New From CWPNM:
Bibliography of analysis
and criticism of international coverage in U.S. media
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Abdul Rahman states his faith, posing a problem for both Karzai and Bush

Kabul Christian Convert Puts Afghanistan's Karzai in a Bind
Under pressure from his patron, the U.S. government, Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai intervened personally to secure the release of Abdul Rahman, a 41-year-old convert to Christianity who faced a potential death sentence under Sharia law for apostasy. And, predictably, thousands took to the streets to protest and demand that he be put to death. The case highlights not only a contradiction in Afghanistan's constitution between its endorsement of international human rights conventions guaranteeing freedom of worship, and its codifying of Sharia law, but also a political tension that exposes the limits of Karzai's own authority -- and a domestic problem for his U.S. backers.

Karzai's power remains limited, and entirely dependent on a combination of U.S. and NATO forces, and the consent of various warlords -- some of them radical Islamists -- who have been drawn into government. For the Bush administration, the persecution by a U.S.-backed regime of a Christian for having chosen the same faith as the President of the United States is untenable: Washington was pressed to demand Abdul Rahman's release by a clamor of protest from the Evangelical activist base of the Republican Party. But for Karzai, caving in to the U.S. on a matter of faith and identity is a risk option. And the case has inflamed the passions of religious activists on both sides, and the Taliban is using it as a rallying point to build a coalition against Karzai. Nor is it over, for Abdul Rahman's release was engineered on the grounds of evidentiary technicalities and insinuations about his sanity, rather than any question over the legitimacy of the law that makes it possible to charge him for converting from Islam to another faith. The fact that Abdul Rahman has reportedly applied for asylum in a third country underscores the problem. The Bush administration likes to point to Afghanistan as a poster child for its promotion of democracy abroad; the Abdul Rahman case will have alerted Americans at home to the limits of the freedom that is being defended in Afghanistan.
(TIME, March 26, 2006)

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)