Last
week, through a front-page reconsideration of its Iraq
reporting written by media columnist Howard Kurtz ("The
Post on WMDs: An inside story"), the Washington Post
finally hung out a piece or two of its dirty laundry.
This comes three months after the New York Times buried
its Iraq mea culpa on page 10 (and then its ombudsman
Daniel Okrent did a far more forthcoming consideration
of the same).
The fact is that while its
editorial page was beating the drums for war, Post
prewar reportage was in general marginally better than
that of the Times. It had no obvious raging
embarrassments like Times reporter Judith Miller's
shameful pieces and, more recently, from Walter Pincus
to Mike Allen to Dana Priest, it was on the beat of real
Bush administration stories in Washington far sooner
than its Times equivalents. Still, it has a good deal to
apologize for ("from August 2002 through the March 19,
2003, launch of the war, the Post ran more than 140
front-page stories that focused heavily on
administration rhetoric against Iraq. Some examples:
'Cheney says Iraqi strike is justified'; 'War cabinet
argues for Iraq attack'; 'Bush tells United Nations it
must stand up to Hussein or US will'; 'Bush cites urgent
Iraqi threat'; 'Bush tells troops: Prepare for war'"),
though you'll find no apologies here, certainly not for
the front-paging of administration war propaganda and
the nixing or burying of what prewar questioning its
reporters did.
You'll also find the following
howler from executive editor Leonard Downie Jr: "We were
so focused on trying to figure out what the
administration [of President George W Bush] was doing
that we were not giving the same play to people who said
it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were
questioning the administration's rationale," not to
speak of Bob Woodward's claim that "We had no
alternative sources of information" - at a moment when
he knew from the horse's mouth, so to speak, that the
Bush administration was intent on war with Iraq. (Of
course, you didn't need insider sources to grasp this,
just a pair of eyes and ears.) Imagine, though, that
Washington's imperial paper of record was focused only
on discovering what then couldn't have been more obvious
to tens of millions of people around the world: that the
Bush administration was hell-bent on and determined only
to go to war, WMD (weapons of mass destruction) or no.
So imagine, in turn, Kurtz is the best we can hope for a
year and a quarter after Baghdad was taken, after a
series of tsunami-like events that have sent the Bush
administration reeling, long after every aspect of its
WMD claims has gone down those "aluminum tubes" (doubts
about which the Post admits to having back-paged) and
into oblivion. And they say the president has a tough
time acknowledging error!
Self-censorship,
conformity, and craven bowing to Bush administration
propaganda of the sort admitted to by the Washington
Post are, however, just the tip of the media iceberg.
The Post, via Kurtz, is only not-apologizing for what
was actually written and where it was placed in the
paper. It remains beyond anyone's wildest dreams to hope
that the United States' major papers would devote the
slightest thought to stories that logically should have
been covered but simply went missing in action (MIA). So
for the rest of this dispatch, let me just focus on US
Iraq reportage since the taking of Baghdad and offer my
own little non-inclusive list of occupation/war stories
that seem to me to have gone MIA - and these are only
the ones that, with my limited public sources and
limited knowledge, I can see from here. Then, because
every war has its war words that are meant to bend
embattled reality to someone's advantage, I want to
consider a few recent examples of Iraq war words and how
the press has dealt with them. Missing
stories 1. Air power. Air power has been at the
heart of the US style of war since World War II. With
the sole exception of Central America in the Ronald
Reagan era, from the Korean War in the early 1950s to
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s to the 2001
"shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad, the application of
massive air power (or more recently of cruise missiles),
often unopposed, has been the essence of war as
Americans have fought it. It strikes us Americans as
completely normal to be able to bring air power to bear
in situations where the enemy of choice has neither air
power of its own, nor any but the most minimal air
defenses.
