DEFENDING THE MEDIA ON IRAQ.
Off Message
by Joshua Hammer
Post date 10.23.03 | Issue date 11.03.03
Baghdad, Iraq
hen Commerce Secretary Don Evans flew into Baghdad for a brief tour last week, the Bush administration made the most of his visit. In a series of stage-managed appearances, Evans inspected a bundle of newly minted dinars and praised two boys he'd spotted selling soft drinks as an example of the new businesses that have sprung up here.
But, despite Evans's cheery assessment, the media paid little attention. Just after Evans left town, Shia in Karbala gunned down three American soldiers in a ten-hour firefight. On Saturday, almost every U.S. newspaper carried the conflict on the front page. "clash with shiites and bomb attack leave 4 g.i.'s dead," ran the lead story in The New York Times. The Washington Post's headline included a grim milestone: "3 soldiers killed in iraqi city; bomb claims a fourth; postwar toll passes 100." Evans's story, meanwhile, ran on the inside pages.
For the Bush administration, it was yet another example of the villainy of the press. In recent weeks, a chorus of critics ranging from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to occupation leader L. Paul Bremer have lambasted the media for harping on bad news in Iraq and ignoring coalition forces' successes. "Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter. We're making good progress," President Bush said last week. According to these critics, the reasons for "biased" news coverage range from the press corps's failure to venture out of Baghdad to see the progress in the hinterlands, to an ideological hatred of the administration, to what Bremer recently termed a "structural defect of a free press"--an instinct to dwell on violence. Some administration officials even accuse the press of undermining America's mission in Iraq by providing psychological succor to enemy forces and eroding domestic support for the occupation. Two weeks ago, the American Enterprise Institute held a symposium whose tone captured the animosity festering in conservative circles. The synopsis of the panel discussion said it all: "Is the Bush administration losing control of the situation on the ground, or is the media transforming a military victory into a defeat in the public mind?"
Are journalists predisposed to find failure in Iraq? As a correspondent who spent part of the past six months reporting from Iraq, I know I wasn't. In fact, when I arrived in Baghdad in mid-August, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how much had improved from my previous visit immediately after the war. Shops and restaurants were crowded in the Karrada neighborhood around my hotel. The pervasive fear of looting was gone. Also gone were the half-mile-long lines in front of gas stations that I'd encountered before. Baghdad's streets were cleaner, safer, and more vibrant. Compared with the anarchic wreck of April and May, or with the sullen, oppressive metropolis of the Saddam Hussein era, I found that, on balance, Baghdad appeared on the road to recovery.
Then, on August 19, another reality struck. I had just returned to my hotel room when I received word of an explosion at the U.N. headquarters. Rushing across town, I found the compound blocked by American troops, who acknowledged there had been "massive casualties." Twenty-two people, including U.N. Special Envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, died in the wreckage that afternoon. With them, any confidence that Iraq was normalizing perished. As I watched shell-shocked survivors stumble out of the smoking compound, their faces and clothing streaked with blood, I found myself struggling to make sense of the two realities I'd witnessed here: the economic boom in Karrada and the terror strike in the heart of Baghdad.
Bremer tried to portray the U.N. tragedy as a bump in the road, insisting that reconstruction was proceeding smoothly. And, in general, the Bush administration has spoken about security and reconstruction as if they are two separate stories, with the press ignoring the latter. In fact, reconstruction depends on security, and the lack of security is sabotaging the rebuilding effort--by driving skilled people out of Iraq, scaring away investors, and turning Iraqis against the occupation. Hours after the attack at the U.N. headquarters, U.N. experts in postwar reconstruction were fleeing Iraq. One member of de Mello's team told me he was returning to Geneva and doubted he'd ever be back. He predicted the U.N. mission wouldn't recover: "Who the hell would want to come and work here?"
The U.N. bombing was followed in rapid succession by a car bombing in Najaf that killed more than 80 people and a second suicide attack near U.N. headquarters that injured 20 people. In the aftermath of the attacks, Secretary-General Kofi Annan scaled down the U.N. mission from 400 foreign nationals to a skeleton staff of 35, robbing Iraq of more experts with years of experience in nation-building. In stark contrast to staffers of the Coalition Provisional Administration, most of whom have little experience outside the United States, nearly all the U.N. officials had cut their teeth in war-torn countries like East Timor. Take just one example: David Marshall, a Harvard-trained attorney charged with rebuilding Iraq's justice system. Marshall had spent years doing the same work in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and Afghanistan; now fear has driven him from Iraq. The coalition legal team trying to reform Iraq's judicial quagmire could no doubt have benefited from Marshall's expertise.
