Spinning Yarns of ‘Good News’

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/11/5768/

Spinning Yarns of ‘Good News’
by Pierre Tristam

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The propaganda controls are clearly in effective hands today. There’s been no need, as there is in more discriminating Iraq, to plant positive stories in the domestic press. For the most part the mainstream news media here seem as willing as they were in 2003 to buy the Bush administration’s latest recasting of the Iraqi catastrophe as a country on the mend. But caveats grow as lush as date palm in Iraq. Here’s this season’s crop.

· Al-Qaida was routed. Not exactly. The semimythical invention of “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia” was never a force as potent as its Iraqi enemies. One thing Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis agree on is rejection of foreign meddling, be it bin Laden’s or Bush’s. Iraqis reviled al-Qaida before the invasion and had no connection to Sept. 11. They revile al-Qaida more today, now that Bush’s invasion made its brand of terrorism possible on Iraqi soil. Absent American troops, ironically, al-Qaida would have faced an unrestrained assault from Shiite and Sunni militants, to whom tribe comes before religion, and religion before caliphate.

That’s just as true in the rest of the Arab world. A Brookings Institution survey of Arab opinion in six countries last year showed bin Laden’s popularity never breaking 5 percent. Bin Laden’s popularity in the Middle East is itself an invention, convenient to the Bush administration’s offensive posture there, inconvenient to Arabs who must pay its price. Bin Laden is the Arab world’s Timothy McVeigh, a fringe loon, but one lucky enough to be constantly revalidated by Bush’s monomaniacal war on Islamowhatever.

· Refugees are coming back. The return of 25,000 refugees from abroad, out of a total of 2 million, is deceptive. News reports have generally neglected to mention that Syria, where most of Iraq’s refugees have gone, shut its door to them two months ago and is now requiring refugees already there to apply for visas — through the Syrian embassy in Baghdad. In other words, Syria is booting them out.

· Our friends the Sunnis. The Bush administration says the new alliance with former Sunni insurgents is a benefit of the surge’s supposed rout of al-Qaida. But those Sunni insurgents had themselves began routing al-Qaida before their alliances with American troops, and well before the “surge” peaked. The Pentagon reversed the chronology to make itself appear as the new strategy’s broker — and to obscure the deeper reason the Bush administration is aligning itself with Sunnis anew. Osama or a free Iraq are not it.

· Our former friends the Shiites. Southern Iraq is already a fiefdom under the control of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite who got rid of most of the British presence and is biding his time before being rid of the American. Sunnis dread a Shiite take-over unrestrained by American occupation. So does Bush, because so do oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates, where militant, resentful Islam is the shifty sands under those authoritarian, unelected, lavishly corrupt and American-backed sheikdoms. In Iraq, the Bush administration is rediscovering that a Sunni-dominated authoritarian regime wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Lacking that, Sunnis as a proxy force against Shiite hegemony will have to do.

Peace isn’t breaking out in Iraq. A colder, longer war is. It’s further miring the United States in the shards of the Sunni-Shiite divide. And it’s confirming once again in Arab eyes that America’s end game is control of the Middle East’s authoritarian houses of cards. If Enron were an emirate, Bush would be its principal shareholder right now, with America’s foreign policy as collateral.


Pierre Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com.

There has been so much misdirection over time.


KnR

"A Brookings Institution survey of Arab opinion in six countries last year showed bin Laden’s popularity never breaking 5 percent. Bin Laden’s popularity in the Middle East is itself an invention, convenient to the Bush administration’s offensive posture there, inconvenient to Arabs who must pay its price. Bin Laden is the Arab world’s Timothy McVeigh, a fringe loon, but one lucky enough to be constantly revalidated by Bush’s monomaniacal war on Islamowhatever."

It was the "University of Maryland/Zogby International 2006 Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey" that the writer has decided to dub a "Brookings Institution Survey"--makes tracking down his source difficult; having simply be "*a* survey of Arab opinion in six countries last year" would have made fact-checking easier.

The question wasn't "popularity", but "Please tell me which world leader (outside your own country) you admire most." Bin Laden probably wouldn't have been a "world leader" by most definitions at the time, to be honest, and stipulating "admire most"--right after Chirac and Nasrallah had made waves, causing Nasrallah's popularity to surge--likewise limited the range of responses. Even Nasrallah properly counts more as "world leader", given that he has a something perceived as an army and has a hand in a government through his legislators, and was taking on both the Lebanese and Israeli governments in a fairly direct way and fairly recently at the time. It's a useful question, but doesn't mean that those *not* chosen weren't "popular".

Questions asking "support" or "admire" usually prompted much higher results at the time. And, if you get to Pakistan--outside the Arab "world"--you could get AQ getting "support" up into the 30+% range. It really depended on how the question was phrased and what was going on in the previous few months, so the responses ranged from nearly no support for UBL to support nearing 50%. The results, IMO, constitute something of a Rohrschach test.

"Misdirection" is an equal-opportunity tool.