Here’s the first line of a front-page New York Times piece by Dexter Filkins and Somini Sengupta, datelined Baghdad, that appeared 6/21/04 under the headline, Iraq Government Considers Using Emergency Rule: “Faced with violent resistance even before it has assumed power, Iraq’s newly appointed government is considering imposing a state of emergency that could involve curfews and a ban on public demonstrations, Iraqi officials said Sunday.” Now, consider that phrase “even before it has assumed power.” “Power,” of course, is a very specific word with so much meaning embedded in it. It’s no small journalistic act to bestow “power” upon a largely helpless entity simply because it proclaims that, with untested, minimal forces uncertainly at its command, it may declare “martial law” in embattled areas of a still-occupied country.
Now consider these recent comments by “Riverbend,” a young woman blogger in Baghdad:
“The new government isn’t very different from the old Governing Council. Some of the selfsame Puppets, in fact. It’s amusing to watch our Karazai [the Afghan head of state] — Ghazi Ajeel Al-Yawer — trying to establish himself… That whole charade is laughable. It has been quite clear from the very start that the Puppets do not breathe unless [occupation administrator L. Paul] Bremer asks them, very explicitly, to inhale and exhale. The last time I checked, Puppets do not suddenly come to life and grow a conscience unless a fairy godmother and Jiminy the Cricket are involved.”
Two views of power, you might say, and both datelined Baghdad. Your choice. But first consider the recently proposed solution to the problem of Saddam, the captive, in the context of assuming power. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch recently pointed out to the Bush administration that, under the Geneva Conventions, with sovereignty officially being turned over to Iraqis on June 30, POWs like Saddam either had to be charged with crimes or released. The leaders of the new “interim government” promptly demanded that Saddam be turned over to them; George Bush initially refused. Now, Washington has suggested a “compromise,” which tells us a good deal about what power is being assumed by whom: “It said it would retain physical custody of Saddam but legal custody would go to Baghdad” (Guardian, 6/22/04) So here’s a question — If physical custody equals power over Saddam, what does “legal custody” equal?
Consider, then, where power lies when the interim government assumes… well what exactly? How would you rewrite that New York Times first line? Here’s a sentence I picked up from a piece (Echoes of the past) in the British Guardian, 6/22/04, by Luke Harding that might come closer to reality (the job of journalism, no?): “Next month the Bush administration will hand over limited powers to a carefully handpicked and pro-US Iraqi government to politicians whom most Iraqis already dismiss as American stooges.”
Or take another subject. Just days ago, an American plane or helicopter fired two missiles into a residential neighborhood of Fallujah (itself a war crime as Juan Cole recently pointed out at his Informed Comment website). The Bush administration explanation went like this: Based on “strong, actionable” intelligence (Christian Science Monitor, 6/21/04, or “multiple confirmations of actionable intelligence” (Chicago Sun Times, 6/22/04) our military hit a “safe house” used by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terrorist network. Reports from Fallujah were that 22 people had died, mostly belonging to a single extended family and including a number of women and children. Our spokesperson in Baghdad responded: Not at all; we “killed key figures in the network of suspected terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi” (AP, 6/21/04). (How, given our notoriously dreadful intelligence in Iraq, we can be sure of this in out-of-bounds Fallujah, I leave to your imagination.) The destruction and civilian deaths, the claims and counterclaims, the reassertion of even more specific claims and counterclaims (often followed by the promise of an investigation)… anything seem familiar here? Not, probably, if you read the American press.
On June 13, the New York Times had a striking piece (Errors Are Seen in Early Attacks on Iraqi Leaders) by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt reporting that, of 50 air strikes meant to take out the top figures in Saddam’s government with “precision munitions” over a month-long period beginning on the eve of the war, and based on our best intelligence of that moment, we were an across-the-boards 0-50. What are the odds against that, even blind? (“It was all just guesswork on where they were,” they quote “a senior military officer” as saying.) Of course, we were anything but 0-50 when it came to killing significant numbers of Iraqi civilians since, as in the recent Fallujah missile attack, many of these strikes took place in heavily populated urban neighborhoods. Perhaps there is a little formula here: smart bombs plus dumb intelligence equals civilian horror. Then again, as the Israelis have shown, precision munitions plus good intelligence still equals civilian horror.
Now, you might think that the Times piece would have provided a little useful context — with the Fallujah strike taking place only a week later, with the U.S. Air Force once again attacking an urban residential area, once again using precision munitions based on hot intelligence tips, and once again claiming to have precisely taken out the bad guys (as, for instance, during the war we claimed incorrectly to have taken out General Ali Hasan al Majid, aka “Chemical Ali”); or you would think that a number of other similar and similarly contested bombing incidents and U.S. claims might be brought up. But no such connections are made in the American press.
Under the pressure of events, our media people now generally agree that the Abu Ghraib scandal was not simply a matter of “a few bad apples” and, on the issue of torture, some of the obvious dots are indeed finally being connected all the way up to the top of the Pentagon and into the White House. But generally speaking, during the era of the younger Bush, the single bad apple theory of reporting has ruled the roost.
We are not into patterns, not those in any case that might reflect badly on us. Being the world’s hyperpower evidently means never having to notice. To see such patterns, you really need to view the world through other journalistic eyes. The minute you do, and so leave our American biosphere (as Nick von Hoffman calls it in his new book Hoax), the world starts to look like quite a different place and pictures — large ones filled with connected dots — begin to form almost immediately, like so many images emerging from the solution in a dark room.
Ask British journalist Robert Fisk of the Independent, for instance, what dots should be connected when considering the Iraqi “assumption of power,” the turning over of “full sovereignty,” and he writes a thoroughly eerie piece, Iraq: 1917, on parallels between the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920s and ours today (right down to the punitive use of air power).
Or step out of our bubble with Filipino columnist Renato Redentor Constantino, and the recent bombing in Fallujah promptly brings to mind a bombed wedding party in Afghanistan, then another on the Iraqi border with Syria; while our present debate over “water-boarding” and other tortures applied in our offshore mini-gulag is framed by an earlier version of the same in the turn-of-the-last-century Philippines. Dilip Hiro, an expert on the Middle East based in London — don’t miss his latest book Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After — takes us on yet another dot-connecting journey to Iraq in the second piece below, as he puts together “tipping points” in the history of imperial occupations.
Perhaps we should take heart, though, as ever more Americans seem to be stepping out of our bubble all by themselves, at least as judged by the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll on support for the war and occupation. Still, it always helps to see your world through the eyes of someone else, particularly when those eyes belong to foreign journalists with the urge to connect at least a few dots; whereas even now, unless forced to the reportorial wall, our media people still insistently take their stories one by one, lest a larger picture or two come disturbingly into focus.
So many dots, so little time.
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]
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