News Media Doomsaying on Iraq, Afghanistan, and...Germany

January 18, 2005

In January of 1946, as America and its allies were struggling to transform post-war Germany from a Reich into a democracy, an article in Life magazine declared "Americans Are Losing the Victory in Europe", observing that "We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease," and "Never has American prestige in Europe been lower." The Saturday Evening Post sought to explain "How We Botched the German Occupation", commenting that "We have got into this German job without understanding what we were tackling or why." That February, The New York Times reported "U.S. Seen 'Fumbling' Its Job in Germany". And in October, a Collier's Magazine article pronounced "Failure in Germany".

To read such doomsaying, it might almost come as a surprise that Germany has been a peaceful and prosperous democracy for over half a century now. But excessively pessimistic news and commentary is not peculiar to 1946.

On October 31, 2001, The New York Times published a front page article entitled "A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam". Just three weeks after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan had begun, the Times report asserted, "Despite the insistence of President Bush and members of his cabinet that all is well, the war in Afghanistan has gone less smoothly than many had hoped," "signs of progress are sparse," "American bombs falling on civilian targets will not win Afghan 'hearts and minds'," and "nor have its tanks made any progress toward Kabul, the capital." Kabul fell two weeks later, and national Afghan elections were held successfully last October.

Shortly after the Fall of Baghdad, news and commentary swirled furiously around a story that provides another case study. On April 14, 2003, PBS's NewsHour claimed, "Largely unstopped by U.S. troops, looters pillaged over 170,000 items from the National Archeological Museum of Baghdad on Saturday, stealing or destroying a priceless collection of artifacts from more than 10,000 years of history." On April 13, Britain's Independent lamented "A civilisation torn to pieces" while Salon went one further on April 17 with "The end of civilization". A New York Times article on April 16 charged that "coalition forces were guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry building while hundreds of Iraqis ransacked and ran off with precious heirlooms and artifacts from a 7000-year-old civilization."

But on May 1, The New York Times was clarifying that "the losses seem to be less severe than originally thought." On June 10, an article in Britain's Guardian summed up the museum looting story thusly: "the only problem with it is that it's nonsense. It isn't true. It's made up. It's bollocks." The Iraq National Museum had suffered some looting, but practically all of its 170,000-item collection had been hidden for safe-keeping by the curators before the war; Nearly the entire collection was intact and in the Museum's possession. Of course, the revelation that the bad news was not remotely as bad as initially indicated received considerably less attention than did the bogus bad news.

And while the admittedly abundant bad news from Iraq receives relentless coverage (The New York Times famously featured the Abu Ghraib prison scandal on its front page for 32 consecutive days), the good news rarely rates such prominent mention. And, yes, there is such a thing as good news from Iraq.

The November audio address attributed to Iraq's al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, implicitly conceded defeat, railing against Muslim scholars, "You have delivered us to our enemy." Shiite Grand Ayatolla Ali al-Sistani, arguably the most influential figure in Iraq, has actually issued a fatwa obligating followers -- including women -- to vote. And Iraq's Shiites and Kurds, who combined comprise about 80 percent of the Iraqi people, have remained broadly supportive of the democratization effort.

The IMF has estimated that Iraq's GDP grew by an astounding 52 percent in 2004. The U.S. Agency for International Development has rehabilitated or re-equipped 420 Iraqi health care facilities, immunized three million Iraqi children, renovated 2,405 Iraqi schools, trained 33,000 teachers and school administrators, and produced 8.7 million textbooks. And Canada has contributed to the restoration of Iraq's marshes, drained on Saddam Hussein's orders as punishment for disloyalty by Iraqi Marsh Arabs.

There is undeniably no shortage of bad news from Iraq, and journalists and commentators would be derelict to ignore the steep cost of the Iraq mission. But trumpeting every conceivable setback while dismissing evidence of progress as "delusional pro-war propaganda" is precisely what the insurgents are counting on. Anti-democracy forces in Iraq cannot succeed militarily or electorally. They can however produce a steady supply of terror which can be used in the West and particularly America and Britain as an argument for abandoning aggressive action against Islamic terrorism and fascism. And more immediately, their terrorism and our pessimism could discourage the Iraqi people from participating in their new democracy. If Iraqis make a success of their upcoming national elections, it will have been with little moral support from us.

Andrew W. Smith, Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia and Tulsa, Oklahoma

Published in The Halifax Chronicle-Herald