New From CWPNM:
Bibliography of analysis
and criticism of international coverage in U.S. media
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A bloodied camera lies on a carpet at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel after it was struck by U.S. fire

Green Zone Journalism
To mark the third anniversary of the Iraq war, Orville Schell went to Baghdad to chronicle the state of media coverage of the conflict, and the lives of the journalists tasked with getting the story in the face of mounting obstacles. Extracts:
As Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times explained, "Squeezing off a few rounds of automatic weapons fire here in Baghdad is the equivalent of honking your horn in America." So unless an explosion is quite close, people hardly break step. At most, if there is a particularly loud report, a journalist might go up onto his bureau's rooftop to see where the smoke is coming from.

There is undeniably a Blade Runner-like feel to this city. The violence is so pervasive and unfathomable that you wonder what people think they are dying for. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the everyday violence is horrendous, it does not take too many days before the deadly noises and the devastation everywhere seem to become just part of the ordinary landscape. Soon, quite to your surprise, you find yourself paying hardly more attention to the sounds of gunshots than a New Yorker does to the car alarms that go off every night... until, that is, someone you know, a neighbor, or just someone you have heard about, gets blown up, shot on patrol, or kidnapped by insurgents….

Visiting any of the news bureaus gives an immediate sense of how embattled foreign journalists now are and how difficult it has become for them to do their jobs. Everyone I spoke to complained that the deteriorating security situation has increasingly made them prisoners of their bureaus.

"We could go almost anywhere in Iraq in a regular car, unprotected," wrote the Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi this February, in a wistful front-page story for her paper about the situation she found when she first arrived in 2003. "I wore Western clothes -- pants and T-shirts, skirts, sandals -- walked freely around Baghdad chatting with shopkeepers and having lunch or dinner with people I met." By the spring of 2004, she writes, "the insurgency had been spreading and gaining strength faster than we had imagined possible. For the first time, I hired armed guards and began traveling in a fully armored car. Outings were measured and limited and road trips were few and far between... As security deteriorated around the country, the areas in which we could safely operate shrank."….

Foreign news bureaus are either in or near the few operating hotels such as the Al Hamra, the Rashid, or the Palestine. Like battleships that have been badly damaged but are still at sea, these hotels have survived repeated bomb attacks and yet have managed to stay open. A few hotels like the Rashid, where once there was a mosaic depicting George Bush Sr. on the floor of the lobby, are sheltered within the Green Zone. A few other bureaus have their own houses, usually somewhat shabby villas that have the advantage of being included inside some collective defense perimeter that makes the resulting neighborhood feel like a walled medieval town….

I had arrived here in Baghdad naively expecting that as an antidote to their isolation from Iraqi society, journalists might have kept up something of a fraternity among themselves. What I discovered was that even the most basic social interactions have become difficult. It is true that some of the larger and better-appointed news bureaus (with kitchens and cooks) have tried to organize informal evening dinners with colleagues. But while guests were able to get to an early dinner, there was the problem of getting back again to their compounds or hotels by dark, when the odds of being attacked vastly increase. The only alternative was to stay the night, which posed many difficulties for everyone, especially Iraqi drivers and guards.

The result is that reporters find themselves living in a strangely retro mode where their days end before sunset, and they are pulled back to their bureaus for dinner like an American family of the 1950s. Not a few have sought solace in cooking….

Few reporters I talked to, whether Western or Iraqi, have any direct contact with the insurgents or with the sectarian militias: it is too difficult and dangerous, they say, to talk with Iraqis who do the fighting and set off the explosives. And thus, the various attacks, suicide bombings, and the pervasive anti-Western sentiment, as well as the sectarian hatred that has erupted during the occupation, continue to be largely unexplored and unexplained from the viewpoint of the Iraqis, whether they are Sunni insurgents, members of the Shia militias, or from the American-supplied Iraqi forces that are attacking them.
(New York Review of Books via TomDispatch, March 13, 2006)

President Bush addresses AIPAC

America's Israel Lobby
If social security has long been the "third rail" of U.S. domestic politics, then its equivalent in the sphere of foreign policy has been the U.S. alliance with Israe. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy school tackle the taboo head on, in a provocative research study that assesses the impact of the Israel lobby on decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East. And it asserts that the Israel lobby's influence on U.S. policy has been bad both for the U.S. and even for Israel:

" The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.

"Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.

"There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.

"Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.

"Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed... "What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well. (London Review of Books, March10, 2006)

Racism Over Ports?
Foreign Affairs managing editor Gideon Rose gets to the heart of the matter when he charges that any sober assessment of the issues in the furor over the acquisition of management contracts at six U.S. ports by Dubai Ports World must lead to the conclusion that the only problem being cited by the naysayers is simply that this is an Arab-owned company. Notwithstanding the fact that it has an excellent record of cooperation with the U.S. on security matters and is run by American executives -- or the fact that security in U.S. ports is the responsibility of Homeland Security regardless of who owns the management companies -- politicians began alerting the media with warnings about "a country involved in 9/11" taking over American ports. (Dubai may not have been more involved in 9/11 than Germany, but nobody was bothering with the details.)

Tom Friedman echoed the racism theme, warning that to reject a company playing by the rules of the globalization game and international counter-terrorism simply because it is Arab will actually weaken the U.S. ability to win moderate allies in the Muslim world, and leave it even more vulnerable. The Nation notes that the real security issue in U.S. ports is the rules and procedures adopted by the U.S. government, and how much the U.S. taxpayer is willing to spend on keeping America's harbors safe. But Bill Greider sees a dark irony in the fact that the Bush administration is being stymied by a climate of fear it helped stoke.
(Foreign Affairs, February 27, 2006)

Fatman and Little Boy launched a generation of weapons designed to ensure U.S. strategic primacy

No Limit on U.S. Nukes
Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press argue that the end of the Cold War has removed restraints on the U.S. pursuit of nuclear primacy, because the MAD (mutually assured destruction) principle that served as the foundation for arms control no longer serves as a brake on U.S. ambitions. The Bush administration is pursuing a revitalized nuclear program as part of its strategy to remain, in perpetuity, the single superpower and to prevent the emergence of a peer competitor to replace the Soviet Union on the strategic map. That requires substantially altering the rules of arms control and non proliferation.

“During the Cold War, MAD rendered the debate about the wisdom of nuclear primacy little more than a theoretical exercise," they write. "Now that MAD and the awkward equilibrium it maintained are about to be upset, the argument has become deadly serious. Hawks will undoubtedly see the advent of U.S. nuclear primacy as a positive development. For them, MAD was regrettable because it left the United States vulnerable to nuclear attack. With the passing of MAD, they argue, Washington will have what strategists refer to as 'escalation dominance' -- the ability to win a war at any level of violence -- and will thus be better positioned to check the ambitions of dangerous states such as China, North Korea, and Iran. Doves, on the other hand, are fearful of a world in which the United States feels free to threaten -- and perhaps even use -- force in pursuit of its foreign policy goals. In their view, nuclear weapons can produce peace and stability only when all nuclear powers are equally vulnerable. Owls worry that nuclear primacy will cause destabilizing reactions on the part of other governments regardless of the United States' intentions. They assume that Russia and China will work furiously to reduce their vulnerability by building more missiles, submarines, and bombers; putting more warheads on each weapon; keeping their nuclear forces on higher peacetime levels of alert; and adopting hair-trigger retaliatory policies. If Russia and China take these steps, owls argue, the risk of accidental, unauthorized, or even intentional nuclear war -- especially during moments of crisis -- may climb to levels not seen for decades."
(Foreign Affairs, April-May, 2006)

Why the Islamists Are Winning
Rami Khouri sees much of the discussion in the West about the rise of Islamist politics in the Middle East as misguided, and shaped by Western cultural and political assumptions transposed onto a very different context. After analyzing the prevailing misconceptions, and periodizing the phases of the modern Islamist phenomenon, he offers the following conclusion:

"This wave of victories is not due to a longing for virgins in the afterlife or the consequence of poor primary education. It is the consequence of a modern history combining the cumulative pain of poor, often corrupt and brutal, governance, with foreign military occupations and threats (mostly from Israel, the U.S. and Britain recently). Most ordinary people consequently feel they have been denied their cultural identity, political rights, national sovereignty, personal freedoms and basic human dignity.

"Islamist groups in turn have responded with an irresistible package that speaks to the citizenry about religion, national identity, legitimate governance, and resistance to foreign occupation and subjugation. That's why there is nothing surprising about victorious Islamists. The best response to their victories, whether you like or dislike the Islamists, is to understand the political, national and personal issues that have generated their victories, and to address the real grievances behind them, rather than to wander off into intellectual swamps and fantasylands."
(Daily Star, March 15, 2006)