CNN gets real on Iraq
The US may have the will to see Saddam become history, but it may not have the way, suggested CNN.
Sevanti Ninan
Television is an inherently unsatisfactory medium for exploring complex issues. It represents the opinions of entire countries through two and half sound bites, it compresses several days of travelling and questioning into three or four piece-to-cameras, the presenter spends an hour with a minister and then represent his views through a single pithy quote. That’s how it is, particularly on TV news.
When you add to that an audience that is predominantly American you could end up with a programme that is the TV equivalent of a digestive biscuit. However even with all that predigesting, CNN produced a special last weekend that George Bush could choke on, like his famous pretzel. Though a summing up was carefully avoided, the message was clear: no one the channel interviewed in four countries: Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, was buying the American recipe for whipping up democracy the Middle East. And there is no guarantee, if history is something to go by, that its efforts to replace Saddam will be a walkover.
"CNN presents: Lines in the Sand" looked at whether the US would be able to win the peace in Iraq. Would its blueprint for remaking Iraq work? It avoided stating the conclusion but suggested that it might not, indeed, it most probably would not. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Would regime change be easy to affect? The programme suggested no, whichever way you choose to get rid of Saddam Hussain, he is not easy to eliminate. A man who never sleeps in the same place every night or even all night, whose security apparatus would make US presidential security look like kid’s stuff, a man who has survived more assassination attempts than any leader in the world. The US may have the will to see Saddam become history, but it might not have the way, suggested CNN.
The State Department official who spoke on the programme effectively damned his country in the eyes of the world, though he might not have realised he was doing so. Would The US end up running Iraq? Well, he said, "We don’t want to turn it over to the Iraqis before they are ready for it." He added that the US would remain in Iraq as long as it was necessary. It would have to move from occupation to a political reconstruction of the country. And then, who knows, Iraq might yet become a democracy that would surprise the world. Some harking back, at this point, to Japan and Germany.
But somebody else said dryly that Iraq could hardly get to becoming a Jeffersonian democracy in a matter of months. The final word from the State Department was that the US did not have a neatly sewn up plan of transiting to democracy once a regime change had been effected. "You can only plan to a certain degree." A former CIA agent who had done duty in Iraq suggested that democracy was not something you could just install.
Throughout the one-hour programme politicians, academics and ordinary people from across the Arab world rubbished America’s logic, ability and moral authority in attempting to impose democracy upon their region. So why were there no massive anti-war protests in this part of the world, the CNN reporter asked. People are not free to speak their minds here, said a woman in Syria matter-of-factly. Even so, they were not clamouring for the US to come in and win that right for them. Said a bearded Syrian animatedly, they did not have anything against the American people, only the government. But if Bush went ahead and meddled in their part of the world, people like him could also end up hating the American people.
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