I thought that it would be appropriate to comment on what I thought about the Iraqi elections as well as my personal views on the war in Iraq. What does Iraq's election mean for this documentary, and for recruiting a wide range of volunteers to help collaborating on a project about a very politically and emotionally-charged issue?
The Echo Chamber documentary analyzes the performance of the media during the build-up to the war in Iraq. Some may say, "The Iraqi elections were held yesterday, and going to war in Iraq and deposing of Saddam was a good thing. Why are you doing a documentary on the media during this time period?"
* First of all, the American press has acknowledged that their performance during the pre-war time period was not adequately skeptical. I've investigated many of the reasons for why this happened, and it will happen again and again on other issues until some fundamental changes are made to how journalism is conducted in the United States.
* Secondly, there are still a lot of other problems with the mainstream media, and some of these problems can be addressed by creating a more transparent and collaborative approach to media production -- one that harnesses the power of a decentralized force of civically-minded citizens.
* Thirdly, the moral reasoning given by the Bush Administration for military intervention has never really been publicly debated -- No issue as complex as war can be reduced down to a simple equation of Black vs. White -- Right vs. Wrong -- Anti-War vs. Pro-Liberation. We interviewed a number of dissident perspectives that explore these different moral nuances, and their perspectives are worth being introduced to the larger Internet discourse.
* Finally, nearly everyone agrees that it is a good concept to have a world without Saddam Hussein in power and a world where democracy can flourish in Iraq -- But what people do argue about is the tactics of using military intervention to bring about regime change and democracy as well as the role of the United States in the world
I believe that each individual needs to do a comprehensive cost / benefit analysis of the Iraq war before they side with one ideological camp over the other.
What has this war cost in terms of US lives, US credibility, US taxes, US relations with other countries, and the long-term implications for US foreign policy, security and military? What are the benefits to the US & Iraq, and for the potential of a "Democratic Domino Effect" in the Middle East?
Every individual must go through this calculation to resolve how they perceive the war in Iraq.
The most popular options are:
* Absolutely oppose the war & resulting occupation.
* Absolutely support the liberation.
* Originally opposed the war, but now support the war because Saddam is deposed.
* Absolutely oppose the war, but now support the occupation.
* Support the war, support deposing Saddam, but now oppose the military occupation.
I make the distinction between "war" and "liberation," but there are many within the pro-liberation camp who refuse to make this distinction. This rhetorical trick allows them to reduce being "anti-war" to being "pro-Saddam."
I have no kind words for Saddam Hussein -- I don't know how many troops we should leave in Iraq, but I think that we should leave sooner rather than later -- And I still absolutely oppose the war in Iraq for the following reasons:
* I don't buy the assumption that there were collaborative links between Iraq & al Qaeda.
* I didn't buy the assumption that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction that posed any threat to the continental United States or the region surrounding Iraq.
* I don't believe that the United States or United Kingdom were motivated by democratic altruism.
* I don't appreciate the non-transparency of the persuasion tactics and justifications that were used to sell this war to the American people and the rest of the world.
* I don't believe that either United Nations Security Council resolution 1441 or the alleged "revival" of resolutions 678 & 687 were sufficient enough to explicitly authorize the military intervention in Iraq.
* I do agree with the opinions of Human Rights Watch's executive director Ken Roth and HRW lawyer Reed Brody that there was not an imminent or ongoing genocide in Iraq that justified this war being classified as a humanitarian intervention.
* I do believe that war should be always be the last option, and that there were other options that should have and could have been explored.
* I would have preferred pro-liberation pundit Michael Barone's non-violent suggestions for Iran and North Korea to be applied to Iraq.
* I believe that there are many other more pressing issues in the world that deserve this degree of our attention and financial resources.
There are other specific reasons that justify why I would be best classified as a member of the anti-war crowd, and I hope to make these more clear in the future. But this is a pretty comprehensive list for now.
I share my personal views for the sake of transparency. Despite my anti-war perspective, I am dedicated to taking an objective and balanced approach to The Echo Chamber.
This 90-minute documentary focuses primarily on journalistic issues during the pre-war time period, and it is beyond the scope of the project to make comprehensive set of political arguments either for or against the war.
At the same time, there is no reason why this political discussion could not happen within the limitless context of the Internet by the collaborative community that I hope to recruit for this project.
I would like to have volunteers from both sides of the aisle help develop the post-production techniques of open source documentary filmmaking.
THOUGHTS ON IRAQ'S ELECTION
I think that it would be worthwhile to share my survey of what the pundits and leading opinion-shapers are saying about the Iraqi election.
Most of the following opinions are tilted towards the pro-liberation crowd because the anti-war perspective was mostly absent from mainstream news (apart from a NYT headline change).
Who's against freedom and democracy? No one I know. Who's against war? A lot of people I know.
Many Americans will no doubt view Iraq's election and potential democracy in a positive light, and some will translate this into a justification for the war or a vindication of George W. Bush.
I agree that the elections are a positive step forward, but I am cautious to not confuse support for democracy and "liberation" with consent or vindication for "war."