Indeed, many specific postwar needs are going unfulfilled as aid groups flee. In recent months, the International Committee of the Red Cross reduced its foreign workforce in Iraq from 130 to 30. The French nongovernment organization Handicap International pulled its entire international staff out of Iraq, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and unicef currently have no foreign staff in the country. At a meeting in New York with U.N. representatives last week, Denis Caillaux, secretary-general of care International, said that concerns about security were making it nearly impossible for his organization to carry out its responsibility, providing clean water to more than five million Iraqis. "As long as ordinary civilians--including humanitarians trying to assist them--are not able to go about their basic work, any efforts at reconstruction in the medium and long term will be seriously impeded," Caillaux said.
The security situation has also had a chilling effect on foreign investment. Small Iraqi businesses have bloomed since Saddam's fall, but Washington was counting on a flood of foreign capital to help the economy recover. Yet, with carjackers lurking on the road to Amman, anti-aircraft missiles on sale in Iraqi markets, and car bombs detonating with regularity, few investors are setting up shop in Iraq. Iraq's crippled oil industry needs an estimated $7 billion to rehabilitate production and refineries, but Oil Ministry officials admit that instability has scared off potential investors, including corporate giants like Exxon. And even the Coalition Provisional Authority admitted in mid-September that the process of selling off 153 of 200 state-owned companies to private investors could take five years, in part because of investors' wariness. The press isn't overplaying the security situation in Iraq; it's the single biggest challenge facing the country's reconstruction.
The White House is also playing blame-the-messenger on coverage of American casualties. True, most of these have taken place in a small area, the Sunni triangle west of Baghdad. Consequently, the Pentagon has dismissed the roughly 17 attacks per day and the half-dozen deaths per week as "militarily insignificant." That's probably correct--the resisters are not likely to beat the U.S. Army. But such a blithe assessment ignores the psychological impact of casualties. The guerrilla campaign has clearly dampened troop morale. According to a recent poll by the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported in the Los Angeles Times, half of the 1,939 troops responding said morale in their units was low or very low. This slump in morale has contributed to heavy-handed house-to-house searches and panicky retaliatory fire that kills civilians, which stirs resentment and strengthens support for insurgents.
What's more, the violence, which may be spreading to Shia areas (witness the gunfight this week between Shia radicals and American troops), has unhinged Washington's efforts to bring in international troops. In Turkey, young conscripts are now restive about the prospect of being dispatched to Iraq. "You cannot send compulsory, conscripted soldiers outside your national territory," Major General Riza Kocukoglu, a veteran of 43 years in the Turkish military, told The Christian Science Monitor last week. "Even the American and British soldiers there are very demoralized." Worse, many countries have refused to commit troops altogether. Their reluctance to enter the fray will keep Americans shouldering the burden, perpetuating perceptions of the United States as an occupation force. "The Bush administration keeps confusing the volume of violence with the importance of [the] violence," says Vivienne Walt, who reported in Iraq for The Boston Globe and Time. "Of course, only a tiny minority is involved in guerrilla activity, but it's hugely important, because it can undercut everything that is going on for the 99.9 percent of people."
Sometimes even the "good news" in Iraq is less than meets the eye. Some American officials have criticized what they call "poor" news coverage of the U.S. rehabilitation of 1,000 Iraqi schools. Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho said he'd only learned about the program after arriving in Iraq in early October as part of a congressional delegation. In fact, according to the Associated Press (AP), there was plenty of coverage of the school reopenings on both television and in print. And, as the AP points out, the schools needed the rehabilitation primarily because they'd been damaged during the looting following the U.S. military's entry into Baghdad in April. Moreover, many schools in the south haven't been renovated, according to reporters who've visited them.
Many other so-called success stories look less impressive when held under scrutiny. Hospitals have been reopened, but, according to Iraqi doctors, the distribution of medicine is worse than it was before the war. The United States boasts of completing 15,000 construction projects, but many of them, according to aid workers, are cheap building repairs or "quick fixes" of battered sewage, water, and electricity systems. On a recent tour of Baghdad, Bremer pointed out reopened shops and told reporters that "the wheels of commerce are turning." In reality, according to Iraq's Labor Ministry, more than 70 percent of Iraqis are unemployed. Iraq's highly touted, new 40,000-man-strong police force is also less than it's cracked up to be. Although few dispute that the new cops mean well, they lack phones, squad cars, protective gear, computers, and precision weapons; American law enforcement sources say privately that they don't have anywhere near enough expertise to handle serious investigations.
ll this is not to say that Bush isn't partly right. There's a natural tendency in the media to give bad news top billing. Bombings and ambushes sell newspapers, and their prominent play can give a distorted impression of widespread chaos. Walt's September 12 report on the accidental killings of eight Iraqi policemen by American troops was featured on page one of The Boston Globe; a few weeks later, her long, nuanced story on improvements in the Iraqi educational system was buried inside the paper. But these journalistic priorities aren't unique to Iraq. Newspapers invariably place stories about suicide bombings in Israel on page one, conveying the impression that Israel is a highly dangerous place. It isn't: Suicide bombings have killed about 400 Israelis during the past three years, while automobile accidents have killed roughly four times as many. But few people question the media attention paid to suicide attacks in Israel because of their far-reaching consequences--the devastating effect on the region's economy and on the future of the Middle East. Since violence in Iraq, if it leads to U.S. forces leaving the country, could have a similarly large impact on the region's economy and politics, why shouldn't it be given top billing as well?