When under the onslaught, if the enemy
then takes refuge in places that would normally be
forbidden to bomb - hospitals, schools, temples,
mosques, or among the civilian population - this is seen
as a "cowardly" act, placing our military at such a
disadvantage as to nullify the "rules of war". And this
is a theme sometimes taken up in the press. In a recent
piece ("Why the Najaf offensive is on hold"), for
instance, Time's Tony Karon, who generally writes
interesting analysis, picked up a phrase made popular in
the Vietnam era in discussing the recent fighting near
the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf: "While the estimated 1,000
lightly armed Mehdi militiamen," he wrote, "were no
match for more than 3,000 US troops and an undisclosed
number of Iraqi personnel deployed there, the political
circumstances in which the battle was waged forced
the marines to fight with one hand tied behind their
backs."
Now this is quite true. For fear of
further damaging the Shrine of Imam Ali, the marines are
evidently at present under orders, if fired upon from
the direction of the shrine, not to fire back. What's
missing in action here, however, is the other part of
the story: when we employ Apache helicopters, Predator
drones armed with Hellfire missiles, and F-16s (not to
speak of tanks) in heavily populated urban areas against
an enemy armed mainly with AK-47s and rocket-propelled
grenades (RPGs), how many hands do we have in front of
our backs? Six? Ten? Eighty-seven?
Now that
significant portions of Iraq, city by city, seem to be
blinking off the US map, our military is increasingly
releasing air power as the weapon of choice in those
heavily populated urban areas. In the past week, we have
bombed, missiled or strafed (sometimes a combination of
all three) in Sadr City, the Shi'ite slum holding an
estimated 2 million of Baghdad's inhabitants, Samarra,
Kut, Najaf, Fallujah (more than once) and possibly in
Ramadi and Hilla as well among other places. If you have
the time to read deep into Iraq coverage, follow various
news wires, check out historian Juan Cole's invaluable
Informed Comment website, check Antiwar.com and troll
various representatives of the foreign press online, you
can certainly piece much of this together. So, in Kut,
Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported:
Heavy overnight US bombing of Kut killed
84 people and wounded nearly 180 others, a day after
clashes between Iraqi police and Shi'ite militiamen in
the southern city, a hospital official said ... Police
Colonel Salam Fakhri said the bombing started at 1am
Wednesday and lasted until 3am. "The bombing was
concentrated in Al-Sharkia district as the US military
felt there were a lot of Shi'ite militiamen in that
area. It also has an office of [radical Shi'ite Muslim
cleric and militia chief] Moqtada Sadr," he
said.
Meanwhile, on August 12 in Samarra,
500-pound (227-kilogram) bombs were dropped on two
"known enemy locations" killing, according to the US
military, a suspiciously well-rounded-off 50 "anti-Iraqi
forces" ("But Dr Abdul Hamid al-Samarrai told AFP news
agency at the main hospital that most of the casualties
were women and children").
What's striking is
that, while such bombings seem on the increase, I've
noted no significant articles in the US press on the
loosing of US air power in Iraq, the dangers and
possible illegalities involved in bombing heavily
populated civilian areas of a country you still
functionally "occupy", or of the size and positioning of
US air power in Iraq. If you're an Internet news junky,
of course, you can go to the globalsecurity.org website
and check out for yourself the US Air Force in Southwest
Asia and where US planes are based in Iraq (as best as
can be known), but you might think that the widespread,
increasingly commonplace bombing of civilian areas in
cities would be a story the media might want to cover in
something more than the odd paragraph deep into pieces
on other subjects.
There's an old Vietnam-era
lesson in this, as a friend and expert on our experience
in Vietnam recently pointed out to me. Reporters can
generally follow and cover fighting on the ground. It's
harder to be "on the spot" for bombing, and as the
military take for granted (and as was true of the United
States' largely uncovered massive air assaults on the
South Vietnamese countryside, and parts of Laos and
Cambodia back in the late 1960s and early 1970s), for
the US press, out of sight is out of mind. (See Point 4
below.)
2. Permanent bases. Here's
another desperately uncovered story of the Iraq
war/occupation/war, one I've harped on since April 2003
- America's permanent bases (charmingly referred to as
"enduring camps") in Iraq. The possibility that four of
these might be built was discussed on the front page of
the New York Times while the invasion of Iraq was still
in progress (and vehemently denied by the Pentagon). A
year later, in the spring of 2004, the Chicago Tribune
had a couple of pieces on the up to 14 enduring camps
being prepared. Otherwise, as far as I can tell,
permanent US bases, plans for them, the building of
them, and what they might mean, strategically speaking,
have gone almost completely unmentioned in the US media.
