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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
Off the Air: Radio and TV for Free Iraq have been MIA by J J Miller 
Off the Air: Radio and TV for Free Iraq have been MIA. National Review, May 5, 2003, by John J. Miller When troops with the Army's 101st Airborne Division approached the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf on April 3, they didn't expect to face resistance from Iraqi civilians. The Grand Ayatollah Sistani had agreed to meet with the U.S. commander, but asked that soldiers first secure the compound surrounding his shrine, which is a holy site for Shia Muslims. Yet the city's inhabitants hadn't heard of the arrangement. Fearing that the Americans might trample sacred ground, they poured into the street and shouted at the troops. "They've got to understand that [Sistani] wants us here," a frustrated colonel told an embedded CNN reporter. The officer made a quick decision: He ordered his men to kneel and point their weapons at the ground. Many of the Iraqis then sat down. Tensions eased, but not altogether. The Americans ultimately pulled back because they couldn't talk with the Iraqis. There's going to be a communications gap anytime American soldiers show up in a foreign country where English isn't widely spoken. The military does what it can to minimize difficulties. Before the war started, for instance, planes dropped countless leaflets assuring citizens that the United States was fighting Saddam Hussein's regime and not the Iraqi people. Also, translators travel with many units, though they've been in short supply, as the Najaf incident reveals. But there's one simple step the government didn't take that might have helped: It didn't establish a TV station run by Iraqi opposition groups. This failure may already have cost lives -- and it foreshadows problems that await the Bush administration as it prepares to establish civil order in Iraq. On March 31, five Republican senators -- Sam Brownback of Kansas, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Jon Kyl and John McCain of Arizona, and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania -- complained about this in a letter to the White House. "The fact that we are at war with Saddam's regime and still not fully funding the Iraqi opposition in their struggle to achieve the same goal is wrong," they wrote. Specifically, they were concerned that the State Department had not released millions of dollars previously appropriated to the Iraqi National Congress, a union of opposition groups that hoped to operate a television station called TV Liberty, among other vital efforts. "Mr. President, we ask that you personally clear the bureaucratic road blocks from within the State Department and free up the authorized funding now." Two days later, the State Department released $4 million to the INC -- some two weeks after the war had started. "Now it will take a little while for this funding to do what it should have done long ago," says Kyl. The failure to set up an opposition TV station is startling. Broadcasts could play a central role in any hearts-and-minds operation aimed at the Iraqi public. Ordinary Iraqis, after all, have had few alternatives to Saddam TV. Satellite dishes are a rarity. Even if they weren't, most of the Arab media are hostile to the war effort. Kuwait's station isn't, and its signal can reach Basra and other parts of southern Iraq, but most of the country lies beyond its reach, including Baghdad. The Kurds have a station in the north, but their Kurdish-language broadcasts command only a tiny market share in areas they don't already control. For the majority of TV viewers, it was all Saddam, all the time. The news most Iraqis received about the war from their TV sets was downright Orwellian. "There is no presence of the American columns in the city of Baghdad at all," said Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf on April 7, as U.S. troops entered the city. "We besieged them and we killed most of them. We will slaughter them all." If the INC's TV Liberty had broadcast competing messages -- perhaps from mobile platforms escorted by troops -- the people of Baghdad would have known this was a lie. At the least, they would have received information that seemed to confirm the rumors that were no doubt racing through the capital. The same is true for other population centers that didn't quite know what to think of coalition troops as they drew near. "If opposition TV had been beaming into Iraq from the first day, the cities would have fallen like dominoes," says Ali al-Ahmed of the Virginia-based Saudi Institute. "It would have shortened the fighting and saved lives." The broadcasts might have produced intelligence on the whereabouts of Ba'ath party officials or the locations of weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps they even would have inspired popular uprisings. But they were never recorded or transmitted. TV Liberty has been on the air before, though it went dark last May, when the INC couldn't pay a $25,000 bill to a satellite-uplink provider. Congress had appropriated the money, but the INC's contentious relationship with its Foggy Bottom paymasters led to wrangling over budgets, late money transfers, and finally the cash shortage that caused the station's collapse a year ago. Keeping TV Liberty going and letting it build an audience with anti-Saddam programming would have cost the equivalent of about two fully loaded M1-A1 Abrams tanks. The crux of the problem is resentment of INC leader Ahmad Chalabi. He is a man with roots in Iraqi democracy -- his father was president of the Iraqi senate in 1958, when generals seized the government. The Chalabis fled their home, and Ahmad Chalabi received an education in the United States, entering M.I.T. at the age of 16 and earning a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago later on. "He's very smart, and that's with a capital V and a capital S," says Richard Perle of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Perle is one of Chalabi's admirers in Washington, a group that includes many congressional conservatives, Bush-administration hawks, and advocates of democracy. Yet the longtime Iraqi exile has plenty of enemies, too. The State Department has never cared for Chalabi or the INC because he and his group stood for regime change throughout the 1990s, when most career bureaucrats found this alarming. By taking a different position, Chalabi is seen as a renegade who can't be controlled. ("Freedom fighters aren't good at taking orders," quips a congressional staffer.) The CIA doesn't like Chalabi either, perhaps because he warned the agency in 1996 that a coup it was planning had been compromised. The plot proceeded, but Chalabi's assessment was correct. Instead of feeling chastened, the CIA felt shown up. It continues to hold a grudge. "Once you antagonize the permanent bureaucracy, there's almost no turning back," says a Defense Department official. "A lot of Washington bureaucrats put personal ego before wise policy." (Another concern of some people involved in postwar planning is Chalabi's ties to Iran -- Teheran has reached out to many opposition groups, including the INC.) So Chalabi's supporters in and out of the Bush administration fight a continual battle to make sure that the INC gets the money it needs. "Once the war got under way, we started getting calls from Iraq and the administration telling us that people were getting killed because there were no TV broadcasts," says a leadership aide in the Senate. On March 27, Chalabi himself phoned Sen. Brownback and said the United States wasn't putting enough of an Iraqi face on Operation Iraqi Freedom. "It was aggravating to hear that," says Brownback. "Parts of our government have been against the INC for years, and that attitude is hindering us in the fight to liberate Iraq." The problem began to be corrected in early April, when the Pentagon airlifted Chalabi and 700 INC soldiers into southern Iraq, where they could help coalition forces communicate with Iraqi citizens, deliver aid, and identify Saddam loyalists. They're being called the 1st Battalion Free Iraqi Forces. But the INC's troubles are far from over: At the same time, the CIA was circulating a report claiming that Chalabi lacks popular support within Iraq, in an attempt to undercut him as Washington was contemplating the country's postwar governance. On April 9, Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Chalabi foe, piled on. He criticized the airlift and said that the United States "cannot select who we think should be in the interim government and put them on the throne. That's the most dangerous thing we could do." Yet Chalabi's supporters are quick to point out that there's a big difference between helping a legitimate opposition group and installing a particular leader in a liberated Baghdad. "Working with the INC doesn't mean we're picking Iraq's next ruler," says Brownback. The president has said he doesn't want to do that, either. "I hear a lot of talk here about how we're going to impose this leader or that leader. Forget it. From Day One, we have said the Iraqi people are capable of running their own country," said Bush in Northern Ireland on April 8. "The position of the United States of America is, the Iraqis are plenty capable of running Iraq. And that's precisely what is going to happen." Letting them run their own TV station would be a good start. COPYRIGHT 2003 National Review, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group |