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The Iraq War's Trashiest Piece of Propaganda
by
John Chuckman
There are scores of candidates for the
distinction of trashiest war propaganda in a mainstream
publication, and readers outside Canada may not recognize
my nominee's name, but I am confident readers will
recognize the merit of Margaret Wente's column
[1]
in the Toronto Globe and Mail, April
10). I've excluded CNN and Thomas Friedman from
consideration since trash propaganda on the Middle East is
virtually all they do.
Ms. Wente, who normally writes earnestly on such matters as
the angst of parents whose child has stubbed a toe on
faulty play ground equipment in the city of Toronto,
occasionally lends her deep understanding of human nature
to Middle Eastern affairs. Some regard these forays as akin
to having the late Irma Bombeck write on world affairs, but
they are wrong, because Ms. Wente is not funny, not even
slightly amusing, just earnest and overflowing with
peculiarly-selective concerns.
Her prize column came with a large photograph of a
happy-faced Iraqi boy walking with a small group of
heavily-armed American soldiers, one of them near the boy
smiling generously. The striking impression was of a
photograph taken in Italy near the end of World War Two,
although the glossy technical quality better resembled
modern advertising than war footage. Many ragged children
at that time were photographed smiling at American "GIs" or
"Joes." Some of them had just received a stick of gum or a
bit of chocolate, some were orphans identifying with the
new god-like men in town, and all of them were undoubtedly
glad to see an end to the dreadful sights and sounds of
killing.
At first, I thought the editor should, instead, have
featured one of hundreds of searing photographs from the
Internet documenting children who will never smile or walk
again, children whose faces resemble clotted candle wax or
with limbs like smashed twigs, the work of American
bombing. But as I read Ms. Wente's cheery, glossy take on
horror, I knew the editor had indeed used the perfect
picture.
Ms. Wente brushed aside concerns the beaming photo might
raise by assuring us that less people had been killed in
twenty-one days of war than Hussein killed every year.
Statements of this nature do serve a purpose: they
immediately signal a writer's true intent. There is no way
Ms. Wente could know accurately how many Iraqis died when
she wrote those words (she addresses herself only to
civilians - the poor conscript soldiers killed while
opposing an invasion of their home apparently counting for
nothing), nor could she know how many will yet die in an
unfinished war that has induced chaos in the cities, and
there is certainly no way she could know how many people
Hussein killed each year.
Ms. Wente celebrates the joys of Hussein's "prison for
children" being liberated. We have no way of knowing what
she is talking about since the obscure institution seems to
have appeared out of nowhere, but we must accept that some
children were imprisoned for refusing to join Ba'ath party
organizations. This of course is not improbable in a
dictatorship, but for all we know the children she refers
to were delinquents and the so-called prison a boot camp,
something very popular with their American liberators.
Ms. Wente doesn't let the image of a prison for children go
unembellished. She adds that children were "tortured and
killed" while the men who "kept the whips and keys" were
lavishly rewarded. Wow, in just a few words, she has the
children rendered as youthful resisters and
freedom-fighters and their keepers as whip-totting Gestapo
agents.
Somehow, during a quick stopover in Baghdad, Ms. Wente
learned the complete history of this mysterious institution
and apparently managed to locate and scrutinize its books
for expenditures on payroll and leather accessories. I
dislike being pushed into such cynicism, but one has to ask
what child ever born would accept whipping, torture, and
death rather than simply joining a party's politicized
equivalent of boy scouts?
Of course, her effort at Nancy Drew and the Nazi Dungeon of
Evil is intended to minimize the impact of the hundreds of
dead and mutilated Iraqi children many of us are all too
familiar with. The American authorities did their very best
to keep us from seeing these images of what war is really
about, but thanks to the Internet and heroic reporters for
organizations like al-Jazeerah, the truth is branded into
memory.
Well, children's dungeons or not, there are few thoughtful
people who aren't glad that Saddam Hussein is gone, but
that is not the same thing as saying they are glad with the
way it was done: in defiance of the concerns of most of the
world's people; in defiance of a majority of the UN
Security Council; and in contempt for the heroic work of UN
weapons inspectors - all while setting an example in
international affairs that we will certainly live to
regret. The satisfaction at his departure also is not the
same thing as the immense, long-term problems created by
the government of a people whose attention span to problems
not filling their television screens with smoke and
fireballs is measured in nanoseconds.
