Isn't It Iranic?
The final results were announced Sunday, February 13, and it thus became necessary for American journalism's leading authorities to assign themselves the question, "What exactly do Iraq's historic elections portend?" Unfortunately, American journalism's leading authorities seem not to have assigned themselves any additional responsibility to answer this question intelligibly. Readers of our two leading daily papers, for example, were offered diametrically opposite--and irreconcilable--explanations of the vote.
On the one hand, you can choose to believe Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Robin Wright, whose analysis, "Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision," was a prediction of Khomeini-style medievalism in Baghdad. Wright, reporting from her desk in Washington about phone conversations she'd had with such as Juan Cole, "a University of Michigan expert on Iraq," announced that Bush administration hopes for a Western-friendly, secular Iraqi regime--"the antithesis of Iran's theocracy"--appear to have been thwarted. In "one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention," Wright concluded, "Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base--and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door."
Or maybe that's not what happened at all. A New York Times front-pager by Dexter Filkins, also published February 14 (though datelined "Baghdad"), confidently suggested that "the razor-thin margin apparently captured by the Shiite alliance here . . . seems almost certain to enshrine a weak government that will be unable to push through sweeping changes, like granting Islam a central role in the new Iraqi state." Filkins noted that the Shiite coalition now finds itself "opposed in nearly equal measure by an array of mostly secular minority parties," and that America's closest Iraqi allies, the Kurds, will all by themselves control more than a quarter of the country's new National Assembly. Filkins further noted that "Shiite leaders appeared to be scaling back their expectations" in a series of post-ballot moves that "seemed to ease fears among Iraq's Sunni, Kurd, and Christian minorities" about the possible establishment of a "strict Islamic state."
What's the truth, then? Robin Wright's dark-ages forecast? Or the sunnier Dexter Filkins version? The Scrapbook, claiming no special wisdom about Iraqi politics, but possessed of a paid-up subscription to the Nexis newsclip archive, has decided to go with Filkins and the Times--primarily on account of Robin Wright's reliance on the aforementioned Prof. Cole, whom the Post should more accurately have described as a "University of Michigan anti-Bush partisan" whose only consistent position is that U.S. Iraq policy is always wrong.
For instance: Cole now tells Wright that the new Iraqi government "will have very good relations with Iran. The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. Talabani is very close to Tehran. In terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States was hoping for." But it turns out this is the same Jalal Talabani whose opinions Cole has previously found it convenient to dismiss--as excessively "pro-American" and unrepresentative of the authentic "Arab voice." It further turns out that Cole, just a few months ago, was mocking reported CIA concerns that the Iraqi election might be manipulated in Tehran's favor. This business about significant Iranian influence over Iraqi politics, Cole sniffed, "doesn't hold water."
Except, it seems, when it does.
Robin Wright herself, incidentally, cannot fairly be accused of reflexive recourse to whatever construction of Middle East reality promises the gravest embarrassment to George W. Bush. Indeed, she is sometimes quite the optimist about Iraq. As recently as January 30, on Larry King Live, Wright was going out of her way to pooh-pooh one worst-case, post-election scenario then already becoming popular with the Bush-bashing crowd. "There are many in Iraq," she reminded her audience, "including the senior cleric Ayatollah Sistani, who has said over and over again that they don't want to copy Iran's theocratic system, that, in fact, they want a secular constitution, in which Islam plays an important role, but that doesn't call for religious rule by the clerics." It remains the case that "there's a tremendous difference between Arabs in Iraq and Persians in Iran," she pointed out.
No question, Wright told Larry King: Iraq's election "was a great day for the United States."
How's that for irony?
Pyongyang's Joke
He has weird hair, peculiar and sordid personal habits, and his people are enslaved and starving, but credit North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il--at least--with exquisite comic timing.
Last December, the world of East Asia and nuclear nonproliferation policy wonks was briefly abuzz over a Foreign Affairs article on North Korea by Selig S. Harrison. During the 1950s and 1960s, Harrison held a series of important, Asia-based foreign correspondent jobs for outfits like the Associated Press and the Washington Post. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Harrison made an active second career for himself as a think-tank man on Eastern Hemispheric international relations topics. And during the present decade, Harrison has made an active third career for himself frittering away whatever reputation he's got left from his first two times around.
Which is to say: Selig S. Harrison is to the Korean peninsula what Juan Cole is to the Middle East. He's the go-to guy if you're looking for someone, no matter what the specific situation, who's prepared to say that the Bush administration is screwing everything up--and lying about it, to boot.
That was the point of Harrison's Foreign Affairs piece, at any rate. The president and his State Department, Harrison argued at multi-thousand-word length, have been "seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons." In fact, it remains highly "unlikely that the country is able at present to build or operate the equipment needed, over a long period, to produce weapons-grade uranium."
This pronouncement--which implicitly indicted the Clinton administration, too, for "seriously exaggerating" North Korea's nuclear ambitions--inspired an exhaustive and devastating rebuttal from Mitchell B. Reiss and Robert L. Gallucci (Reiss was until recently the director of policy planning at State; Galluci was the Clinton administration's top North Korea negotiator). Selig Harrison could not be more wrong, the two men wrote for the forthcoming, March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. The case for North Korea's atomic weapons threat is "credible" and "dead to rights," Pyongyang having long since been caught "red handed."
But Harrison was unrepentant. "If it were as easy as Reiss [and] Galluci . . . argue it is to enrich uranium to weapons grade in quantities sufficient for nuclear weapons," Harrison sneered--in a reply made public simultaneously with the Reiss/Gallucci essay on February 8--"and if there were indeed credible evidence that North Korea has a program in place for doing so, one would have expected the Bush administration to put forward this evidence."
Barely 24 hours later, in the wee hours of February 10, the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a formal statement confirming that Kim Jong Il's regime has "manufactured nukes for self-defense."
Ba-dum-bump.
Breindel Award
Applications are invited for the seventh annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism. The $10,000 prize is named for longtime New York Post editor and columnist (and Weekly Standard contributor) Eric Breindel, who died in 1998 at the age of 42. It is presented each year to the columnist, editorialist, or reporter whose work best reflects the spirit of Breindel's too-short career: love of country, concern for the preservation and integrity of democratic institutions, and resistance to the evils of totalitarianism.
Last year's winner was Wall Street Journal deputy editorial-page editor Daniel Paul Henninger. In 2003, the Breindel Award was presented posthumously to editor and columnist Michael Kelly, who'd been killed while on assignment in Iraq.
For further information about this year's Breindel Award, please contact Germaine Febles at 212-843-8031 or gfebles@rubenstein.