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…