Here's what the leading Op-Ed pages are saying starting with the New York Times
This page has not hesitated to criticize the Bush administration over its policies in Iraq, and we continue to have grave doubts about the overall direction of American strategy there. Yet today, along with other Americans, whether supporters or critics of the war, we rejoice in a heartening advance by the Iraqi people.
The Washington Post's take:
That course will surely be full of pitfalls, and the extremists will go on trying to kill anyone involved in it. For the emerging democratic regime to have any chance of taking root, U.S. soldiers will have to continue fighting, and dying, to protect it. The elections probably won't make their job any easier, or the price any lower, in the short term. Yesterday, however, Americans finally got a good look at who they are fighting for: millions of average people who have suffered for years under dictatorship and who now desperately want to live in a free and peaceful country. Their votes were an act of courage and faith -- and an answer to the question of whether the mission in Iraq remains a just cause.
Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria's article titled "Elections Are Not Democracy"
Much of the reason for this decline is, of course, the security situation. The United States has essentially stopped trying to build a democratic order in Iraq and is simply trying to fight the insurgency and gain some stability and legitimacy. In doing so, if that exacerbates group tensions, corruption, cronyism, and creates an overly centralized regime, so be it. Lawrence Kaplan, a neoconservative writer passionately in favor of the war, who coauthored "The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission" with William Kristol, has just returned from Iraq and written a deeply gloomy essay in the current The New Republic. His conclusion: "The war for a liberal Iraq is destroying the dream of a liberal Iraq."
Wall Street Journal's response to Zakaria:
Now that Iraqis have voted, the new line among American critics of the Iraq war is that "elections are not democracy." Well, elections may not be sufficient for democracy but they are necessary. Everyone knows that struggle and compromises lie ahead if the new Iraq is going to succeed. But yesterday's demonstration of courage and hope by millions of Iraqis belies those cynics who say Arabs and Muslims don't want democracy.
"Audit: $9 Billion Unaccounted for in Iraq" is certainly an embarrassing headline that was well-timed to be released during the Iraq elections. It didn't escape the notice of Drudge, Antiwar.com or Buzzflash
WASHINGTON - The U.S. occupation authority in Iraq was unable to keep track of nearly $9 billion it transferred to government ministries, which lacked financial controls, security, communications and adequate staff, an inspector general has found.
...
The findings were released Sunday by Stuart Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. Bowen issued several reports on the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the U.S. occupation government that ruled Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004.
The Sundance film festival ended on Sunday, and the jury awarded the grand jury prize to an anti-war documentary called Why We Fight:
Jarecki's "Why We Fight", is thoughtful foray into what motivates America to go to war and puts the nearly two-year-old war in Iraq into a historical context by examining the economic, political and ideological forces behind US militarism.
"The world is looking to America as a beacon," Jarecki said pointedly as he received his prize.
"This recognition of a film about the history of American war-making couldn't be more important. It draws attention to a critical issue at a critical time," Jarecki told AFP after the ceremony.
Investigative reporter / liberal blogger Josh Marshall weighs in:
Good news has been hard to come by in Iraq for some time. So this unexpectedly high turn-out, relatively low level of violence, and what seems to have been a swelling tide of enthusiasm over the course of the day, is something more than very welcome news. It may also provide some indication or clue to explaining those polls which show, on the one hand, deep-seated Iraqi disenchantment with the US occupation, outrage over the persistent violence that afflicts the country, and yet also an underlying optimism about the future.
NY Post pro-liberation columnist John Podhoretz claims that the election vindicates Bush.
There are literally millions of Americans who are unhappy today because millions of Iraqis went to the polls yesterday. And why? Because this isn't just a success for Bush. It's a huge win. It's a colossal vindication.
...
Yesterday was a day for Democrats and opponents of George W. Bush to swallow their bile and retract their claws and join just for a moment in celebration of an amazing and thrilling human drama in a land that has seen more than its share of thrilling human drama over the past 5,000 years.
But you just couldn't do it, could you?
Losers.
The liberal news portal Buzzflash headlined with the following San Francisco Chronicle article Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid intends to call Monday for the administration to outline an exit strategy for Iraq.
In a pre-State of the Union challenge to President Bush, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid intends to call Monday for the administration to outline an exit strategy for Iraq.
Reid plans to raise the issue as part of back-to-back speeches in which he and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi will sketch outline their differences with Bush on two issues likely to dominate Congress' work this year, the war on terror and Social Security.
Pro-liberation Glenn Reynolds'Instapundit does some media criticism of the New York Times:
YESTERDAY, I noted the following paragraph in a New York Times story on the Iraqi elections:
But if the insurgents wanted to stop people in Baghdad from voting, they failed. If they wanted to cause chaos, they failed. The voters were completely defiant, and there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned a corner.
Reader Chris Fountain also noticed that it was moving steadily downward in the story as the day went on. Today he emails:
Glenn: as predicted, the offending paragraph was missing from this
morning's hard copy. New lede: "Bombs Kill 35."Sigh.
