Valentina Pasquali

Washington D.C. – If Barack Obama’s rise to become the 44th President of the United States was meant to prove that “a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth,” as the President himself notably pronounced in his victory speech of November 4th, the crowd gathered in Washington D.C. for his inauguration was a testimony to just how much the American people have come to believe in his promise.

In front of an emotional crowd of excited spectators – estimated in well over a million people — President Obama took his oath of office Tuesday, on the steps of the Capitol, laying his left hand on the same bible that Abraham Lincoln – the man who pushed for the abolition of slavery – used in 1861. Leaders of the House and the Senate sat behind him, alongside the new President’s family, former President George W. Bush with Mrs. Laura Bush, and a variety of celebrities of different ilk. Aretha Franklin sang, Yo-Yo Ma the famed cellist performed, and the Reverend Rick Warren gave a heartfelt invocation. President Obama avoided soaring rhetoric and chose a somber tone for his inaugural address, dedicated to calling the nation to serve and “to begin again the work of remaking America.”

The ceremony was not dissimilar to inaugurations past, but instead the day was made special by the presence of citizens of all ages and race, who had traveled to Washington D.C. from all over the country. They laughed, they cried, they waved tiny American flags in the air, and they braved many discomforts to seize their own piece of history as the first African-American president was sworn into office.

st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> In below-freezing temperatures, throngs of people took to the street from the wee hours of the morning. They struggled to get on the first overcrowded metro at 4am, walked or biked for hours before the sunrise, and then slowly made their way to the perimeter of the National Mall, where a public viewing area had been set up. There, they often discovered thousands more already waiting, standing in lines that zigzagged around whole city blocks. Nobody would be allowed on to the grounds of the Mall until much later and people had to stand for hours simply trying not to push and hoping not to be overtaken. The logistics of the day proved ineffective, and organizers appeared unprepared for such an immense number of people.
And yet, despite the hardship endured and the frustration felt, the pilgrims of Tuesday’s secular rite remained calm and in good spirits, acting responsibly and patiently, for the most part. Everyone seemed to be willing to accept the fact that, in a million-plus audience, getting even just a glimpse of one of the (few) jumbotrons broadcasting the ceremony across the Mall was an exceptional endeavor.

“It was absolutely worth it,” said Ernest Smith after President Obama had concluded his address. With his wife Mary-Ann he had flown to D.C. from Los Angeles to attend the inauguration. “There is this great sense of hope, the attitude of the American people has changed,” he declared.

Bobby Moore, a social worker who had traveled all the way from Madison, Wisconsin, had spent the night at a friend’s in Maryland and had embarked upon his trip to the Mall at 5am. “Initially I didn’t want to come, but my wife insisted that it was history and that we had to be here,” said Moore before leaving the Mall. The experience, he admitted, was entirely worth it: “Seeing all these different Americans together, everybody seemed nicer with each other. Blacks are being nicer to whites and whites are being nicer to blacks, it is incredible.”

With their presence, the hundreds of thousands of people that filled the National Mall echoed the words of President Obama and gave them poignant resonance, especially when he proclaimed: “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” This marked the highest point yet of the special dialogue Barack Obama has crafted with the American people since the beginning of his campaign. Over the next four years, President Obama will be faced with many difficult challenges (which he elucidated at the start of his 20-minute speech). As he confronts them, he will be held responsible, probably to a higher degree than any of his predecessors, for listening and responding directly to the will of the American people. After all, they have wholeheartedly entrusted him with an overwhelming mandate to shape a new style of politics and to lead America out of its current crises.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

On December 10th 2008, the United States Congress passed a legislation establishing that governments involved in the use of children as soldiers may no longer be eligible for major U.S. military assistance programs. The legislation was passed unanimously by both the Senate and the House as part of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Sponsored by Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Sam Brownback (R-KS), the legislation restricts the provision of International Military Education and Training (IMET), Foreign Military Financing, Excess Defense Articles, Foreign Military Sales, and Direct Commercial Sales to governments using child soldiers directly in their own armed forces or that support paramilitaries or militias that do so. Center for Defense Information’s Rachel Stohl, an expert on small arms proliferation and children in armed conflict,, is among the people that over a ten year period conducted research and later provided briefings and reports to the U.S. legislators which helped them drafting and passing the bill. The Center for Defense Information (CDI) is a division of the World Security Institute. In her interview with Washington Prism, Stohl talks about the legislation, what it means for the United States and for child soldiers around the world, and the steps ahead.

Valentina Pasquali (VP): Can you explain to us some of the core mandates of the legislation passed by Congress last week?

