In three years of war coverage the culture of elite leftist journalism, its uniformly inspired daily product, has proven itself to be an occupation of deception, not detail; work that is compulsive, not committed; with a character that is pungent and mordant, and neither pointed nor clever. The second exposed link between a news agency and the plain enemy of mankind — that of CBS News and a terrorist gang's cameraman — is only an invitation to consider how that sort of relationship now defines the industry, especially since the first instance of collusion won one of this year's most prestigious awards for what was once reporting. If we do, we realize that bureaus are doing this not because they seek all information but instead, since events can in fact be prevented by scheduled witnesses, there's a certain narrative they'd prefer to tell.
Loathsome, it hardly stands out in a rich history of men made Faust, subscribing on the devil's ledger for worldly things — in this case, spite, revenge and sophistry — in the trust that they're smarter than the last fool who met a fiery default; or the one before him, or before that one, or that one, and so on. That we can't understand why the leftist press is enthusiastically aiding those who would immediately destroy it — betrayers are punished first — is why even the modern age can't alchemize guile into wisdom.
Compulsive, not committed. All the newspapers rushing to declare this weekend's modest Baghdad protests in the name of Muqtada al-Sadr and all accompanying horrors as a savage twist of fate missed the real irony: on the second anniversary of Saddam Hussein's symbolic fall, al-Sadr's assembly was peacefully demonstrating, subordinate to the rule of law. Beaten by American might and Iraqi common good, Iran's patsy had to pretend he was part of the nation whose birth he couldn't thwart.
Adolf Hitler played much the same part, of course, upon exiting prison in 1924, a little over a year after his disastrous "Beer Hall" putsch. But the dimwitted al-Sadr is not the sly Austrian weasel; and the Weimar Republic was weak from the start, the rent for Hitler to nestle into pulled apart with the full-hearted effort of several Germans in those fifteen years of stifling neglect. In liberated Iraq a firm grounding has been set in the face of a sustained brutality the Nazis' 1932 party street-killings couldn't match. A trial met and won teaches value, and Iraq stands taller and stronger after two difficult years than the republic quietly conceived from Philipp Scheidemann's single impulsive remark.
Apart from the conspiracy loons and cranks, who should never be left an audience, a host of field students, scholars and experts have seen their bromides, predictions and pronouncements overturned as one force — that of this troubled world's capacity for goodness — endured. Afghanistan was neither impregnable nor doomed, Iraq's people were not too faint for their hand-to-hand struggle. Yet with more pride than shame, academia can't rest in faith; it must doubt in all things but its own intellectual investments. In today's Wall Street Journal, Iraqi Jalal Talabani exhorted a new Iraq to the West and to the world. He may have also meant to quietly answer a rather sour challenge, written in the same editorial page space three days earlier by a man on hand during the Coalition Provisional Authority's administration, New York University professor Noah Feldman.
He's informally billed as the Jewish Arabist-Islamist. Such a title probably aspires to a cosmopolitan air but critics on the right simply take that to mean Feldman's confused. His record in Iraq is not so much checkered as is his transcript; towards the end of 2003 he could have debated himself within the space of a month, phoning in a falling Iraqi sky to the authorities around Halloween and talking "solvable" just after Thanksgiving. The record shows that at no time have cataclysms existed in Iraq, though often in the imaginations of cynics and skeptics; which means Mr. Feldman is either opportunistic or sorely unobservant for his professional esteem.
Being wrong about something repeatedly still can't lower esteem to where a major newspaper won't have your opinion piece, so on Friday, April 8th Feldman introduced his article "A Backroom Constitution" (posted online a day later) with four paragraphs built exclusively on innuendo. The first sentence alone relegates Ibrahim Jaafari's nomination as prime minister to "backroom deals" — what, were Tony Blair's and John Howard's by impartial Olympic panel? With a broad brush not nearly big enough for its heavy daubs of tar: Feldman hits the Kurds ("'politcking'...infighting") and the Shiites ("experienced in...internecine politics of Iran") and the Kurds with the Shiites ("got to know each other during prewar meetings in London [over tea, crumpets and hegemony jam? — please tell us, Mr. Feldman]") and foreign-based umbrella groups ("the group of exile politicians who returned to Iraq after Saddam's fall") twice, in fact ("seeking that sovereignty be transferred directly to them") and Ayatollah Ali Sistani ("Islamically oriented Shiite politicians") and the Kurds for three ("results made the Kurds kingmakers") and then Iyad Allawi and Ahmad Chalabi ("both of whom had close ties to...US intelligence") before returning to Shiites ("ties to Iran").