And enormous as they evidently are, they should be hard
to overlook. Here's the only reference I've found, in an
obscure engineering journal, to their overall size and
the enormousness of the funds being pouted into them,
based on an e-mail interview with Lieutenant-Colonel
David (Mark) Holt of the Army Corps of Engineers, "who
is tasked with facilities development". It reads:
US Base Construction - The third major
mission the army's engineers are engaged in is
building facilities for the bed-down of US forces.
"Again the numbers are staggering," Holt says. Most of
work is being done through KBR. "Interesting program
in the several-billion-dollar range," Holt
says.
Imagine, "in the
several-billion-dollar range" and being built by
Halliburton subsidiary KBR. Some of them, such as Camp
Anaconda, are evidently comparable in size to the vast
Vietnam-era bases that the US built in such places as
Danang. These go unmentioned and yet if you don't grasp
that, from the beginning, the Pentagon was planning a
major string of "enduring camps" in Iraq, then you
really can't grasp why the Bush administration had no
exit strategy from that country - because, of course, it
had no plans to depart. These permanent bases also help
explain why the Coalition Provisional Administration of
L Paul Bremer so confidently disbanded the Iraqi
military of 400,000 and made plans instead to rebuild a
modest-sized force (but not an air force) of perhaps
35,000-40,000 lightly armed, tankless troops (as was
said again and again from the time of the invasion on).
Instead of maintaining anything close to a Saddam
Hussein-sized military, the neo-cons and Pentagon hawks
in Washington planned to stick around and have the US
provide the air power and muscle needed in such a
heavily armed region itself, as indeed is happening,
though under far different circumstances than our
policymakers imagined. Of all the subjects one can
understand not being covered in Iraq right now due to
the obvious dangers to foreign reporters, these US bases
certainly should be a reasonably safe exception.
3. Urban warfare and slaughter. One of
the fears of the military at the time of invasion of
Iraq was that US troops might be bogged down in urban
guerrilla warfare in Baghdad, a situation in which our
immense technological advantages in war-fighting could
be constrained or partially nullified in a maze of city
streets. There were scores of articles about this
fearful possibility then and a slew of reports about US
preparations for such a fate. (A good example of such
pieces is New York Times reporter Alan Cowell's "House
to house: Urban warfare: Long a key part of an
underdog's down-to-earth arsenal", published on March
27, 2003.) In the end, Baghdad fell largely without a
struggle. Critics - and there were many, including
military ones, who raised the possibility of urban
warfare - were in essence laughed off the premises as
what in the Vietnam era would have been known as
"nervous Nellies", and the subject was forgotten. Now,
this nightmare seems to be coming true. From Mosul in
the north to Basra in the south, US and British troops
are involved in spreading urban guerrilla warfare. Yet
while this is obvious, it also goes largely uncommented
upon. There is no real discussion or analysis of this in
our press that I've seen, though reporters would largely
only have to revisit their own or their colleagues'
reportage from the spring of 2003 to begin.
Certainly, the recent warfare in the streets of,
and amid the tombstones of, Najaf has been covered in
some daily detail. There have been descriptions of
"bloody" fighting and fierce "hand to hand" combat in
Najaf's vast holy cemetery and in the alleyways of the
old city. These accounts give a sense of equality in
struggle (as in hands tied behind backs). However, if
you look at the casualty figures, it seems that so far
perhaps eight American soldiers have died in the
fighting as opposed to many hundreds of Iraqis. Even if
US "body counts" of dead Mahdi Army militiamen,
announced at more than 300 almost as the battle began,
are exaggerated (and even if some of those dead are
assumed to be civilians caught up in fighting in a
sizable city rather than "anti-Iraqi forces"), the
casualty figures are still grotesquely disproportionate
(though remarkably similar to those in most 19th-century
colonial wars). On the face of it, this should really
not simply be labeled "bloody fighting" or "fierce
hand-to-hand combat" (however fearsome and dangerous it
may be for American soldiers). Another word should be
added: "slaughter". On this, the casualty figures do not
lie. I assure you, though, that you can search the US
media high and low and not find that word, or anything
similar.
