THE ARENA: Nov 05, AU Edition

JAMES MORROW
Iraqis have a sturdy constitution
If it bleeds, it leads’ is the old cliché about how journalists, editors, and producers decide what leads the evening news and makes the front page of the morning paper. After all (to borrow another aphorism), it’s not news when an airplane lands safely; it is news when one misses the runway and scatters steel and bodies across an airfield. But what if things were the other way around, and plane crashes were an every-day occurrence? Wouldn’t it be news if the rate of disasters dropped, and things started getting better in the aviation industry, and getting on a plane stopped being a life-or-death matter? That would certainly be worthy of a story.
That’s the situation we are faced with when it comes to the news media and Iraq. On the one hand, yes, parts of Iraq are deadly dangerous, as the regular litany of death tolls from suicide bombers and ‘improvised explosive devices’ makes clear. British journalist Robert Fisk recently said that Iraq ‘is now hell – a disaster. You cannot imagine how bad it is.’ Now Fisk may be a notorious leftist and anti-Bush radical (he was the man who once, after being accosted by toughs in Afghanistan, wrote that he felt that he deserved to be beaten up for being a white European), but his sentiments are a common one in the press. And as a result, the vast majority of reporting we see in Australia (and in other countries’ news outlets) is bad news.
Yet there is another side of the story that is not being covered with anywhere near as much enthusiasm: the growth of a democratic Iraqi civil society, and the increasing failure of the notoriously-misnamed ‘insurgents’ to achieve their tactical or political goals. Did you know that Iraqis recently went to the polls and approved a new constitution? No? You could be forgiven, considering the precious few column-inches in Australian papers that were devoted to this historic event.
Even if you did hear the news, it is likely that it was tempered with well-spun numbers designed to suggest that the balloting was a bloody failure. As a combined AP/Agence France Press dispatch that ran in the Sydney Morning Herald put it at the time of the voting, ‘Nearly 450 people were killed in the 19 days before the referendum, often by insurgents using suicide car bombs, roadside bombs and drive-by shootings.’
Well, yes, fair enough – though these numbers don’t tell us anything about the 19 days previous to that. (Similarly, reporters trumpet the rising death toll of American troops, without contextualizing it by pointing out that casualties have been decreasing month-on-month). What the Herald’s dispatch, and those in most other major news outlets, ignored is that the voting was a tremendous disaster for the terrorists who doing their best to turn Iraq into a swamp of civil war and sharia law.

Yes, Coalition troops did their level-best to secure the country for the voting, including banning on the day to prevent car bombs, but consider this: There were 347 terrorist attacks on polling places in January when Iraqis went to the polls for the first time since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Ten months later, when Iraqis once again took to the streets in droves to cast their ballots and get their fingers stained purple, terrorists were only able to pull of a grand total of 13 attacks.
Pretty pathetic on the terrorists’ part, really.
Of course, the institutional bias of most news organisations means that this sort of information is rarely presented. Indeed, ABC’s Media Watch went to great pains recently to take a swipe at a regular feature in the Wall Street Journal – an American newspaper – written by an Australian. It’s title? ‘Good News From Iraq’.
The amazing thing is that this bias, which can broadly be called left-wing, winds up doing such a disservice to the cause of bringing freedom, democracy, and self-determination to a country that had spent the past several decades being crushed under the heel of a brutal tyrant. Loathing of George W. Bush specifically, and broader post-modern skepticism about anything American in general, has placed the left in a very uncomfortable position philosophically when it comes to the liberation of Iraq and the broader Global War on Terrorism.
This was brought home to me a few weeks ago when I sat on a panel discussing everyone’s favourite cocktail party subject, ‘why hate America?’. The war was pretty high on my opponent’s writ of indictment, and of course all the usual canards were trotted out: George Bush and Dick Cheney orchestrated the whole thing so that their greedy environment-despoiling pals at Halliburton could take control of Iraq’s oil while at the same time making sure plenty of poor, black soldiers get sent to their deaths and are kept overseas where they were unable to help the Kerry-voting residents of New Orleans…and so on.
And of course, they charged the US with fighting a ‘war on Islam’.
While a simplistic misrepresentation, there is something to that last charge; the war is not a war on a religion, but a particularly political manifestation of it that is generally termed ‘Islamo-fascism’. Where Islamo-fascism flourishes, the very freedoms we all cherish, and which the left has an honourable history of fighting for, die. And thus left-wing opponents of the war – who always go to great pains to say, ‘Of course I didn’t support Saddam Hussein’, before adding the critical, ‘but…’ – effectively align themselves with regimes whose leaders ban representational art, music and dancing, think ‘equal pay’ means that a man has to give the same shopping allowance to all his wives, and stay up all night debating whether stoning or hanging is the proper application of gay rights.
Yes, Iraq still has a long way to go before adventure tourists head there by the planeload to see the ruins of Ninevah. And yes, as the saying goes, war is hell. But as Iraq’s constitutional referendum showed, that country is heading in the right direction.
Too bad that those who should be most supportive of the project can’t see it.