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July 04, 2004
More on communications: al-Jazeerah and Fox
Kristof of The New York Times had an interesting set of commentary that dovetailed with my own a few days ago re the present American Administration's strange inability to even pretend to sell its own point of view in the proper venues in the Middle East, preferring its own special little echo chambers. Let me quote and comment then on this
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Al Jazeera: Out-Foxing Fox
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 3, 2004
First, the opening, of course:
If President Bush wants to rescue his Iraqi adventure, here's a suggestion: Spend less time with C.I.A. sycophants like George Tenet and more time watching Al Jazeera television.
The Bush administration's central intelligence failure was not that it failed to tap enough telephones. Rather, it didn't bother to understand the mind-set in Iraq or the larger Arab world — and it still doesn't.
Emphasis added.
Let me leave aside the phrasing CIA sycophants re Tenent and focus on the last sentence as well as the issue of watching al-Jazeerah.
First, on the last, nothing could be more correct. I have yet to see the slightest sign that the present Administration has anything like a glimmer of an understanding that getting a solid conception of the mind-set of your "enemy" as well as those who you wish to engage is not wishy-washy liberalism but good, solid realism. It helps prevent idiotic own goals.
Kristof adds:
The transfer of sovereignty is a useful moment to look back at what went so wrong in Iraq. As I see it, the root problem was hubris born in a Washington echo chamber, and a resulting conviction that Iraqis would welcome us with flowers.
When I visited Iraq in the run-up to the war, I met another foreigner by the pool of the Rasheed Hotel, where we hoped our conversation couldn't be bugged, and we spoke of our bafflement. Senior U.S. officials seemed genuinely convinced that our invading troops would be hailed as heroes, while ordinary Iraqis often talked about fighting U.S. troops with guns, grenades and suicide bombs. Iraqis typically hated Saddam, but also hated the idea of an invasion.
But the neocons refused to hear it. From their Washington and New York cocoons, they insisted that ordinary Iraqis welcomed an invasion. Ahmad Chalabi had told them so. Or they read it in The Weekly Standard.
Emphasis added.
I believe I raised these points precisely over the past year and just recently.
Among the more severe issues is believing one's own propaganda. In some very strange ways the Washington Bolsheviks seem to be echoing the habits of the old Soviets, in sincerely believing the oppressed classes must clearly welcome with open arms the (foreign) liberators.....
Strange the symetry. But then these new Bolsheviks seem to share the same conviction that ideology must trump pragmatism, that purity is the truth. Irrealism of the worst kind.
I should nuance the above (Kristof) comments by noting that there was some basis to have a genuine belief that in the initial aftermath a good percentage of Iraqis would... well not throw flowers at the feet of the invaders, but be favorably disposed. Very, very briefly favorably disposed before the nationalist reflex took over. Again, our Washington Bolsheviks, as the original Bolsheviks seem blissfully unaware of the reality of other national feelings - although they have a tender concern for their own, although dressed up in 'universalist' messianism.
They even mangled the country's name — Mr. Bush called it Eye-rack — yet they bet American lives that all would go well. That's "the arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright termed it when Democrats made similar blunders in Vietnam. (An excerpt is at www.nytimes.com /kristofresponds, Posting 505.)
Such arrogance has a long and sad lineage. The Wolfowitz of World War I was Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander who launched an offensive that cost the British 420,000 casualties. "It naturally pleased Haig to have carefully chosen and nicely cooked little tidbits of `intelligence' about broken German divisions, heavy German casualties and diminishing German morale served up to him every day and all day," Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote. "He beamed satisfaction and confidence. His great plan was prospering. The whole atmosphere of this secluded little community reeked of that sycophantic optimism."
Sound familiar?
leaving aside the somewhat unfair jibe at Ibn Bush's lack of speaking skills - not directly relevant although hard to resist - the phrase sycophantic optimism is well placed.
"We know that Al Jazeera has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again," Don Rumsfeld complained during the war. "What they do is, when there's a bomb that goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children. . . . We are dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case — and to the extent people lie, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility."
Good point.
Irony there at the end. In case you miss it, Rumsfeld's accusations directed at al-Jazeerah rebound upon him.