4. US strategy in Iraq. When the
new State Department/CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)
team arrived during the June "transition", led by
soft-spoken Ambassador John Negroponte, they clearly had
a plan - put new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and other
Iraqi spokesmen in front of the cameras and get US
policymakers inside the Green Zone to shut up. They did
so and, miraculously, evidently lacking access, sources,
leaks, or quotable voices, reporters simply stopped
writing accounts, analyses, speculations on the nature
of or meaning of US strategic planning in Iraq. Green
Zone officialdom simply disappeared from our press,
which largely dealt with the fighting that could be seen
in Najaf and Allawi's supposed decisions in relation to
Najaf. It may be obvious to any sane observer that the
Americans are still in charge and that US strategic
decisions are largely being implemented by Americans,
not Iraqis; it may also be plausible that the offensive
against Najaf results from a US urge (however
ill-advised) to crush what looked to be the easiest of
the oppositional forces in the country, Muqtada
al-Sadr's lightly armed, ill-trained militiamen, and
perhaps somehow take Iraq off front pages until
November, but as a news story, all strategic thinking in
Baghdad is, at the moment, missing in action.
5. The Imam Ali Shrine and Shi'ism. In
the context of points 1-4, this may seem a small matter,
but while the Imam Ali Shrine is almost generically
referred to as "holy" in any story or perhaps as
Shi'ism's most holy site or one of Islam's most holy
sites, and its golden dome is sometimes mentioned, and
the shrine itself has regularly been front-paged in
stories in the past weeks and can be found near the top
of the TV news, I have yet to see a full background
piece on the shrine or a full description of its history
and meaning. The best I've noticed anyway was a sidebar
prepared by the "staff" of the Christian Science
Monitor, for Scott Balduff's canny piece "Sadr plays to
power of martyrdom". Generally speaking, the same goes
for Shi'ism itself. With the exception of Juan Cole, an
expert on Shi'ism, who has been a one-man press corps
when it comes to explaining the Shi'ite world to those
of us who visit his site regularly, I would nominate
"Shi'ite" as the least defined noun and the least
meaning-filled adjective in the US press at the moment.
Why should this matter? One answer is: Because
Islam is not a familiar religion to most Americans
(despite growing numbers of converts here), and so,
unlike more familiar "holy" sites, either religious or
political, the Imam Ali Shrine has no resonance for us.
The impact of the fighting so near to, and the threat to
the shrine, doesn't really register here, even as it is
deeply unnerving Muslims (not to speak of others)
elsewhere in the world. If (in some fantasy future) a
rebellious priest, no matter how extreme his views, were
locked inside the Vatican with his self-appointed
militia fending off an occupying army from some powerful
Arab state, I assure you the reporting would be
different indeed. It matters that we, who simply read
about this, can't even begin to put ourselves in the
shoes of Iraqis experiencing it - although this should
at least give us insight into why US policymakers and
military men, no less ignorant than the rest of us, can
make such staggering tactical blunders.
War
words What do we call the enemy? George and Laura
Bush were the guests on CNN's Larry King Live
last Sunday. In the context of the latest fighting in
Najaf, King said to the president: "We've had more
today, there are more eruptions in Iraq. And it seems
never-ending, does[n't] it? What does it do to you?"
The president replied:
We've got a great leader in Prime Minister
Allawi. He's a tough guy who believes in free
societies. And more and more Iraqis are being trained.
And more and more Iraqis are stepping up to do the
hard work of bringing these terrorists, these former
Ba'athist and some foreign fighters to justice. And
that's why we are going to prevail.
So the
president thinks that in Najaf we're up against
Ba'athists, foreign fighters, and terrorists. In a
similar vein, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the
following of the fighting in Najaf at a recent press
conference:
In this case, the violence is being
perpetrated by outlaws and by former regime elements
and by terrorists who respect no truce, respect
nothing except force. And as long as those individuals
don't understand the spirit of peace and
reconciliation, are not willing to work for
democratic, free Iraq, they have to be dealt with. And
so your question really should not be addressed to us.
