'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Iraq: notes on (journalistic) sources

I want to go back briefly to the judgment Juan Cole made Monday when he compared the coverage of the NatConf in that day's NYT and WaPo. Unlike me, he strongly preferred John Burns's coverage in the NYT, noting that portrayed the NatConf mainly as, "a mess, disrupted by repeated mortar fire and by angry delegates who stormed the stage to denounce the Allawi government and demand it cease military operations in Najaf." Rajiv Chandrasekaran's coverage in the WaPo Cole described, by contrast, as:

an almost panglossian story of the triumph of democracy-- noisy, disruptive, but still triumphant. He reports that the delegates said they had secured from Allawi a promise to suspend military action until further negotiations could take place, and he seems even to believe that Allawi gave such an undertaking and would abide by it!

Well, I read both stories carefully. What distinguished Chandra's for me was the wealth of useful and illustrative detail in it. You got the sense not only that he'd been in the convention hall, but also that he'd talked with delegates and generally understood what was going on. There were quotes from participants; there was the explanation of the voting system being deliberated on; etc etc. Burns gave none of that. So I stand by my earlier judgment. And it rapidly became clear during the day Monday (as I noted here ) (a) that most Iraqi forces had indeed stopped participating in the US assault on Fallujah, and (b) that the delegates whad indeed won a commitment from Allawi to allow some form of tnegotiation with Sadr to proceed.

So no, Chandra's story was not a "panglossian story of the triumph of democracy". But it was fairly well-informed description of the messy process of real politics that was starting to play out on the conference floor. As I've noted before, not perfect, or perfectly democratic politics. But real politics; and a process far, far preferable to Allawi's earlier pursuit of a "take no hostages" assault against Moqtada.

And, while I'm in a refuting kind of a mood, I'll just spend a moment on Chris Allbritton, a young US journo who once went to Iraq as a free-floating blog-espondent but has now ended up working for Time magazine as well...

Chris has a post on his blog today in which he explains and expands upon his growing hostility to Moqtada. (I note that he was graced by Allawi with a semi-exclusive interview yesterday... Are these two developments connected?) One of the arguments he attempts to make--very much pace the Allawists' argument--is that Moqtada is a very marginal, unpopular figure in Iraqi politics. To "prove" that he cites the end-of-June poll done in Iraq that found that only 1.1% of Iraqis wanted Moqtada as their President... Well, that's a very specific kind of a question... Heck, even Ayatollah Sistani only got 0.4% of support to be President. That doesn't mean people don't support the one or the other man to play a different kind of leadership role in life.

A little later, Chris argues, "Based on anecdotal evidence --and the poll results above --self-determination would involve someone riding Moqtada's ass out of Najaf on a rail and disarming his militia." H'mm. If "anecdotal evidence" and Chris's own particular use of that poll data are all he has to go on... then I think his overall argument is really, really flawed.

And of course that kind of language is jejune and inflammatory. (Reminds me of George W. Bush's, actually.)

It's just really fortunate that most of the participants in the NatConf didn't agree with Chris's conclusion about Moqtada... Instead, they have so far shown themselves desperately eager to find a way to de-escalate the confrontation in Najaf through non-violent means. More on this, in the next post, soon...