KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

The war after the war (Steven Martinovich, July 26, 2004, Enter Stage Right)

Karl ZinsmeisterKarl Zinsmeister, editor in chief of The American Enterprise since 1994, makes no bones about his unequivocal support for the war against Saddam Hussein and the U.S. military in general. In his 2003 effort entitled Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq, he informs the reader that he has taught his children "to think of military jet noise as 'the sound of freedom.'") It's not surprising then that in his follow up -- Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq -- Zinsmeister is pretty optimistic about the future of Iraq despite the ongoing strife the news is saturated with every evening and filled with praise for the difficult job the Coalition has been tasked with. In an exclusive interview with ESR Zinsmeister discusses his new book and what's going on in Iraq. [...]

KZ: I am very frustrated with the reporting from Iraq; that's why I felt I had to write Dawn, to give a fuller picture. It's not that the bombings and so forth that we see aren't happening -- the reporting is "accurate." It just isn't complete. There is another whole set of stories out there -- deeper, slower, but ultimately more important stories about the evolution of Iraqi society, ordinary Iraqi opinion, changes in the position of the terrorists, etc. That's all left out of the "what's in flames today?" style of reporting that is dominating today's coverage in the establishment media.

I write about the big, glacial changes taking place under the radar, the stuff, I believe, that historians will really care about -- much more than today's blowups -- when they look back 10 or 50 years from now. Dawn Over Baghdad is a detailed human-interest story, describing exactly what I saw inside Iraqi homes and businesses and on the streets, and the picture it draws is much less gloomy than most of what we're getting on our TV screens and in our newspapers at present.

ESR: Why do you feel the media is only concentrating on the troublesome aspects of post-war Iraq and ignoring all the positive developments?

KZ: Lots of reasons. The easiest, laziest, and most sensation-generating kind of reporting is simply to stick a camera at something that's blown up. The fact that 99 other things haven't blown up may be much more significant in the long run, but it takes a lot more creativity and time to tell that story, and most reporters in Iraq today live sequestered in the Green Zone hotels, and only blast out in their SUV bubbles for 2-3 hours to cover the aftermath of an attack. They get no perspective. They see none of the successes. They notice little of the progress over time.

I'm not a hotel-style reporter; I'm a backpack reporter. My two new books on Iraq, Boots On the Ground, and Dawn Over Baghdad, grew out of weeks spent walking the streets on combat patrols, observing in city council meetings, meeting with radical imams, watching interrogations of prisoners and secret military intelligence briefings at the company level.

The unbalanced politics of the establishment press corps are also a problem. A whole host of studies stretching from two decades ago to literally last month show that the elite press corps is Democrat over Republican/liberal over conservative/dovish over hawkish by about ten to one. In a war that has taken on intense partisan colorations like this one, that causes problems of portrayal. We ought to have much more ideological balance in the ranks of our press corps.

Yet another problem is the yawning cultural gulf that separates most reporters from soldiers. They just don't "get" military men and military work, and often have a hard time portraying them in an easy, straightforward, sympathetic, and accurate way.

ESR: What are some of those positive developments that the media has given such little time to?

KZ: Just one little example I like to cite: We hear, ad nauseum, in the media about the electrical blackouts in Baghdad. But you're never given the perspective you need to understand what's really going on.

The reality is, more electricity is being generated in Iraq today than even before the war. So why the blackouts? Two reasons:

1) Saddam shamelessly hogged most of the country's power to his capital, shunting 57 per cent of all Iraqi electricity to Baghdad, while the provinces were starved for juice. Today, power is distributed fairly to all population centers, and Baghdad gets 28 per cent of the national total. That means occasional shortages in some previously privileged neighborhoods, but Iraqis as a whole are better off.

2) Iraq is in the midst of a consumption bloom. The economy is growing at about 60 per cent, and there are suddenly a million new phones in the country, a third of the population has bought a satellite TV, a million cars have been imported, washing machines, air conditioners, and other devices never before available are proliferating. Most of those things have to be plugged in, and as a result the demand for electricity is rising even faster than supply is going up. Does that cause problems? Yes, but it's a "nice" problem, not evidence that "nothing ever gets fixed by those boob Americans."

But here's the really big story the major media have missed: The critical almost-never-reported reality is that the massive middle of Iraqi society -- the silent majority of Shiites who are going to run this country -- have stuck with us over the last year, through many travails. Contrary to what you'd guess from the headlines, there is no mass revolt in Iraq. The latest military intelligence is that there are a grand total of about 20,000 terrorist fighters operating in the country. That works out to one for every 1,270 Iraqis. Just to put that in perspective, one out of every 305 Americans is a Hindu -- so insurgents in Iraq are four times less common than Hindus are in our population.

Can 20,000 sadistic men cause a lot of mayhem? Absolutely, I've spent three months dodging bullets and IEDs on the streets of Iraq myself, and have no illusions about this. And it's a fact that many Iraqis are so afraid of the insurgents they are reluctant to cooperate with reconstruction. But fearing the guerillas and supporting them are two very different things, and the essential point is that we are not now in the midst of a general uprising, some bottomless guerilla pit where most Iraqis are fighting us.

If the Shi'a had turned against us we'd have had to abandon the mission.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 26, 2004 8:37 AM