It should be addressed to those who are causing the
violence, who are setting off the bombs, who are
destroying the hopes of the Iraqi
people.
Now statements like Powell's tend to
be reported quite straightforwardly in the US press even
though the one thing you certainly couldn't say about
the Mahdi Army in Najaf is that it's made up of former
"regime elements" or "Ba'athists". These are, after all,
the Shi'ites of southern Iraq whom Saddam brutally
repressed in 1991 and whom we claimed our invasion was
meant to liberate. It should be remembered, in fact,
that the last army to reach the Imam Ali Shrine with
intent to harm was Saddam's.
Should you want to
imagine what the present situation looks like from the
point of view of many Shi'ites and you're willing to
search, you can probably find the odd comment buried
somewhere in our torrent of Iraq reportage ("Saddam made
mass graves in 1991," Abbos fumed. "Now the Americans
are making mass graves in 2004, filled with Shi'ites
again"), or you can go offshore or into cyberspace,
where, for instance, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service
offers the following in Asia Times Online (US poised for killer blow against
Muqtada, Aug 14), quoting (the ubiquitous)
Juan Cole:
"What's going on right now looks a lot
like April 1991, when it was [Iraqi president] Saddam
[Hussein] who was crushing a Shi'ite uprising. But now
it's the marines who are playing the role of the
Republican Guard," Cole told Inter Press Service,
adding that US policy in Iraq was looking increasingly
like "Ba'ath lite", particularly under
Allawi.
Or you can read the piece (mentioned
above) by Scott Balduff, who has done some superb
on-the-spot reporting from Najaf, and writes:
If the Americans and Iraqi army do end up
assaulting the Shrine of Ali, they will not be the
first. Hussein threw the full force of his military
against the shrine in 1991 after Shi'ite rebels
launched an abortive rebellion. Artillery barrages
damaged the shrine complex and special-forces soldiers
killed the rebels inside the complex itself. The
brutality of this crackdown at such a holy site turned
most Shi'ites against Hussein, even those who had
defended him in the past.
Of course, the
labeling of guerrillas, rebels and insurgents, religious
or otherwise, as "outlaws" and "terrorists" has a long
history in European colonial wars as also, for instance,
in Japanese depredations in China in the 1930s.
Similarly the language in the statements coming out of
the US military in Iraq these days has a familiar ring
for anyone who knows something of the history of
counterinsurgency warfare. For instance, here's part of
a statement quoted in the Washington Post by
Brigadier-General Erv Lessel, identified by the Post
reporter as "deputy director for operations of the
US-led multinational force":
Clearing operations by Iraqi Security
Forces and Multi-National Forces today in Najaf
continue to further isolate the militia and restore
control of the city to the government and people of
Najaf ... The combined Iraqi and multinational
security forces continue to operate in strict
compliance with guidance from the prime minister
[interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi] to
safeguard and prevent possible harm to these holy
shrines as well as protect the citizens and future of
Iraq.
US operations involving Predator
drones, Apache helicopters, and jets in downtown Najaf,
then, are "clearing operations" (though who exactly is
being "cleared" isn't made particularly clear), and the
forces, almost totally American, conducting these
clearing operations are dubbed "multinational", and all
this is supposedly being done under the "guidance" of
Prime Minister Allawi to "safeguard ... these holy
shrines". Of course, it's obviously in the interest of
US policymakers and military men to put forward such
lies even at a moment when the only non-US troops
fighting on our side in Najaf, the sparse Iraqi
battalions we've trained, are evidently deserting in
droves, as Hannah Allam, Tom Lasseter and Dogen Hannah
of Knight Ridder have recently reported. ("'I'm ready to
fight for my country's independence and for my country's
stability,' one lieutenant-colonel said. 'But I won't
fight my own people.'") But if this sort of language is
simply reproduced without comment in our news, then
Americans will have little way to grasp the nature of
what's happening in Iraq.
