Meanders

Last night I was getting ready to start writing my final papers for school.
I was setting up my DVR for the night, making sure I won’t miss anything worth watching, when I decided to watch Tuesday’s recording of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart featuring special guest: Arizona Senator John McCain.
And it was amazing.
First time I hear someone questioning the governmental decisions related to the war in Iraq to someone that is NOT a Democrat but still a government representative, asking THE questions and making clear and obvious that questioning the government is not antipatriotic or anti-troops –which has been the way the government has been making its case up to this point- but exactly the opposite.
I am not pro Democrats or anti Republicans.
I don’t trust many members of the Democratic party either, especially those engaged in that same practice but instead of using the ‘anti-patriotic’ line, they use the ‘guiltracist’ trip (notice I joined two words together because they use them interchangeably)

What I am talking about is the intention –of the government from all things- of not allowing people to question ‘what is’ because that goes against personal interests or visions of the world.

And I repeat: PERSONAL.
“What is good for me inherently must be good for you and don’t even dare to question otherwise because that means that you want my destruction which is yours too. If you do question me you may destroy (huh?) me/us which means that you are like a suicide bomber that is ready to kill himself and destroy everything around him, or a misanthropist racist…in other words, you are a terrorist. And before you say anything else let me enroll everybody against you because you are dangerous”

WOW!

OK, so the Daily Show ended and I was back to cable checking the programming when I read “Bill Moyers’ Journal”…uhm, Bill Moyers? I was watching his interview with Joseph Campbell for my Symbolism class and I was wondering about him! Is it an old program or a new one?

Turned out it was a brand new one, “Buying the war”, about how journalist corp in the White House tacitly allowed President Bush to invade Iraq. How the government made such a wonderful case and used the media so perfectly in their favor.
A Harvard case-study of political propaganda.

Nobody, at least no editor or journalist of the main media conglomerates (CNN, NBC, ABC, WSJ, NYT, etc, etc, etc) ever questioned the government affirmations about WMD’s, Hussein’s alleged links with Al Qaeda or the actual plans of war.
Nobody took the effort to go to ‘the source’: Iraq, the bureaucrats, the experts, the people in the field, the diplomats in the Middle East and ask them: is that true? What is going on?

Fox News became the flag ship of the government propaganda, and the use of ‘American values’ and September 11’s tragedy made it an implicit but effective bully able to move masses against anyone who would dare to question the government affirmations.

I remember the first time I heard that Hussein had links with Al Qaeda.
I was stunned.
What? Hussein, a secular tyrant, that has been scared to death by anyone that shows sings of been able to recruit its people against him in any imaginable ways, a lunatic that had been completely isolated since before the first Gulf War, a coward that governs with a stern fit over opposing groups, that mistrusts Iran, Syria and especially Afghanistan and the Arab Emirates….in touch with Al Qaeda?
Says who?

I thought that someone here, Thomas Friedman or Ted Koppel maybe, will show the American public that that was almost impossible.
I mean, Americans are not that good at geography, let alone politics in the Mead East besides knowing that Israelis and Palestinians fight against each other all the time and that countries out there have a lot of oil, but Friedman, Koppel and others have been there and talk and write about it so they may be able to explain how those ideas were just not, well, real.

And what about the WMDs?
Given the restrictions and controls over the Iraqi military from the U.N, Russia, France and even China, that was not possible either.
Besides, if they did have a strong military they were more focused on ‘checking up’ on the potential opposition in Bagdad than planning a war with anyone else.
Chemical weapons?
Well, that was a certain possibility given their low cost and easy manufacturing, but not in a massive scale mainly because of the restrictive international regulations concerning Iraq at the time and how much it was plagued with spies from all over the world.
One little indication that a group of more than 5 people were gathering somewhere in a daily basis and were handling chemicals and working non-stop would have Israel, Turkey and Iran (not to mention the Kurdish community all over the world) screaming foul in seconds.

I remember my confusion when I heard agents of the government saying that Iraq was sort of an ‘easy going’ group of Muslims; the war would be so easy, everyone will love Americans and take them as their saviors. Besides Sadam Hussein there were no problems, all Iraqis ‘were the same’.
No mention of its complicated social and political web Turkish, Sunnis, Shias..nothing

Wait a minute
How do I know about all that?
Do you really want to know?

I read the news!

Yes, I lived in Israel for a while and yes I started Political Sciences at the University of Tel Aviv with an emphasis in Arab studies, but that was right before the Perestroika and the Gulf War and one thing I learned from living there is: things are in constant change, you can’t relate to the same issue in the same way for more than 3 weeks, let alone 15 years or more!
And nothing, n o t h i n g, is never the way it seems.

In any case, I learned about the complicated social structure of Iraq in 2002 when Bush was making his case by clicking on: ‘Naked Planet Iraq’ or something of that sort, nothing official but ‘credible’ that would give me some information about the life in Iraq and what did it look like.

All the information was over the Internet for anyone to see.
Typing ‘Kurdish in Iraq’ or ‘UN and chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq’ and something might show up…for anyone interested.
And ALL the reports about Hussein since the Gulf War –by anyone who met him- depicted him as a loner whose only visible supporter was Hugo Chavez, the only international leader who visited him since 1991!