Ms. Wente is one of those who see the United States as the
brave and noble loner - Kirk Douglas in "Lonely Are the
Brave," Sylvester Styllone in "Rambo," or Gary Cooper in
"High Noon" - standing away from the ugly mob's opinion (in
this case, consisting of virtually the entire planet) to do
what he has somehow mystically been given to know,
deep-down, is the right thing to do. She shares this view
with the President of the United States, a man who appears
never to have read a serious book.
So, why should we be surprised when Ms. Wente includes such
a B-movie line as "Freedom does not come cheap, I know
that," placed in the mouth of an Iraqi? Now, I suppose it
is possible that an Iraqi, exposed to the antics of CNN and
glib hacks from outfits like the Heritage Foundation,
actually repeated this pathetic bromide, but why would a
journalist quote it?
Ms. Wente sprinkles her description of the toppling of
Saddam Hussein's statue with suggestive words like, "For
all the jubilation in the streets…The people cheered and
danced…On the fringes of the ecstatic crowd…." Photographs
of the statue-toppling, just the day before Ms. Wente's
glowing column, had been broadcast all over the world and
clearly signified Hussein's loss of power.
Now, it turns out, from an aerial or high-rise photograph
of the square at the time, published on several Internet
sites, that almost the entire square was empty. There was a
tiny group of people and a far greater density of military
vehicles than people. This panoramic view offers a
remarkably different perspective to the published close-ups
of people around the statue and a remarkably different
perspective to Ms. Wente's jubilation in the streets,
cheering and dancing, and ecstatic crowds. The numbers of
people in the square appear to have been so small as to
make the words almost silly.
The pictures broadcast of the statue being toppled were not
technically untrue, they simply lacked perspective. The old
adage from statistics that, with one hand in ice water and
the other in boiling water, you are on average warm,
applies to news coverage. In fact, here it appears the
distortion was far greater than talking about the
meaningless average of two extremes because there appears
to have been no balance in the extremes to which the people
of Iraq were exposed. These were photographs of a few happy
moments by a small number of people in a vast trail of
tears.
It is ridiculous to focus on one aspect of a huge and
complex situation and declare yourself satisfied with the
result. This is a good deal like celebrating the fact that
some dollar bills are fluttering around for the taking
after a deadly, massive highway crash involving an armored
car.
My judgment of the overall tone in Iraq is supported by
reports of Iraqis telling American troops "Thanks, but now
go home." Many Iraqis, fearfully miserable before the
bombing even began, have been pleading unsuccessfully with
the American troops for help. Other reports tell of many
Iraqis simply miserable, not gleeful, sitting and weeping.
After all, their country has been ravaged by bombs, the
hospitals overflow with piteous cases, thousands have been
killed, anarchy in the cities has meant the looting of
museums and hospitals, they swallow the indignity of defeat
and occupation, and they face a terribly uncertain future
with possible civil wars and the break-up of their country.
When you throw in the fact that genuine, stable democracy
is a very remote possibility for a country with no history
of it and a devastated economy, there just isn't a whole
lot to celebrate, even though a genuine tyrant has been
overthrown.
Well, after a good lot of her bubbly-earnest touch, Ms.
Wente gets around to quoting an expert on the Middle East,
and who else should that be but Mr. Bernard Lewis, the man
regularly trotted out by everyone who wants to make an
informed-sounding negative point about the region? Anyone
who has read Mr. Lewis or listened to one of his lectures
will know that he is just the kind of expert lawyers look
for to support a weak case in an appalling murder trial.
Ms. Wente uses Mr. Lewis the way a ventriloquist uses a
dummy, to say things without seeming to move her own lips.
One of the gems we are offered from "the great scholar of
Islamic history" (This kind of introduction always
effectively tells the reader, "Go ahead, just try
disagreeing with someone like that!") is that nothing about
"Ba'athism" (an awkward neologism referring to the
principles of Hussein's Ba'ath party) is native to Islam,
that Ba'athism is in fact an imported fascist ideology from
Europe.