Kristof directs attention to this documentary - I have not had the occasion to see it so I have no direct sense as to its quality:
The gulf between the American and Arab realities is the subject of "Control Room," a powerful documentary by Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American. She looks at Al Jazeera's coverage of the war, offering a sobering reminder that there are multiple ways of perceiving the same events.
President Bush's narrative for the war was: "Altruistic Americans risk their lives to topple evil dictator and establish democracy and human rights." The Arab narrative was: "The same Yankees who pay for Israelis to blow up Palestinians are now seizing Iraqi oil fields and maiming Iraqi women and children."
Emphasis added:
Rather more to the point, regardless of the quality or accuracy of either perception or either narrative, if (as is clearly in my opinion the case) winning one's goals or achieving one's goals requires at least some modicum of convincing or at least neutralising perceptions, then whinging on about how "inaccurate" or "biased" the other side's media are does little to no good. The Arabs have played that game for a good thirty years or more - whinging in the place of effective strategies for communicating with the target audiences (in their case, the American public), and for the pure delicious symmetry, I note that they (the various Arab points of view) have had every bit as much success as the present Administration. Again, the problem faced is symmetrical as are the goals, from an Arab point of view there is no way for them in say a year or five to utterly change the point of view of the average American, largely hostile to them and largely incomprehending (for some very valid as well as not so valid reasons I may add), but one can aspire to limiting one's downside and achieving a modicum of a turn around. Miracles, no, modest change, limiting the negative side, yes. But as in the case of the present Administration, Arabs have preferred to wallow in their own discourse, their own echo chambers, and have generally made little effective effort to communicate in a way that might aspire to success.
Symmetrically, the present Administration of Ibn Bush is engaged in the same fiasco. Wonderful, they take their "lessons" from possibly the least politically successful interest group on the entire planet (allowing for available resources and the like). Speaking to itself and its home audience, with no sense of how to engage and turn around their image in a region where it is desperately needed - and no sense of how even to communicate in a manner that might limit the downside. Radio Sawa and TV al-Hurra (the name itself speaks to idiotic hubris and is needless and ineffectually insulting, never mind as I noted some time back its programming is American navel gazing- unlike BBC Arabic I note, or the private American venture, CNBC al-Arabiyah.).
Kristof adds:
I'm not a big fan of Al Jazeera, which tends to be emotional and nationalistic. As U.S. Lt. Josh Rushing astutely notes in "Control Room," Al Jazeera is the Arab version of the Fox News Channel: "It benefits Al Jazeera to play to Arab nationalism because that's their audience, just like Fox plays to American patriotism, for the exact same reason — American nationalism — because that's their demographic audience and that's what they want to see."
If the Arab world is going to break out of its self-pitying self-absorption, it's going to have to understand American attitudes — and it could do worse than switching its televisions from Al Jazeera to Fox. And if the Bush administration is going to turn Iraq around and engage the Arab world effectively, then it must try harder to escape the echo chamber and understand the Arabs — and it could do worse than switching from the reassuring euphony of Fox to Al Jazeera.
On the first paragraph, I note that I agree. al-Jazeerah is emotional, yellow journalism. Yet, unlike state journalism here, it is real journalism. That is to say, they are effectively free to report (given on the ground limitations on information gathering) and effectively free to respond to their customer basis. The quotation above is spot on in regards to the symmetry of patriotic pandering. Yellow journalism.
The second paragraph of course touches on my point supra, and I note as a general matter that if American Administrations wish to have some modicum of success in the region, they will have to engage the reality, not the wishful thinking and deeply inappropriate analogies to Eastern Europe that have characterised rather too much discussion on the right end of the spectrum. That does not mean, I add forcefully, sucess requires pandering or kowtowing to the prejudices of the Arab region as one sometimes gets the sense from commentators on the Left feel is required, quite the contrary, but it does require an intelligent design of an engagement to sell one's own goals. That is to say, the company has to understand its market and what products can be sold directly, what needs to be done to prepare the terrain for future products and what products will just have to stay on the shelf, realistically. One cannot simply assume that one's bright and shiney democracy products are just going to leap off the shelves and run around telling the Board that the customers just "have to" get it.
Posted by The Lounsbury at July 4, 2004 03:53 PM
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Jan-Jul 2004
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