It's not clear whether Feldman intended his article for readers with not even a tiny understanding of parliamentary procedure or whether his contempt for eight million Iraqi voters exceeds what he carries for everybody in Baghdad politics but the Sunnis, for only once does he refer to the National Assembly as a "freely elected government," and then in a clause beginning with the word "although."
Iraqis have best served themselves by decisively identifying their enemies, both political and mortal. Terrorists fit tightly into the latter category. The United Nations would be considered political, for all its pandering and filching and cozying with Saddam; Al-Jazeera and other despot-run Arab cable networks are both political and mortal for their furtive work with terrorists and upstarts. Feldman seems determined to become a political enemy as well; half-over, his Journal article finishes with some insulting and faulty advice. Deals cut in parliament? Constitutional compromises? Hard-edged backbencher cliques? Feldman's failure isn't recognizing the democratic sausage-grinder, since he lists all of these things; it's that he takes civil disagreement to be something of a problem.
That's the center of it. Like the academics, like the gentry leftist media: this man writes as if self-determination offends his sensibility. The American alliance is still obligated to ensure that Iraq emerges from the nursery a free country — no "whatever they choose we take" nonsense, not even the Germans gave Hitler's National Socialists a Reichstag majority on March 5, 1933 when elections weren't a complete farce — but the authority and propriety of foreign micromanagement ended last June, when L. Paul Bremer gave power to an Iraqi transitional government. Funnily enough, when I wrote two months ago of unexpected Iraqi actions that would be spun by spoilsports as failure, I truly meant "public slights" and "operational impediments." Feldman gives us nothing but business as usual, to where we could paste over the print names and descriptions with those of any other parliamentary democracy and not know the difference. His introduction adds up to a rigged government and yet a different chorus of detractors told us it was chaos.
Finally, he approaches disingenuous imploring the Assembly's leaders to "incorporate" the Sunnis in lawmaking, when he means "offer concessions." True, Sunnis — if we're strictly scoring on sectarian lines — only gained half their demographic representation. But then Sunni areas were Saddam's criminal nests, most habitable to Ba'athists, gangsters and foreign terrorists; and leaders who shunned the election had their bluff called. Feldman talks of a "political solution" to be presented when in fact a combination political and military solution has ennervated Iraq's enemies for two months, now. There are plans to pull the law-abiding majority of Sunnis out from under rank intimidation. But that solution doesn't come from a foreigner. President Jalal Talabani:
[W]hile the new Iraq is open to all, there must be no underestimating our determination to vanquish terrorism. Conciliation is not capitulation, nor is compromise to be deemed equivalent to imbalanced concession. Rather, it is through conciliation and compromise that we are buildign a fair Iraq, a just state for all its peoples. Democracies, unlike dictatorships, are forgiving and generous, but they cannot survive unless they fight. And fight we shall.
To his credit Feldman believed Iraq's elections could not be postponed but his essential lobbying for political capital an Iraqi bloc simply hasn't earned is counter to democratic metrics, and a nudge right back to the minority tyrant — which Talabani, a man completely new to elected representation, understands precisely. When Talabani talks of "human rights, primarily of the individual, but also of our diverse ethnic and religious heritage," and places it against Saddam Hussein's murderous exploitation, he's speaking of an Iraq that foreign pedants, drawing cultural conclusions from a closed society, haven't yet recognized. Iraqis, like Afghans, aren't exactly waiting for permission to become pluralist.
The division between universalists and relativists has been untraversable since September 11th. Today, we can watch another, subtler separation taking place, that of the self-interested intellectuals and the selfless. The relativists act out of recklessness and malevolence; with the intellectuals, it's for their treatise that would have overturned the "simple" adage stating that given the opportunity, free men might work for good. We'll find that some among us don't like liberal Iraqi self-determination after all.
One of Noah Feldman's black marks centered on a handful of Muqtada al-Sadr's henchmen slipping into the National Assembly. A day before the gentry press made a go of presenting al-Sadr's protests as more than they were, we were told that the "backroom" constitutionalists ought to pay attention to Sadrite demands.
Do we fear it? And everything else we've been told lies only one unheeded warning away from Judgment? Best to trust the people who will eventually put "Mookie" away like the mobster he is. From Baghdad, Ali Fadhil, watching Iraq's try at C-SPAN, recalled with a good deal of humor a roiling speech from an al-Sadr goon about all things reprehensible. The MP growled and spat and quoted from the Koran through half of his time; and when he was done, said Ali, "his speech was met by a shy clapping from one member, and that's all."