Well, after first wondering why Mr. Lewis, just introduced
as peerless scholar of the Middle East is used to comment
on fascism from Europe - you have to wonder why you'd even
need to call upon any scholar to support so utterly obvious
and banal a statement.
The fact is that almost nothing about the politics and
organization of the Middle East today is native to the
Middle East, and that applies even more completely to
Israel and its institutions than it does to the Arab
states. It all consists of uniforms, flags, posters,
slogans, brand names, ideas, and institutions imported from
Europe or America.
This is what you find anywhere in the world after a long
period of colonialism. It was certainly true of the early
United States after it separated from England, with the
President typically being addressed then as "Excellency,"
carrying a sword as a symbol of office, and the country
adopting, wholesale, concepts and phrases from English law
and government tradition. In fact, Americans, for many
decades, used to burn the Pope in effigy on the anniversary
of Guy Fawkes day.
Ms. Wente's other profound insight from Mr. Lewis is the
observation that there are two fears in the Middle East
about Iraq's future: one is that democracy won't work; and
the other is that it will. That sounds terribly clever for
a few seconds, international affairs delivered by the late
Oscar Levant. The truth is that it is just about as helpful
as a quip from Oscar Levant to our genuine understanding.
So why would you quote it? Only if you either do not
understand what you are saying or if you are making a cheap
propaganda point.
Mr. Lewis is intensely biased in favor of Israel, and he is
very much in demand these days as a speaker against the
world backlash created by Israel's bloody excesses. You'd
be hard put finding a critical statement from Mr. Lewis on
Israel, its policies, or its institutions, but you will
find a huge amount of unflattering observations about Arab
societies. Ironically, many of the observations he makes
have relatively little to do with Arabic studies per se,
and more to do with areas of scholarship such as economic
development or the history political institutions, but
perhaps Mr. Lewis is a much greater and wide-ranging
scholar than I am aware.
Societies that are poor and underdeveloped are just that,
poor and underdeveloped. Their particular cultural history
may arguably have had a role or not in their arriving at
that state, but it is the state of poverty and
underdevelopment that retards democracy and the flowering
of human rights in every culture on the planet. It is not a
people's history, otherwise the Renaissance would never
have happened, and there would be millions of Europeans
eating gruel and flagellating themselves in monasteries.
People adapt to change, often surprisingly readily,
especially when it is clear there is a positive future, but
the magic of economic growth has not come to many portions
of the Middle East yet. I truly wish I could see America
bringing billions of dollars in investment, aid, and
technical assistance rather than cluster bombs, but I
don't. And the same for Israel, which always seems to have
billions for armaments but does almost nothing to raise the
level of its impoverished neighbors.
Democracy and concern for human rights, as I've written
before, flow naturally out of healthy economic growth and a
rapidly expanding middle class who do not see their
interests served by a single leader or small aristocratic
group. This is the story of Western civilization since the
Renaissance. No bombs or revolutions are required, just the
remarkable power of economic growth to dissolve away
ancient traditions and organizations and bring new ways of
looking at things. The experience has been universally
demonstrated from the death of scholasticism in Europe to
the receding backwaters of the American South.
The other time I recall noting Ms. Wente had departed from
her fluffy subject matter in Toronto, she had joined the
chorus of morally-obtuse columnists at the height of the
suicide bombings in Israel to suggest that Palestinian
parents must be deficient. Now, in her anxiety over a
Baghdad institution for 150 children, she has overlooked
Israel's gulag of more than three million Palestinians, an
overwhelmingly youthful population. I reflect on the
hopelessness that causes such children to kill themselves
and others instead of enjoying the sunshine of youth, but I
doubt Ms. Wente,
so selective in her earnest
concerns, will examine that
any time soon.
Note:
John
Chuckman, a free-lance writer, is a
retired chief economist for Texaco Canada. He can
be reached at:
JChuckman@mediamonitors.org. He contributed above article to Media Monitors Network (MMN) from
Portland, Maine, USA.
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