The Washington Post's Blackwash
By Alan Nathan
Published February 21, 2005
Looking
for The Washington Post’s reasoning skills is like trying to locate
Dracula’s tanning lotion – it’s an exercise in futility. In
a much-reported February 14th article, staff writer Robin Wright portrays Shia
dominance in the Iraqi election results as validation for her story’s title, “Iraq
Winners Allied with Iran are Opposite of U.S. Vision.” She argues that
having won almost half the votes cast, the Shiite’s United Iraqi Alliance
will choose the next prime minister and press for inclusion of Islamic law
in the next constitution.
First,
a two-thirds consensus is required for the passage
of any law, regardless of who is prime minister.
Second, the binding interim constitution provides
a fail-safe against theocratic dominance by ensuring that it takes only
three
of
the 18 provinces to reject a new constitution. Because the Shiites only
control about 50 percent of the national assembly
and must therefore coalesce with
the minority parties in order to govern, we see both Iraq and the U.S.
with results
that are almost idyllically antithetical to Wright’s delusions.
Only three of her 21 paragraphs reference material dissenting
from her thesis;
however, they’re powerfully undercutting to her premise nonetheless:
- A
leading prime minister contender, Adel Abdul
Mahdi, argues for no Shiite or Islamic government;
- U.S.
and regional analysts agree that Iraq will not
be a
likely surrogate to Iran; and
- Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rejects
Iran’s
theocracy as a model.
Aside
from these brief sightings of contrasting views,
over 85 percent of the piece focuses on perspectives
and quotations from well known antiwar
critics
like “scholar” Jaun Cole from the University of Michigan and editor
Rami Khouri of Beirut's Daily Star, the Middle East’s largest English
language newspaper.
“ This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran. The
Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. {Jalal} Talabani is very close to
Tehran,” said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraq. “In
terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States
was hoping for.”
Added
Rami Khouri, Arab analyst and editor of the Daily
Star: “The
idea that the United States would get a quick, stable, prosperous, pro-American
and pro-Israel Iraq has not happened. Most of the neoconservative assumptions
about
what would happen have proven false.”
Because
we provided pre-Gulf II no-fly zones to protect them
from repeated genocidal attacks from Saddam Hussein,
the only folks more pro-American
than the Kurds
are perhaps the citizens of Texas. And Khouri’s contention is baseless
because not one single White House official espoused that Iraq’s future
stability or prosperity would ever be “quick.”
Another
device used by Wright to diminish the appearance
of Iraq’s legitimacy
in transition to independence is the assumption that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi
was handpicked by the U.S. and the UN. Many in the mainstream press – who
insist that Iraqi President Ghazi Al Yawar was similarly selected – share
this point-of-view. This fiction must stop. The preferred choices by the U.S.
and UN were Shiite Nuclear Scientist Hussein Shahristani for prime minister and
Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi for president. The Iraqi power brokers at
the time told both U.S. Coalition Leader Paul Bremer and UN Special Envoy Lahkdar
Brahimi to get stuffed! Under the June 4, 2004, headline “Iraqi Politicians
Assert Themselves in New Government,” CNN’s Political Analyst Bill
Schneider reported that the then-interim Iraqi General Council rejected outside
pressures. “[T]he bottom line: Iraqi politicians took control of this process.” His
report along with so many others during that news cycle have been
seemingly ignored with all due prejudice.
Apropos
of the Robin Wright piece comes another journalistic
problem: the blurring line that once separated reporting
from editorializing.
This story
was on The
Washington Post’s front page under the unobtrusive heading of “Analysis.” If
it’s analysis, why not keep it with the rest of the analyses found in their
op-ed section? It’s journalistic “slight-of-hand” to
juxtapose opinion pieces with serious reporting because, whether
intentional or not,
it acts like a parasite, using the more credible sinews of news
writing to give
it more weight than it would otherwise have (or deserve) if presented
alongside other works of its kind.
The
subscriber deserves better; this paper has done better.
Lets get nostalgic and do better again.
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