Bush’s Good-News Agenda
If life in Iraq is improving at such a tremendous pace, why does the administration fight so hard against the idea of handing power over to a new Iraqi government?
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Oct. 14 — Has Iraq turned the corner? At the White House and throughout the Bush administration, they’d like us to believe that the corner is far behind them. Electricity is now in greater supply than it was before the war. Iraqi police training is well under way. The economy is showing signs of life.
YET AS YOU pick up the newspapers or tune into cable news, there is no escaping the dismal facts of life on the ground. On Tuesday a car bomb detonated outside the Turkish embassy in Baghdad, just two days after a suicide bomber struck at the hotel headquarters of U.S. security officials, killing eight people.
For the moment, the administration is blaming the media for this parallel universe. The negative picture of Iraq has been painted in the twisted minds of news executives and their liberal allies. Either journalists are morbidly fascinated by death and destruction or they are colluding in political manipulation of the facts on the ground.
It was George W. Bush himself who best delivered that message in a series of regional television interviews at the start of the week. “There’s been tremendous progress since Saddam Hussein fell,” he told one regional TV group, pointing to the improved state of Iraqi hospitals and schools. Why didn’t anyone appreciate that progress already? “There’s a sense that people in America aren’t getting the truth,” he told another TV interviewer, attacking what he called “the filter” of the national media.
Such sensitivity about media coverage is, of course, a sign of the times we’re now entering: election season. Senior White House officials believe that reporting on Iraq has become, in the words of one, “politicized.” So they are responding with politics to get the message out. That’s why Commerce Secretary Don Evans flew to Baghdad this week to help spread the real news. Evans, who is one of the president’s oldest and closest friends (as well as his campaign chairman in 2000), is a straight-talking Texan who still sounds unfiltered in spite of spending the last three years inside the Beltway. “This is not the dismal, frightened area I expected to see having watched the news coverage in the United States over the past six months,” he said.
That’s easy to say when you’re on a whirlwind trip inside a hermetically-sealed security bubble. The dismal parts of Baghdad are still prone to bombs and crime. Yet it’s not all dismal. Evans—just like the media he attacks—is neither wholly wrong nor wholly right.
However there is one small logic problem with the Bush administration’s good-news agenda. If life in Iraq is improving at such a tremendous pace, why does the administration fight so hard against the idea of handing power over to a new Iraqi government?
There is a growing chasm between what Washington is telling its allies and what it is now trying to tell the American people. At the United Nations, and in direct phone calls to the world’s major capitals, senior U.S. officials are dumping on the mostly European notion of creating a real Iraqi government. Those officials say, quite rightly, that Iraq is not ready for elections and a new government that could take over power from the U.S.-led coalition. And they go one step further: Iraq isn’t even ready for a timetable that would lead to such a handover of power.
In its latest olive branch to the United Nations, the administration presented a deadline for at least drawing up such a timetable to hand over power. Under the latest revised resolution at the U.N., the United States says its appointed Iraqi governing council has until Dec. 15 to say when it will write a constitution and hold elections. The new resolution also echoes the rhetoric of some European critics, saying the council “will embody the sovereignty of the state of Iraq”.
That position—even with its latest tweaks—has largely failed to win over either the U.N. itself or European critics, such as Russia, France and Germany. Kofi Annan, the U.N.’s secretary-general, said the resolution was not “a major shift in the thinking of the coalition.” He also explained why he had reduced his U.N. staff in recent weeks in Iraq—and it wasn’t because there was “tremendous progress” in Iraq, as the president would say. “We have a very difficult security situation which has compelled us to reduce our presence drastically,” Annan told reporters on Tuesday.
The truth is that Annan’s assessment of Iraq is not so far from the Bush administration’s, even if he arrives at a different conclusion. Life on the ground is too dangerous and too complex for the U.N. or the Iraqis to take over. It remains something that only the United States can manage, with its vast military and financial muscle. “The French basically want to dump Jerry Bremer and we are not going to let them do that,” says one senior State Department official, referring to the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq. “They have this basic idea that people are attacking Americans, but the people who get attacked include Spanish diplomats and U.N. staff. The attackers are attacking because they don’t like being kicked out of power. It doesn’t matter who is in place.”
Life is indeed improving in Iraq by most measures. It improved immeasurably when Saddam Hussein was toppled and his gang of thugs were chased out of the so-called police and security forces. But it’s nowhere near safe enough to start to talk about Iraq’s hospitals, schools and streets as if they looked just like suburban America.
You can indeed criticize the way the media reports on Iraq. It misses good news and bad news alike. Amid the news the national media are largely ignoring are the climbing statistics of deaths and injuries among U.S. troops in Iraq. Amid the good news it ignores is the remarkably efficient distribution of food in a nation whose ailing economy collapsed after the war. Either way—whether Iraq represents good news or bad—you can hardly blame the media for echoing the story the rest of the world hears from the administration itself. Life in Iraq may be getting better, but the pace is too slow for basic democracy to take over any time soon.
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