The time has come to offer our heartfelt apologies to the people of Iraq. Oh, don't get me wrong. Only the far-Left fringe would even consider apologising for removing a brutal tyrant like Saddam Hussein from power.
One would have to be mad to apologise for freeing 25 million people from over three decades of injustice, preventing Saddam from filling more mass graves and ending forever his predilection for genocide. Who regrets giving Iraqis the opportunity to hold free and fair elections for the first time ever -- making the oldest civilisation the youngest democracy? How could any American want to apologise for exposing and halting the massive corruption in the United Nation's Oil-for-Food program, which funneled billions of dollars into Saddam's pockets while doing nothing for his people?
Or for the way France, Russia and China sold Saddam their influence with the UN Security Council in exchange for oil exploration rights, to be exercised as soon as the sanctions -- which only hurt the Iraqi people, while keeping Saddam in power -- were removed? No, there's only one thing that America needs to apologise to Iraq for: inflicting our Liberal agenda-driven media on them.
During the actual Iraq war itself, the "mainstream" media was quite fair in its coverage. It could hardly be otherwise, with reporters taking the field alongside the soldiers themselves. The talking heads on the home front started using the "Q-word" and making Vietnam comparisons before even a week had passed, but their dour outlook was negated by reports from their own embedded colleagues. Of course, they projected the same negativity during the Afghanistan campaign, too. All battles are quagmires, and all wars Vietnam, when a Republican is in the White House.
After the short war to topple Saddam was over, the embedded reporters returned home, or retreated to the relative safety of Green Zone hotels, from which they now rarely emerge. "The journalists among us agreed that our work increasingly relied on phone calls to Iraqis on the scene, rather than real reportage of what we could see and touch," lamented journalist Dan Murphy in April 2004. Two years after the liberation of Iraq, most of the "news" they report from Iraq consists of reciting death counts or bewailing the costs of Iraqi freedom. They get most of their information and slant from old contacts, formerly Saddam's "minders," or by taking phone calls from... who knows who?
In order to tell us how badly everything is going in Iraq, the mainstream media must consistently ignore good news unless there's a down side upon which they can dwell. For instance, Americans have to check with the BBC to find information on the reflooding of the Iraqi marshlands. Saddam drained them to punish the inhabitants by destroying their land and culture, in what UN Environment Program Executive Director Klaus Toepfer called "a major ecological and human disaster." Don't waste your time trying to find an environmentalist giving Bush credit for their restoration.
Civic and economic restoration are also largely ignored. The American media was quick to discuss Fallujah while Americans were taking casualties there, but have been as silent as the proverbial grave since the main fighting stopped and the city has undergone what can only be termed a renaissance.
Even when reporting positive developments they can't ignore, like the Iraq election in January 2005, the writing of a constitution or actions against terrorists and insurgents, they feel it necessary to mention unrelated American and civilian deaths or Abu Ghraib. Few, if any, reporters mention the rebuilding of hospitals, schools, roads and other infrastructure. Even overwhelming victories against the insurgents or the foreign terrorists -- of which there have been quite a few -- are treated as defeats in the press. The media seems determined to follow some sort of "equal time" law for both sides of our fight to protect and stabilise Iraq.
The media is intent on portraying American soldiers as either victims or brutes, ignoring all the good they have done and still do. The only time we hear about heroes like Casey Sheehan, for example, is when his own mother refers to him as though he were a foolish child, praises his killers as "freedom fighters" and uses his death to demand that America abandon Iraq to the mercy of its totalitarian and theocratic neighbors. The old cliche, "if it bleeds, it leads," has been almost completely replaced with, "if it hurts Bush, it leads." And Iraq is unfortunately caught in the crossfire, as the media tries desperately to discredit and undermine support for President Bush and the military.
No matter what Iraqis do, the media will continue to focus on the negative. Nothing they do will ever be good enough to gain media approval, and for that we should apologise. It must be hard enough to rebuild your country after over 30 years of mismanagement without having every move you make scrutinised by an overly-critical media trying to get the American government to abandon you. Our own history is full of false steps and mistakes -- it took us seven years to write our own Constitution, for instance, and two more before we added the Bill of Rights -- but Iraqis will not be given any leeway whatsoever.
The Iraqis writing their constitution have some disagreements. Disaster! Civil War! It's all been a mistake! the media cries. One disagreement is over the role of religion in government. Horrors! Theocracy! What did we go there for? the media wails. Yet the Afghanis wrote a constitution that specifies the country is "an Islamic Republic" with Islam as the official state religion, and mandates that "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam." The mainstream media never said a word against it. In fact, the New York Times praised it as "an excellent foundation for creating a better Afghanistan."
Watching their every effort to advance belittled in the American media may be the hardest test the new Iraq has to face. Terrorists with bombs are one thing, but a persistent campaign to sap the will of two nations is quite another. I'm sorry to see Iraq put through the media wringer that Afghanistan escaped.
Joe Mariani is a computer consultant born and raised in New Jersey. He now lives in Pennsylvania, where the gun laws are less restrictive and taxes are lower. Joe always thought of himself as politically neutral until he saw how far left the left had really gone after 9/11. His essays and links to articles are available at http://www.guardianwatchblog.com/
