SINCE KOSOVO IN 1999--through 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq--I've noticed, as the producer of a television program on international affairs, three common assumptions that cloud the minds of some otherwise good journalists and academics charged with reporting and explaining major events as they unfold. Reliance on these assumptions--all of them seemingly designed to help one escape the hard work of sifting through evidence and thinking through ideas--explains the way stories like the war in Iraq are framed and simplified in the media and for the public.
The first assumption is that universal fairness, if achieved, would result in world peace. One is not surprised when such sentiments are uttered by children. Around Christmas, my son's kindergarten class was asked how to make the world more peaceful. "Talk nicely to each other," said one kid. "Be everyone's friend," said another.
If we tried hard enough, the children were saying, we could do away with conflict by just getting along. A recent email from the head of an English think tank devoted to global cooperation expressed this notion perfectly: "Time has come for all the world's politicians to come together. . . . The solution of eradicating terrorism can only be achieved by building a new world" where everyone is equal.
This utopian tautology--only when there are no problems will there be no problems--ignores the fundamental question of why conflict exists in the first place. "We need to get beyond the them and us, the good guys and the bad guys, and seek a genuinely collective response," urged the Guardian, following the 3/11 attacks in Madrid. But a world without us's and them's is inconceivable. And the lesson of Madrid is clear and simple: Well-meaning appeals to "collective" understanding cannot do away with the profound cultural differences that are now exploding in conflict.
The second common fallacy I've come across is that "my country"--in my case, Canada, though it applies to some others--is a nation apart. Somehow, it can stand outside the turbulent currents of contemporary international events.
Quite a few of my countrymen see Canada's (alleged) neutrality as a sign of our longstanding "idealism." Any decent history book will contradict this fiction, but the fantasy that we are, and will continue to be, neutral on the world's stage persists. There was no overwhelming majority here either for or against joining the Iraq war. Consequently, the government did not feel compelled to come down firmly on either side. This ambiguity may be nothing more than self-interest. Or it may be a window on our own cowardice in the face of today's security threats.
A few days after voters in Spain elected a new prime minister--a mere three days after bomb attacks killed 191 people in Madrid--a young Spaniard told the New York Times that "maybe the Socialists will get our troops out of Iraq, and al Qaeda will forget about Spain, so we will be less frightened." A Canadian columnist recently urged our new prime minister to "keep your Canadian distance" from the United States. "Kow-towing to [Bush] and doing his bidding in the Middle East and elsewhere will only bring you grief." Such sentiments are not the stuff of principled policy differences, but a calculated effort to stand outside the history that is being written today.
Bad Assumption Number Three: The world is divided into strong and weak. Being weak is a source of virtue. Being strong is suspect.
The United States is accused of being in Iraq (and Afghanistan) to control oil, to enhance its own power, and/or to subjugate friendless, defenseless Muslims. Muslims "are treated with contempt and dishonor," said outgoing Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad last October. "Our religion is denigrated. Our holy places desecrated. Our countries are occupied. Our people starved and killed."
However, as Bill Clinton recently pointed out, between 1991 and 1999, the United States freed Kuwait, intervened in Somalia, resolved the Bosnian conflict, and went to war for Kosovo's Albanians. In each case, the United States helped Muslims and did so (except for the Gulf War) despite the absence of any traditional national interest requirement.
The David-and-Goliath lens was similarly used to distort the fierce battle of Jenin in 2002. "Rarely, in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life," wrote the Times of London's Janine di Giovanni. When the deaths of 32 to 38 armed Palestinians and 14 to 20 Palestinian civilians--not to mention 23 Israeli soldiers--are compared to the tens of thousands who were raped, mutilated, or killed in those other conflicts, something other than clear-eyed analysis is going on.
Some editorializing on the prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison reveals this same tendency. Salim Lone, the former communications director of the United Nations mission in Baghdad, recently wrote that "Iraqi fury will, in fact, be uncontrollable if the infinitely more depraved images circulating on the Internet of what was done to women prisoners are authentic and get wider publication." There are no excuses for the sadistic acts of sexual humiliation and torture committed at this notorious house of horrors, but the Abu Ghraib abuses in no way confer victimhood on all Iraqis. Yet, as victims, Lone suggests, Iraqis are entitled to react with uncontrolled fury. This infantilization of Iraqis and their reactions--collective, undifferentiated, irrational--unduly and tellingly simplifies a much more complicated reality.
By leaning on these dull and often meaningless assumptions, journalists betray a preference for simplicity and tidy lessons at the expense of reporting and analysis. Some of this distortion may stem from a desire among commentators to be on the side of peace and goodness, but it would be much easier to take seriously their hopes for a better world if they appeared ready to confront the messy one we have.
Dan Dunsky is producer of Diplomatic Immunity , a Canadian weekly foreign affairs show on TVO in Ontario.