By JOHN BUNDOCK
STAFF WRITER
It should almost go without saying that the big-brand media of the day failed in their coverage of the Iraq War from its outset. Almost. The problem is that there remain fanatical adherants to this idea that the war, with all its perpetual slaughter, brutality and scandal, was somehow justified whether by mythical “WMDs” or for the purpose of “spreading democracy.” Empirically, they are denying reality, because to observe Iraq today is to see a country beset by it struggles not simply to maintain democratic governance, but to just rebuild and redefine itself as a nation that respects all citizens. What is remarkable about the discussion of the war is just how little it has taken into account the views of actual Iraqis.
To get a better idea of the prewar media environment, I spoke with Arthur Hayes, a professor of communications and media studies at Fordham. When I asked if the press coverage was overly laudatory or celebratory, he said that, “Of course it was… even two [prominent papers] apologized; The New York Times and The Washington Post gave mea culpas [for their] failure to perform their constitutional duties.” The narrative was overly simplified, he said: “That’s the way it always is… ‘good guys and bad guys’…someone said ‘everything changed because of 9/11.’”
The opposition to the war was filled with bad actors that fetishized expressionism and their own conspiracies over the very genuine goal of stopping an unnecessary invasion and occupation. The likes of Ron Paul and George Galloway were the shrillest of opponents, providing easy targets to paint all opposition as conspiracy-mongers, dictator-coddlers or worse. “How many children have you killed today” chanted one such protester as Marines marched into Firdos Square reported “His Horse Was Named Death” in Foreign Policy. Also, according to Peter Maass in “The Toppling,” the collapse of Saddam’s statue in that square proved a microcosm of the war coverage: excited media, Marines and foreigners had their experience while only a small group of Iraqis actually cared. The ignorance over massacres in the Kurdish north and Shia south of the country was as crude as “de-Baathification”’s disregard for disaffected Sunnis (many in Anbar) during Reconstruction.
As described by the late Anthony Shadid in December of 2010, Iraq was one of the defining stories of his generation. Our nation’s decision to invade, in fact, “destroyed the society that was there,” while there ought be no monopoly of blame as to how the brutal Shia-Sunni warfare of Reconstruction came about, National University of Singapore Research Fellow Fanar Hadded said.
According to “Iraq’s Sectarian Iinheritance,” a feature in Foreign Policy, “The invasion created otherwise avoidable conditions in which sectarian identity took center political stage and nurtured sectarian imaginations, fears and suspicions by unchaining and inflaming already extant fissures in Iraqi society as shaped by recent history. Coalition authorities, Iraqi political elites, regional actors, elements of Iraqi society, pre-2003 history and post-2003 events all conspired, wittingly or not, to create the perfect sectarian storm from which Iraq and indeed the region seem unable to now escape.”
Too often, public perceptions of the bloodshed defined it as just “more of the usual” Middle Eastern violence; “these people just fight each other” was the message conveyed, said UMass Amherst professor Jillian Schwedler. This was particularly a problem as U.S. policy-makers made such sectarian simplifications. This sentiment could be seen in Shadid’s commentary: “what haunts me as a journalist there…[is that]…through a series of policies, of decisions, of seven years of creating a new body politic we [US policymakers] made that stereotype, that cliche the reality in some ways…”
Indeed, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran describes in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Bremer’s governance team, the Coalition Provisional Authority, allowed for more sectarian parties such as Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) to push out other less divisive actors. There was no holding people to account for what Shadid called “incredible naïveté or willful disregard” in defining Iraqis as just Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab. As the first truly sectarian government of Iraq was formed, the journalist said, “It’s turned this country into a very simplistic idea… and I think it’s going to be disastrous.”
The Iraq War and the media coverage that preceded it were emblematic of Western arrogance in Middle East policy-making, but so was the entire debate about whether to invade. Between the hyper-masculine, gung-ho neoconservatism and conspiracy-mongering, dictator-idealizing left there was little room for sound alternatives to the invasion or the voice of the average Iraqi. Today, Maliki’s Iraq is a place that freely allows weapons to be smuggled to Assad’s regime next door; somehow that passes for “a functioning democracy” and “anti-imperialism” among the war’s most fervent supporters and opponents, respectively. It is shameful that such ideological extremes persist in the discussion of that destructive conflict.
John Bundock, FCRH ’14, is a middle east studies major from Pelham, N.H.
