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Response to 'Who does CNN watch?' in 9.1.03 edition received via email Sept. 7.
Kathleen Macaul's article on Al-Jezeera takes a traditional libertarian western view of this station's behaviour assuming that journalists are right whenever they clash with authority. But I'm afraid her coverage of this issue is one sided and ill-informed. In fact, Al-Jezeera has unashamedly retained several well-known Saddam supporters as commentators on their channel. Dhafir Al-Ani (now in the gulf living in five-star luxury and spreading malicious misinfomration on the air-waves) and Sabah Al-Mukhtar (London-based and very closely connected with Saddam's former propaganda network in Europe and a close associate of the infamous Member of Parliament George Galloway) to name just a couple. It is not their reporting of Iraqi or coalition deaths that upsets Iraqis but the justification and the glorification of acts of wanten destruction and murder that is so offensive. I would not at all rule out some privileged contacts with the terrorists who perpetrate such acts which would explain being on the scene so quickly after an incident (the Tayseer Allooni case is an interesting one to follow closely in this regard). The claim Al-Jezeera makes of being pro-freedom of expression and anti-Saddam is pure rubbish. They put him and his regime on a pedistal and portrayed him as a true patriot for years. They even stage-managed a phone-in program (by Faisal Al-Kassim) in Baghdad during Saddam's rule that gave an absurdly one-sided view of the Iraqi situation thus becoming a willing instrument of the Iraqi propaganda machine; something they have not done for anyone else. They continue to this day to present the Saddamist world-view and to minimize such atrocities as the mass graves. For these and other reasons many Iraqis believe that Al-Jazeera should be brought to account as any responsible media organisation should be when they cross the line between reporting and inciting violent acts.
Riadh Abed
Sheffield, UK
Response to editorial in 9.1.03 edition received Sept. 5 via email:
As a student of history for most of my 65 years, I have always endeavored to try to experience firsthand impressions of what actually happened during various events. Most of the time those impressions are colored, exaggerated, and prejudiced by often conflicting input. But, following the history of Iraq since the lead up to the first Gulf
War, I am keenly interested in the post-major combat happenings.
Most people have avoided comparing post-Saddam Iraq with the historical events of post-Hitler Germany. American soldiers trying to enforce the peace were knocked off by various guerrilla contingencies in Germany. The US spent an amount, in equivalent terms, far more than is being advertised as the forecast cost for getting Iraq on its feet and the US out of Iraq; the Marshall Plan cost American taxpayers a ton of money. The difference is there was no U.N. to beg; France and Germany, not to mention the Russians, were ready to say yes to anything we wanted to do.
But forget the past. What about today? Reacting to your recent editorial
about the US after 9/11, and the hatred of the US, particularly by those countries that somehow seem to spawn the terrorists, I feel we should go back to being a turtle. Let's go back to isolationism. Let's keep American money in America; let the rest of the world make its own medical discoveries, build their own economies without any US participation of any kind; shut our borders to anyone and everyone who can't complete the sort of screening process that I had to undergo for a visit to Saudi Arabia; send every suspected terrorist now in jail back to their own countries at their expense on an air carrier of their country; withdraw every single member of the US military now spread around the world back within our borders; and, in general, pull back inside the USA and watch countries such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the third world self-destruct. Spend all the money we save on defense to be able to shoot anything out of the skies that approaches our borders. Develop lightning-fast response teams to cover a completely, 100 percent covered border. Have surveillance aircraft on our borders 24 hours a day. Adopt an intelligence system similar to Middle East countries where there are no holds barred, and like them, we are able to use any means of torture or persuasion to find out what we want or what happened in any situation.
The US is arrogant; so was Germany and Russia, not so long ago. Every major developed country is arrogant. Tell me one that isn't. Italy? China? Singapore? Australia? Are we harsh and abrasive? As an educator who traveled literally all over the world for about three decades, I'd have to say we don't hold a candle to many of the major countries in the world in terms or "arrogance and ignorance". I was treated with more contempt by officials in more Middle East countries than I could believe. Because I was an American? Wrong. Because they were living under an oppressive rule that totally eclipsed their civil liberties, and they love to stick it to people that have any freedom whatsoever.
I would agree with you that the US should leave Iraq. As the former Iraqi mouthpiece to the UN Mohammed Al-douri recently told Wolf Blitzer, "the Iraqis themselves should have done away with Saddam". Unfortunately, they didn't. Neither could the Germans, who tried on numerous occasions, get to Hitler. It took the US to do it then, and took the US to do the same with Saddam. Without Bush making the decision to go do it, with or without WMD, Saddam would still be shooting cabinet ministers and shoveling thousands into mass graves while gassing Kurds and Iranians, not to mention draining waterways and destroying oil wells while stealing UN money for food and medicines to build even more palaces; Uday would be raping women on the street, chopping up athletes, re-labeling milk for children to sell in Jordan and shooting brothers in law; and Qusay would be organizing Fedayeen to put women and children in front of fanatics who stockpiled their weapons in schools and hospitals.