The media's relentless scrutiny of violence in Iraq is also the result of another factor: the often clumsy efforts by the Bush administration to stage-manage news. On a day just after the fall of Saddam, when government ministries were still burning in Baghdad, Lieutenant General David McKiernan, commander of ground forces, was asked at a press conference about looting and arson in the capital. He insisted that every Iraqi he had encountered had told him things were better and thanked him. "But this is a society that was ruled by a despotic authority figure," says Christine Spolar of the Chicago Tribune. "Do you think that anybody would tell McKiernan, who had just captured Baghdad, anything else but 'thank you'?" The military's spin has gotten worse. About a month ago, the U.S. Central Command website deleted all mention of coalition deaths from its homepage, and this week the White House banned media coverage of returning coffins from Iraq. Then there were the 500 letters from Iraq-based soldiers that appeared in hometown newspapers praising progress in Iraq. The letters were nearly identical, except for the signatures--a lame p.r. effort devised by the military.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, reporters are subjected to a twenty-first-century version of Saigon's five o'clock follies: At the Baghdad Conference Center, Bremer and his generals offer relentlessly upbeat assessments. Yet just getting to these press conferences requires running a security gauntlet. Reporters must pass through four checkpoints and submit to ID inspections, frisking, and metal detectors. The U.S. government's whitewash of such unpleasant realities, and its refusal to confront the deaths of soldiers and the threat of terrorism, invites a more aggressive approach from the press. "Every single time they talk to media, they gloss over the bad news; they refuse to confront it head-on," says Walt. "Any journalist worth his or her salt is going to spend the other six days a week debunking the rosy picture."
Then there's Rumsfeld's charge that journalists aren't getting out of Baghdad to see the rest of the country. "The bulk of the journalists are in Baghdad. ... They have facilities, hotels, and connections with their home offices," the Defense secretary complained at a recent Senate hearing. "So we've not had many takers on [the military] embedding program, which still exists and is available." True, few journalists avail themselves of the embedding program now, but that's because they're no longer dependent on the U.S. military to get around, and they don't like to be spoon-fed information. It's also true that physical discomfort can help keep reporters confined to Baghdad: During the terrible August heat, most of us weren't eager to escape from our air-conditioned hotel rooms. Insecurity on the roads remains a problem, and travelers run the risk of being robbed when they venture into the boondocks.
However, most big news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Newsweek, keep two or more correspondents in Iraq and encourage at least one to travel outside Baghdad as often as possible. During my first five-week trip to Iraq, I began my coverage in Basra, spent ten days in Najaf, put in a one-week stint in Baghdad, then finished the trip with a five-day swing through Mosul, Irbil, and Kirkuk. And the reconstruction process is not necessarily proceeding any faster outside Baghdad. In Shia areas, the growing tension and violence between the followers of radical clerics and the United States is scaring off aid workers there as well. In Basra, in the south, the Los Angeles Times reported this week, "occupation authorities say the absence of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has slowed the return of an estimated 400,000 Iraqis." In the north, meanwhile, violence between Kurds and Sunnis is rising. The fact remains, however, that Baghdad is the nerve center of the country, the economic capital and seat of government. What happens in Baghdad determines the fate of the entire country, and journalists have to pay close attention to the capital.
he Bush administration's attacks against the press have become strikingly reminiscent of the criticism I heard as a correspondent in Somalia ten years ago. At the time, U.S. and U.N. forces, having waded into a nation-building effort for which they were woefully unprepared, were engaged in an increasingly violent search for the fugitive warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid. Then, too, foreign correspondents were summoned to regular briefings by military spokesmen, who painted a rosy picture of the "progress" being made. Retired U.S. Admiral Jonathan Howe, the U.N. mission leader in Somalia, regularly touted a shaky exercise in democracy called the Transitional National Council and chided journalists for focusing on the negatives, such as a worsening guerrilla war that was claiming the lives of a half-dozen U.S. troops each week. Then, too, we were urged to leave the chaotic capital and see for ourselves improvements in the hinterlands.
The journalists refused to listen. Instead, they focused, much to Howe's annoyance, on the futile and bloody pursuit of Aidid, a hunt that culminated in the October 1993 battle that killed 18 American soldiers and led to the U.S. withdrawal. Iraq is certainly not Somalia. It may even be on the road to recovery. But, as long as American soldiers and Iraqis keep dying there, we'll put the story on page one. And for good reason.
Joshua Hammer is Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief and the author of A Season In Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place, published by Free Press/Simon and Schuster.