All that information was ignored in favor of a propaganda machine that was about to overtake and change hundreds of thousands of lives for ever.
No journalist took the effort on t r a v e l l i n g to Iraq, or anywhere around there, and find out…why waste that money when you have all those pundits that will give you a “pro-American” opinion for freeeeee!

In the US everyone was sold to the war once Colin Powell exposed the Iraqi threat at the UN Security Council: how would Mr Powell lie? Not possible! Especially not at the UN He knows!
But I remember reading the opinion of international diplomats and personalities: Are you sure he’s the Secretary of State of the US? Of the US? Really? Then where did he get ‘that’ from? Why my government never heard about that before?

The position of American media? Who are ‘them’ to question American politics?
As a journalist my first thought was: wait a second!
What if ‘they’ were right? Who else besides the American and British government said that it was right?
Mind me: what are journalists for if not to dig up and find out what the source of the matter really is especially when there are talks of war!?
For me the shadow of the Holocaust was too present to be ignored: people were dying in Europe, they were persecuted and killed in a systematic and horrific death machine but almost no information was published in the US media about the camps and that horror.
Most people here knew about it because of their family members fighting out there….

I thought: “here we were again, taking sides and not looking around before making a decision”
It’s nice when the reality-check is about Africa and the poverty and AIDS problems, it feels so far away and so awful that people kind of put it in their cubicles and savescreens or their charity contributions but it’s not really ‘present’…so there is no real threat.

A war of international proportions on the other hand, the US getting involved in the Middle East, talking about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, that’s another story..
And what American journalists did? Nothing!
They gave all their trust and professional principles away to avoid being signaled out and called traitors.
I remember feeling so obfuscated but I could not say anything because: who am I to question my host’s politics?

All that lack-of-truthful-information that was going back and forth between what could be seen as a monolithic source of information (the government) and a powerful conglomerate of the willing (the media) made me think:
If you don’t want to see the truth or take care of it OK; but what about the people?
What about those who were going to have bombs and foreign military running around in their backyard and flying over their heads? What did they think about all this?
We know what happened during the invasion thanks to a now very famous blogger, but what was there before that? Who else was out there speaking out and telling their truth?
But then again: who would listen anyways…

Then I think: why the US hasn’t got into a war with Iran? What had changed since?
They obviously have the intention, they are looking really hard to make their case but seemingly not many people are listening anymore?
Why?
What is different -if anything- within the American people that is making it hard for the government to use the same ‘trust me I know what I’m saying so if you are not with me you are a traitor’ card anymore?

My answer: Blogs

I watched a Ted Koppel special this past November about life in Iran.
He actually traveled to Iran and spent some time there checking facts and learning about their culture and politics. Just enough to show who Iranians are, how do they look like, what do they do, what do they think about themselves and the world around them and especially about the American way of doing politics…and during that special Koppel said something like: people in Iran use blogs as personal journals and as a way to connect with others, especially with their families overseas, particularly with their families in the US.

Even tho the government installed softwares in their Internet servers that shut down any website containing words censored by the regime (like “women”, “woman” is OK but the plural is not because it implies an assembly of women which is something prohibited by the strict regime), “they still find their way ‘out’. Blogs is the new frontier of information and social interaction”.

I was remembering Koppel’s special while watching Moyers’ program and I recalled that now journalist and pundits ‘excuse’ themselves when mentioning Iranians, ‘they are Persians really not exactly the same as Iranians, you know’ and they sometimes even make a side note to remind the audience that Iranians while predominantly Muslims are not really Arabs ‘but the story is to long to be told here’ and they keep talking about whatever new stupidity Ahmadinejad came up with.

That makes me wonder: why they didn’t make those side-notes about Iraq 5 years ago? What had changed since the invasion in Iraq?

My answer: Blogs.

Blog IS the new frontier. Blogs are the media that people are using to fill the gaps or find out more about news.
If something happened, sure enough there might be plenty of people who have an opinion about it. All we need to do is type the words and we will find it.
And it’s not a depersonalized, market-driven source, it is an individual. The points of views and experiences of an individual that most probably than not is in touch with the news (those who are not ‘there’ are immediately rejected).
Blogs are the new ‘go to’ primary source of information about the outside world.
Suffice to see the thousands of blogs that showcased first-hand the war between Hezbollah and Israel this past summer and how they were used by the media as part of their account for what happened that day.

As a journalist I find it scary and awesome at the same time.
It’s scary that an opinion is now a source of news, but I love the fact that that opinion has to be supported on proven facts: just because you say so doesn’t mean it happened; show me, prove me what happened for me to have my own ideas about what you are talking about, otherwise your account has the potential to fizzle sooner or later and nobody wants to be called the supporter of lies anymore.

The best part is that no bunch of media companies or governments are the omnipotent gatekeepers and owners of the information anymore.
The people hold the key and the possibility to say their truth to whomever wants to hear it…as long as they make the effort to type the words on their Internet browsers…

One sided news?
No more, no thanks!

Now if only I could cut and paste this three times for each of my final papers…