No matter what a mess Iraq is in now, it is better off than it was a short
eight months ago. However, in a move to please those who are anti-US, the US should leave now, fold up its tents and go home. Let the locals fight it out. Let Syria and Iran divvy up the spoils. The price of oil would be the same if the world has to pay Syria, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia: high. We could save a lot of money, and our lives, if we did that. We could go back home, stay inside our borders, have lots more money to invest in ourselves instead of on third world natives who don't even know where the US is, and be as arrogant, ignorant, and safe as we wanted to be.
Then you, and many others, would have to complain about something else. No doubt you could join with the French and Germans, who have comfortably sat miles away while the hard work was going on, in choosing a new villain.
D. Michael Coughlin
Portland, Maine, US
From the Aug. 18 edition:
Truly a good thing?
Your publication has a clear and well presented website, with good information regarding the current situation in Iraq. However, as I was reading the articles I began to ponder the reality of the Baghdad Bulletin. It seems bizarre in the extreme, when one thinks about it, that such a publication would be established and set up by outsiders then presented as an authoritative news source on Iraq.
Who exactly is your target audience? The national language in Iraq is Arabic, not English.
Why should media mediums be controlled and edited by foreigners in Iraq?
Why should foreign journalists write a large proportion of the articles?
It's all very well for me here in the UK to read your articles and find them useful and interesting but how would I feel if I was living in a country with hardly any large internet based publications and then an Iraqi publication started-up, writing primarily in Arabic and behaving as if the UK was an Iraqi colony about which they have the right to comment on as if it is their own country.
I understand that there has been a general rush to provide Iraqis with many services that frankly not many Iraqi companies can offer, but I can't help but feel that Iraq is being sold off, and that once all the markets are filed by more powerful and technologically advanced international corporations there will be no room for the development of local companies.
I hope you realize that I am not attempting to make a personal attack, I recognize the rationale behind a publication such as the Baghdad Bulletin. But I can't help but get a bit of a sinking feeling in my stomach!
David Leary
UK
The editor responds
Thank you for the letter, you have addressed many of the concerns we had in setting up the Bulletin.
First, we do not intend to present ourselves as authoritative, only honest. The target audience of the Bulletin is anyone in Iraq who speaks English (and there are a lot of English-speaking Iraqis), and the plan is to eventually publish two issues, one in Arabic, one in English, with the same content. It is extremely important to have English-language reporting here on the ground right now because English speakers (the coalition especially) are going to be making most of the decisions –– it's an unfortunate fact, but they should be making them based on good information and there should be a publication here to challenge and examine those decisions (in English) as well.
The media here should not be controlled and edited by foreigners, and much of it is not. We are one of the many new publications in Iraq - freedom of the press has been one of the happiest by-products of the invasion.
The intent is not to have foreign journalists writing most of the articles, but to begin training Iraqi journalists to take over the publication, eventually writing all of the foreign staff out of the equation and leaving the Bulletin here as a locally-owned and operated publication. The situation is as it is at this point, because, quite simply, there are not very many well-trained journalists here. Thirty years of oppressive rule have taken a toll. We are encouraging Iraqi involvement as much as possible and rely heavily on the advice and contributions from our Iraqi staff, which do outnumber the foreign staff at the magazine.
You also bring up an important point when you say "it's all very well for me here in the UK to read your articles and find them interesting." Iraq should demand world attention, and I suspect it is unlikely anyone locally would have set up a website and magazine people would be interested in reading internationally so quickly. We are providing a much greater readership for Iraqi writers than they would receive anywhere else. Also, by having the company incorporated in London and initially set up by foreigners, we strongly reduce the chances we will be harassed by coalition forces and can call attention to the harassment of other publications. (Unfortunately, we're still subject to the same press prevention tactics as everyone else here.)
Finally, there has not been a "general rush to provide Iraqis with many services," and by encouraging Iraqi advertising and providing coverage of the local economy (our economics editor is an Iraqi), we are encouraging the development of local companies, rather than heralding their extinction.
Hope this makes you feel a little bit better about reading us.
David Enders
Editor
Praise for the Bulletin
What you are doing is both incredible and important. While it would be ideal to have had such a venture created by the Iraqi people themselves, I also think that you, as an American, going into Baghdad and setting up a bastion of the free press will do more for post-war US-Iraqi relations than a hundred Bremers, Bushes, and Marine battalions combined. Hopefully the cultural investment that you are making in Iraq will be reciprocated in the US, and we will have a future where the American people do not view every Iraqi as a potential “‘non-combatant,” nor as simply another emerging market to be exploited to their own ends.
Peter Sanderson
Pittsburgh, Penn., US
Response to Rob Goodspeed’s Democracy and profit in Iraq (6.23.03 issue)
There are few campuses more liberal than the University of Michigan's at Ann Arbor. Mr. Goodspeed is simply engaging in the usual "shit and run" tactics employed by the childish. You do your new bulletin no service by publishing extremists like him.
The truth is Iraqis are their own worst enemies, not ours. The US can always retreat to Fort Rumsfeld in Free Kurdistan, let Iraq be Iraq with the promise that if the country follows the usual Muslim path we will kick their ass again... and again... and again until they get it right.
J. Hannay
Dallas, Texas, US
To submit a letter, email editor@baghdadbulletin.com by clicking here. Please include your name, email address and city of residence. The Baghdad Bulletin reserves the right to edit letters or decline to print them. |
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