Has Mexico been purposely releasing criminals across our border? Are terrorists preventing your children from getting school lunch?” These stories are healthy in accurate moderation, but a steady diet of them will make you one paranoid individual. Why? Because 90% of the issues influencing our collective lives are under our control, as a culture and as a country. And it’s not just because we’re All Powerful America- this is true wherever you go. Things like crime and drugs and hatred and racism are not forced upon people from the outside- they are symptoms of an unhealthy culture that develops bad habits based on bad ideas.
I don’t mind the fact that the Arab media is hostile to the West. If there is anything this region needs, it’s certainly self-determination and empowerment, which is something US intervention can never give you- you’ve got to cultivate it from the inside. So I could completely accept a media that distrusted outsiders and empowered its people. But that’s not what this media does. This media blames outsiders for everything and shelters its people from any sense that they should really be getting to the business of taking charge of their lives. It has all the energy of indignation, but none of the energy that motivates and constructs. “America is pursuing its own agenda, but what do we care? We don’t need them to succeed!” It's the difference between saying your obsessive, meddlesome mother needs to move out of your house and let you take over, and saying she is actually trying to poison you with Drano, and it’s all you can do to cower under the sofa in terror. So the Arab media has a great responsibility in encouraging the Middle East to constructively take charge of its own destiny, but it's getting sidetracked into encouraging the Middle East to hate and blame everyone who remotely influences their destiny. This might sound a tad bastardly, given all they’ve been through in the past 30 years, but there is no reason the Iraqi people cannot succeed right now. They have gobs of money for reconstruction, courtesy of the taxpaying American public, and they have the politically correct support of the UN and the whole right-thinking world; everyone is pulling for them. They have a resource-rich country with a large population situated in the center of multiple trade routes and key seaports. Iran will be a problem, but the West will be much more aggressive with them than Arabs need ever be. Really, the only people actively working against Iraqis are the extreme and hateful members of their own culture, and a sensational media that tells them that extremism and hate are natural reactions to the injustices they’ve been subjected to.
The irony of this is always that the institution keeping the people down is the institution thinking it is helping them. The reporter sitting in his office in Saudi Arabia railing against the Zionists and western colonialists (spouting ideas constructed by liberal Western authors, of course) thinks he is doing his countrymen a favor. He is feeding the fires that rebel and tear down, that fight against the unjust imperial machine committing untold atrocities. Such sentiment is easy to come by and sold on the cheap. But when a country is in shambles and needs to unite and build, these same great minds have nothing to say. They know no language of construction and establishment. Building and maintaining anything is a foreign concept to them, the same ones who tear down and destroy with ease and delight. This, to me, is the biggest lesson of Iraq- it is very easy to destroy evil establishments, but quite difficult to build any good ones. The ground war that unseated Saddam was over in 21 days, but reconstructing Iraq has dragged on for years. The anti-Western rebel in the Middle East can bomb and shoot at the evil American power, but has nothing to offer an Arab country building from scratch. There are plenty of great minds who write books and give speeches on the evils of establishments, but virtually none who have any good ideas on how to build any. This is one glaring difference between Germany in 1945 and Iraq in 2006. Western academia sincerely wanted to reconstruct Germany, and there were economists and professors and authors and industrialists who all wanted to pitch in and get their hands dirty. College campuses actually debated relevant questions of policy. Sixty years later, Western intellectuals have no positive ideas to help Iraq. There are American bureaucrats but no great American thinkers in Baghdad. College campuses only debate the evils of war and the administration they think lied and cheated. Politicians scramble for acceptable positions that will minimize any negative fallout from the war. American media pundits are concerned with the American military’s death toll and how much longer it will be before we can come home, and every March 18th and new 1000th death reopen the debate on whether the whole thing was right to do in the first place. You will not hear any debate on the best course for a new Iraq because that debate does not exist. But such willful inattention is forgivable for American intellectuals- quite frankly, they don’t have to care about Iraq. But for Arab intellectuals, it is inexcusable.
When I leave Iraq in November, I hope I will be able to say with pride that I was part of a great undertaking, but only as far as we could take it. The U.S. military gave the people of Iraq a chance. But that is all. We released them from the binds of one bad regime and gave them a chance to build a new one. As I write, three years after the Baath Party’s unseating, they still have this chance. They will have it until the day that they decide to forfeit it to any government that will promise them salvation without responsibility, a government that will crush evildoers and shower blessings at the cost of their control and freedom. My frustrated Army colleagues often say “I understand why Saddam was the only person who could control these people. They are ungovernable.” But if this is true, they are only ungovernable because they cannot envision governing themselves. They have been taught to think themselves helpless and victimized, like lame men waiting for a savior to ride by and provide for them. I do not condemn them, but I see in their future an endless repetition of history, the history of men who believe lies. Where are their authors and anchors and professors? They are off writing spiteful pieces of hate that seek to attack powers they will never hurt, and offend people who aren’t reading what they write. They will only hurt themselves by signing off at the end of the day, having done nothing more than the day previous. They condemn their readership to a hell of paralysis. The people of Iraq deserve much better from them, and I pray will soon start expecting it.
Thanks for reading. You all rule.
Jeff
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