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COMMENTARY
September 20, 2003
The good news
I may have been on balance insufficiently cheerful in my Wednesday article. While the place time and nature of Secretary Colin Powell's address in Iraq last weekend seemed designed to alienate members of the provisional Iraqi government upon which the U.S. occupation forces depend for goodwill my later information is that the speech was taken fairly well by the Iraqis after all its content had been assimilated. Not so Mr. Powell's meeting with Adnan Pachachi in Geneva -- an octogenarian former foreign minister of Iraq who was shoved into the provisional government with State Department pressure. Mr. Pachachi is an autocrat of the old Arab school with intimate and lucrative Saudi connections. He has trouble with the idea that either Kuwait or Israel has the right to exist. He is bad news walking and yet he is clearly the State Department's candidate for the sort of mouldering strongman they think the country needs. By meeting specially with him and yet again refusing to meet privately with Iraq's acting president Ahmed Chalabi Mr. Powell was being provokingly obtuse. For there is very serious mutual distrust between the U.S. State Department and Ahmed Chalabi's INC from a long history of backstabbing by State's bureaucrats. Iraq's aspiring democrats who are at heart quite pro-American and who get along easily with senior Pentagon and White House staff rightly look upon the culture at State as unfriendly to either democracy or risk (the two are usually related). The State establishment tends to be "Arabist" -- i.e. nurtured through an era in which individual bureaucrats working on the region could hope to retire on extravagant Saudi sinecures and pay-offs. For instance five of the last six U.S. ambassadors to Riyadh rode off into the twilight on the Saudi gravy train (not that they received anything illegal; just things that ought to have been illegal). The attitude through much of the State Department is "our friends the Saudis" which was harmless enough a generation ago when Saudi interests largely coincided with American ones. But today the vastly corrupt House of Saud and the fanatical and psychopathic Wahabi brand of Islam that it sponsors and exports make it the enemy of all civilized men Muslim Christian and "other". (Which is not to deny in turn that the Sauds prevent an even more despicable Taliban-style regime from emerging on the Arabian peninsula.) This on top of other attitude problems that tend to build at State from the accumulation on staff of effete self-important and self-righteously "progressive" Ivy League types of the kind naturally attracted to the foreign service. (Canada's own foreign ministry presents an even more farcical display of this kind of over-credentialed fatuity.) The Bush administration's attempt through Donald Rumsfeld to shake-up the culture at the Pentagon by for instance cashiering hapless old Army generals as quickly as they can has proved politically expensive. Really governing means really facing down immense vested interests. The State Department is a quagmire too deep to plumb and enjoys the ability to bite back at anyone attempting reform with tailored leaks to the news media. As one jaded infighter recently told me They have to be tricked into pursuing the U.S. national interest over their own. And as for those media everyone with a vote should read the courageous item by John Burns of the New York Times in the last issue of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher (reprinted here and there; try Google). It is a breathtaking first-hand account of the corruption among Western journalists in Baghdad before the fall of Saddam. Not minor but total corruption; and not by a few but by almost all. Now the "embedded" reporters have come and gone who gave us fresh and untutored eyewitness reporting that completely contradicted the sordid Baghdad media gaggle. So we are back to being fed "quagmire" stories by reporters with big axes to grind and no credibility. Oh right ... I was promising to be cheerful. The best way for the reader to get the kind of information I have been getting from the ground all over Iraq is to end-run the liberal media and go to the Internet blogs. "Instapundit" is a good place to start. Huge amounts of information are becoming available directly from individuals in Iraq -- both foreign and Iraqi. And except the occasional terrorist hit -- mostly confined to the small area of Saddam Hussein's home tribal ground -- the picture that emerges is very encouraging. Iraq is blossoming economically and socially as it has not done in many many decades of totalitarian rule. The infrastructure has been mostly repaired and sabotage alone is the cause of failures. The signs of free speech and free press are everywhere. And most signally the American and other troops trying to provide security are not merely tolerated but popular. (Much more popular alas than the U.S.-supported civil administration whose routine incompetence is not untypical of government everywhere.) And public sympathy with Palestinian militants Iranian ayatollahs and Arabian sheikhs is non-existent. On the contrary I have seen reports suggesting that for instance everyday life in Damascus Syria is visibly improving as the Syrian Ba'athist regime faces a population increasingly aware of the renaissance in Iraq. The good news is that the media may not be able to sustain their "quagmire" misreporting from Iraq much longer. The truth is beginning to get in their way. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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