Who is Muqtada
al-Sadr? In the Washington Post Outlook section
last Sunday, correspondent Robin Wright wrote a
particularly execrable piece ("Not just a battle for
Najaf") about the situation in Iraq, whose language
might have been taken directly from Bush administration
press releases. There are fantasy passages like the
following, no less pure in their deceptions than those
of Brigadier-General Lessel: "A deepening backlash [in
Iraq] could further complicate this second phase of the
three-part political transition and damage the quest to
build a model new democracy that would inspire a wider
transformation in the Arab and l[sl]amic worlds." I'm
sorry, but you'll have to remind me: What was the first
phase of that three-part transition? And I was under the
obviously mistaken impression that the new, silent US
occupation regime inside Baghdad's Green Zone had left
all thoughts of building "a model new democracy that
would inspire ..." etc behind and opted instead for an
ex-Ba'athist thug who has an iron fist tied behind his
back.
But I wander. What I wanted to focus on
was a relatively innocuous sentence about Muqtada
al-Sadr and his men in Wright's piece: "The stakes are
now far greater than whether a rogue cleric and his
renegade militia can diminish the fledgling Iraqi
government and its US patrons." It's a modest but
interesting example of how word choice sets the frame
within which we view the world. On the one side Wright
has marshaled two negative adjectives: "rogue" and
"renegade". Both work well within the framework laid out
by Colin Powell. After all, "rogue clerics", like "rogue
elephants", and their "renegade militias" fit easily
enough into the category of "outlaws". In such a
context, you couldn't even bring to mind an adjective
like "nationalist" or "patriot" (even though we, here in
the US, don't necessarily find any necessary
contradiction between US religious fundamentalism and US
patriotism). On the other side, you have that wonderful
adjective "fledgling" linked to "government". No rogue
elephants here, just a fragile little government chick
in a nest overseen by "patrons" (a word that, while it
may have some modest negative connotations, brings to
mind rich people who give money to the arts or museums).
As a start then Wright accepts that, whatever
Allawi's group may be, it is indeed a "government", and
Americans are nothing but its "patrons". No "puppets"
and "masters" possible here. Not even "interim
administration" and "occupiers". So before you get near
the supposed content of what she's writing about, so
much is already settled - and settled in favor of a
useful official fantasy about the nature of reality in
Iraq; useful, that is, for an administration trying
desperately to limp through to presidential elections in
November.
Perhaps it's the nature of reporting,
a trade done on the run and at top speed, that much of
reality must regularly fall into a series of easily
reused set phrases and descriptions. After all, familiar
modifiers have been wielded this way since Homer ("the
fleet-footed Achilles") to remind, identify, and
categorize. So it's always interesting when you see one
or two of those identifying phrases change, as I did
last week in reports by Alex Berenson and John Burns of
the New York Times on the fighting in Najaf. It's always
a small indication that journalists are registering a
change in the landscape. So twice in that week in
front-page stories those two reporters put an adjective
in front of al-Sadr that hadn't been used before -
"populist" ("Guns fell silent across most of the city as
Iraqi government representatives met into the night at
the provincial governor's headquarters with emissaries
of Mr Sadr, the populist Shi'ite cleric"). That
description was followed by another word that, I
believe, had simply not appeared previously in Times
reportage: "insurrection". In regard to the Sunni areas
to the north, the word "insurgency" and "insurgents" had
long been used to describe what was happening (a
cautious usage I adopted myself), but here they suddenly
wrote of a "widespread insurrection", as in general
uprising. ("His stand against American forces here has
stirred a widespread insurrection across southern Iraq,
starting in Najaf and then quickly setting off fighting
in at least eight other predominantly Shi'ite cities.")
Burns and Berenson used these two words last
Saturday and then repeated them on Sunday. This
represented a small but telling shift in the Times'
assessment of what's happening in Iraq.
What to
call - how to label and categorize - Muqtada al-Sadr has
been a curious problem for American reporters, and the
Times reporting has reflected that. In one of the
earliest Times references to Muqtada, on May 12, 2003,
Susan Sachs referred to him as "another ambitious
cleric, Moktada al-Sadr" ("Iraqis more bemused than
enthused by cleric"). Generally, when he appeared as a
bit player in the paper's pages in the early months
after Baghdad fell, he was little more than "young" or
"ambitious". In his initial appearance on the Times
op-ed page on August 29, 2003, Reuel Marc Gerecht
referred to him as "a 22-year-old firebrand" (though the
age was wrong, he's about 10 years older than that). On
September 24, Muqtada was still imagined to be nothing
but a "marginal" figure and Noah Feldman wrote of him as
"the rejectionist Moktada al-Sadr" ("Wisely, the
coalition has declined to arrest Mr Sadr; his hopes for
a living martyrdom denied, he increasingly looks more
like a small-time annoyance than the catalyst of a
popular movement" - from "Democracy: Closer every day").
