Media Lost on Iraq

June 08, 2004

Once again, as during the run up to the war in Iraq—when the media served as cheerleader for the war and loyally reported extensively on Iraq’s vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction—the U.S. media is again lost on Iraq. Like a herd of stampeding cattle storming this way and that, they’ve changed course again. A few weeks ago, a casual perusal of the reports in the American press revealed an Iraq in chaos, with a widespread resistance to the occupation, a fractious Iraqi elite, a steady drumbeat of U.S. casualties and predictions by respected analysts like Gen. Anthony Zinni and Bill Odom that America’s mission in Iraq had failed.

Now it's hearts and flowers. What happened?

Almost totally missing from news reports—or buried—is the continuing violence in Iraq. (Today, car bombs and attacks killed dozens more Iraqis and two more U.S. soldiers.) The U.S. casualties are all the more remarkable because the occupation forces have sharply cut back deployments and operations, after having handed Fallujah to the resistance and given Muqtada Sadr’s forces a pass in the Shiite areas of Baghdad and southern Shiite cities.

More important, the press is touting the new Iraqi government, whose ersatz president is about to sit down tomorrow with President Bush at the G-8 meeting. The imposition on Iraq of a quisling government, led by former CIA agents and portly pro-American sheikhs doesn’t mean stability. The greedy Kurds, whose militia are being allowed to stand, are already threatening to pull out of the government :

The main Kurdish political parties are threatening to pull out of Iraq's interim government unless a new United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq endorses Kurdish autonomy.

Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan made the threat in a publicly released letter to President Bush.

The two Kurdish leaders said Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq should be included in the new U.N. resolution or otherwise recognized as law-binding on the transitional government, both before and after elections.

Mr. Barzani and Mr. Talabani also expressed what they called their bitter disappointment that no Kurd was chosen to be either interim prime minister or president of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Shiite leaders are blasting the Kurds for resisting Iraq’s central authority. (A key Shiite leader was assassinated today.) In Fallujah, radical (Sunni) Islamists are reportedly taking control of the city, turning it into an operations center for the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies. And in today’s Washington Post a photograph, not analyzed, shows what appears to be tens of thousands of Sadr supporters filling the streets of the Shiite area of Baghdad, “Sadr City.” It goes on. But the tone of U.S. press coverage, thanks to a relentless Bush administration PR effort in support of the patsies now pretending to take over Iraq, has changed dramatically. The new regime in Iraq is portrayed seriously, rather than clownishly, the supposed dismantling of Iraq’s militia groups is given headlines (hint: don’t believe it’s happening), and the UN’s rubber stamp over the U.S. fait accompli in Iraq is taken as sign that Bush is accommodating the world body, rather than tromping over it.