Indeed. And as Ann Althouse noted, the headline has changed on the web, too. Sigh. They just can't help themselves.
Amy Goodman, a big voice for the anti-war movement, has the following as Democracy Now's lead story:
A day after elections in Iraq, we go to Baghdad to speak with Robert Fisk, chief Middle East correspondent for the London Independent. Fisk says, "What this election has done is not actually a demonstration of people who demand democracy, but they want freedom of a different kind, freedom to vote, but also freedom from foreign occupation. And if they are betrayed in this, then we are going to look back and regret the broken promises."
Anti-war Middle East scholar, Juan Cole provides his perspective:
Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.
So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections.
Pro-liberation pundit Jonah Goldberg responds to Cole's blog post on the National Review Online's Corner:
JUAN COLE IS VEXED [Jonah Goldberg ]
Here's his opener:
I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.
Me: Okay, so he's "appalled" because while he said that this event is a "political earthquake," a "historical first step" and of "the utmost importance" it's just wrong, wrong, wrong for other media outlets to say the same thing? I don't get it.
He then goes on to document that Bush didn't originally want this kind of election but he had to go with it because that's what Sistani wanted. Uh, okey dokey. I just think it's refreshing when anti-Bush critics accuse him of being too flexible. It's such a nice change of pace from the usual stuff about him being a rigid ideologue.
He then writes, "With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed 'election.' Iraq is an armed camp. There were troops and security checkpoints everywhere. Vehicle traffic was banned."
I don't know which rah-rah for America station he was watching, but I do recall that this was a fairly well-covered fact. It's not easy to forget. Indeed, it's impossible to forget because the underlying necessity for such security is what makes this such an uplifting story, even though Cole is beyond miserly when it comes to dispensing adjectives celebrating the heroism of the Iraqi people. His prose in the wake of this histroic event is so antiseptic you could eat off it.
C'mon dude, of course this wasn't the highwater mark of democracy and human liberty we all recognized the Bahrainian elections of 2002 to have been. But it was a pretty good day. Don't let the fact that the folks you don't like are happy about it get in the way of recognizing that.
Conservative pundit John Derbyshire has a cautious reaction at The National Review Online's Corner:
IRAQ VOTE -- SOURPUSS REACTION [John Derbyshire]
So, am I still the NRO sourpuss on Iraq?
I'm not sure that I ever was. All I've written on Iraq -- and it hasn't been much, since there is way enough real expertise out there to make armchair blogging on the topic seem a bit futile -- has been to try to keep the focus on the interests of **us**, the American people, and away from concerns about the Iraqis, who must shift for themselves at last.
And while the election proceedings have been heartening, euphoria is surely out of place. Elections don't by themselves guarantee constitutional government. I have just finished reviewing Philip Short's new biography of Pol Pot (review to appear in the NY Sun next week). The Cambodians had elections a-plenty, but they ended up with the Khmer Rouge just the same.
I don't wish the Iraqis any ill, though, and I am glad their election went well. Now, let's concentrate our thoughts on getting the heck out of there.
Pro-war media blogger Jeff Jarvis surveys the lack of responses from liberal bloggers.
The Eeyore Analysis of Iraq
: I'll be on MSNBC in the 5p hour with Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, who tries to wrap-up blogger reaction to the election from the antiwar camp (I won't call it the liberal side).Problem is, there isn't much. Oliver did the Chicken Little dance yesterday but hasn't acknowledged the success today. Jerome Armstrong of MyDD argues that this opens the door to an Iranian-like rule of fundamentalists but doesn't say how he makes that prediction when the clerics decided to stay out of the Iraqi government and every poll makes it clear the people don't want that. Armando at Kos does the Eeyore thing (see also Juan Cole, below); Kos is still silent, as is Atrios.
Whether it's Kerry or any of these bloggers, it would be the grownup, mature, generous, humanistic, caring -- yes, dare I say, liberal -- thing to do to be glad that people who lived under tyranny are now giving birth to democracy.
Democracy isn't a right-or-left thing, folks. It's a right-and-left thing, remember?
The must-read blog for journalists, Romenesko summarizes the following excerpt from USA Today
TV reports on Iraq elections take a decisively brighter turn
USA Today
NBC's Brian Williams chats with Peter Johnson about Iraq's elections: "It's human nature to be happy about a happy ending. And if this is indeed one step on the route to a happy ending in Iraq, well, you can't help but reflect that in your work." He adds, though: "I still can't walk freely out in the street."
Finally, former CNN correspondent turn new media activist Rebecca MacKinnon passes on the following reaction from South African Activist Kumi Naidoo, who was speaking at the World Economic Forum:
From a development perspective, Naido[o] views the Iraq war as a tremendous mis-direction of political will and misallocation of resources. "We from the developing world feel a deep sense of pain that huge amounts of money can be mobilized very quickly for an action that didn't have the support of the majority of citizens on the planet," he said.
UPDATE:Michael Jackson arrives for his trial today -- I don't have cable, but there's no doubt that this celebrity infotainment story will trump any other coverage from the cable networks.