In October, in "Bomb at Turkish Embassy In Baghdad kills
bystander", Alex Berenson and Ian Fisher spoke of him as
" a radical, anti-American Shi'ite cleric". This May, Ed
Wong uniquely spoke of him as "the maverick Shi'ite
cleric" ("US military says Shiite rebels seem to have
ceded Karbala"), but generally in these months he was
referred to in headlines and texts simply as "the
radical cleric".
In a headline for a piece
reported by "Alex Berenson; Sabrina Tavernise and Iraqi
employees of The Times, whose names have been withheld
for security" ("Radical cleric in Iraq sets off day of
fighting) on August 6, he was still being called this.
But on August 11, a change set in. In the very first
paragraph of a Berenson piece that day ("US forces,
close to attack in Najaf, decide to hold off"), he was
referred to as "the rebel Shi'ite cleric", as he was
again the next day, before, on the 13th, he morphed into
a "populist" cleric (populist, or agrarian rebel, still
has quite a positive ring in the American lexicon)
"sparking" a "widespread insurrection", before this week
in two front-page pieces (Alex Berenson and John Burns,
"8-day battle for Najaf: From attack to stalemate", and
Alex Berenson and Sabrina Tavernise, "Cleric in Najaf
refuses to meet Iraqi mediators"), he once again became
a "rebel Shi'ite cleric" or a "rebel cleric". (The
Berenson and Burns piece, by the way, quotes for the
first time in a while "senior officers in Baghdad, as
well White House officials", who throw the blame for the
launching of the Najaf offensive largely on to the
shoulders of local marine commanders, with Ambassador
Negroponte only later deciding "to pursue the case".
Although anything is possible, this seems unlikely to
me.)
If you want a fuller picture of Muqtada,
you might - and I apologize for directing you to his
work so often - check out Juan Cole's piece "It takes a
following to make an Ayatollah" in the Washington Post
Sunday Outlook section on him, his movement, and the
larger Shi'ite context of the moment and consider the
wonderful, unexpected adjective he uses to describe him
(along with "lower-ranking cleric" and "fiery") -
"beefy". Or consider the Scott Balduff piece mentioned
above, which quotes "Amatzia Baram, a noted scholar on
Shi'ite Islam at the United States Institute for Peace
in Washington" as calling him a "shrewd politician". Not
a description we would normally read here.
In
fact, while most of the Times' descriptive adjectives
seem to catch something of Muqtada, they do so within
the context of his relationship to the United States, or
at least within the context of the words available to us
to describe political actors who fall somewhere between
Colin Powell's very American "outlaw" and the Times'
recent very American "populist". None of them surely
catch Muqtada his Iraqi context particularly well and,
given the general lack of Iraqi voices in the US media,
we're not soon likely to find out what the Iraqi
descriptive range might be.
How the naming of
embattled reality is brokered in US newsrooms and how it
changes is a fascinating subject, though one you're
unlikely ever to find discussed in the press itself. A
couple of passing phrases from that inadvertently
revealing Howard Kurtz mea-almost-culpa in the
Washington Post might, however, offer a little help. For
instance, the editorial decision-making that resulted in
the highlighting of administration prewar propaganda and
the burying of all critical thought in the back pages of
the paper is referred to in the piece as "groupthink",
or as Karen DeYoung, reporter and former assistant
managing editor, commented bluntly: "We are inevitably
the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power
... If the president stands up and says something, we
report what the president said." Amen.
(Author's note: Thanks to Nick Turse for his
research help on the Times and Muqtada.)
Tom
Engelhardt is editor ofTomdispatchand the author
of The End of Victory Culture. (Copyright 2004
Tomdispatch. Used by permission.)