Rachel Stohl (RS): The legislation limits certain categories of military assistance to governments that are either using child soldiers or that are supporting paramilitary or militia groups that employ child soldiers. This means that the legislation applies even when a certain country’s armed forces might not specifically be using child soldiers, but we might have knowledge that a militia group allied with the government does. The underlying principle is that any military assistance that you give to the government would filter to that militia group.

The countries that are on this list now, are the ones that are receiving U.S. military assistance at the moment and are known to employ child soldiers. As of today, the legislation could affect: Afghanistan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Uganda. There are two other countries that use child soldiers in their armed forces; Somalia and Burma. But the U.S. doesn’t provide military assistance to them, at least in the way with which the legislation is concerned.

VP: Does this legislation only affect military assistance? Or is there any other form of economic assistance that is also taken into account?

RS: No, it only concerns military assistance. More specifically, it only comprises five specific categories: IMET, Foreign Military Financing, Excess Defense Articles, Foreign Military Sales, and Direct Commercial Sales. The truth is that there are numerous other military aid programs, which the legislation does not affect. Moreover, the bill allows for a waiver for countries that are working to professionalize their militaries. This means that those that are already trying to stop using child soldiers will not be affected.

This legislation is not designed to be a form of punishment. It is an incentive. So it’s a carrot, not a stick. We are trying to get governments to make sure that they are not employing children in their militaries or supporting groups that are. A military of that sort is not a professional military. And it is certainly not a military that the U.S. would want to work in close contact with. I have talked with many in the U.S. Marines and learned that it is very common for them, particularly in Afghanistan, to have to guard a check point with a Afghan soldier who might be fifteen year-old. Many of our Marines have fifteen-year-old children at home.

VP: What do you think is the most immediate and practical implication of the legislation?

RS: Well, for U.S. taxpayers, this means that their money is not going anymore to governments that support the use of child soldiers. It is important because tax payers want to make sure that their money is used according to the values that we uphold in the U.S. I think this is a huge achievement for the legislation.

VP: Do you believe that the law has enough teeth to have an impact on the foreign governments and militaries as well?

RS: As in all legislations, in this one too there are several loopholes and there still exist many ways in which military assistance can be provided in spite of this law. In that sense, this is a very symbolic victory, rather than a final resolution of the problem. However, it is also another tool that the U.S. Government has when encouraging governments like Uganda or Afghanistan to conduct itself in accordance to U.

S. desires. It definitely isn’t the end of it all. One law by itself will not make these governments completely change behavior. But it gives the U.S. one more tool to encourage them to stop this practice.

VP: While conducting the research that supported legislators in their aim to write and pass the bill, did you work with people and organizations from the countries involved?

RS: It depended on the country. We have done significant amount of work with people in Uganda and many organizations I have worked with in the United States have programs there as well. We spoke to many child soldiers and to people that work to rehabilitate them. Afghanistan is a different story.

Some of these countries don’t have a civil society and as a result, they don’t have NGOs that operate on the ground, or in the case they do, they are not free to come to the U.S.

VP: As far as the hope of stopping the use of child soldiers all together, albeit maybe in a distant future, which countries do you consider as the toughest challenges and which ones seem more prone to implement the reforms needed?

RS: Burma has the most child soldiers than any country in the world. There are over 70,000 in the government army. That is an incredibly difficult challenge. Countries like Uganda where conflicts have been raging for over 20 years have developed a culture of this kind, whether it’s on the side of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) or the local militias. Child soldiers have become part of the conflict now. So the challenge is not just stopping the use of child soldiers. It really becomes a matter of changing the context in which these children are living so that the use of child soldiers no longer is a viable option.

In the end, I believe it will vary on a country-by-country basis. In Colombia, for example, the government itself changed its national policies so as to stop using children under eighteen in its military. Yet at first it still supported the paramilitaries that were doing so. However, in the longer term the Colombian government also interrupted its support for these paramilitaries. This is a good example of how things evolve over a long time, that it is definitely not a short term process.

VP: You worked on providing research material for this legislation for ten years. Having followed it for this long, is there anything you wish for that is missing in the bill?

RS: Yes, definitely, there are many things! There is a national security waiver. And a five year waiver that applies to those countries that pledge to professionalize their militaries. The problem with this is, of course, that in the legislation there is no metric to determine whether this ongoing professionalization is actually taking place or if it is only an empty claim. With the latest additions to the bill, it appears now that the U.S. Secretary of State has the authority to determine which countries go on the list of those ineligible to receive military assistance. But we are still unsure about exactly how the process works. It would also be nice if the law applied to some more categories than just those five. Those are indeed the five biggest. But there is a trend now in U.S. military assistance not to provide assistance through those traditional accounts and instead to open new accounts that are not bound by those restrictions.

VP: Where do you go from here; are you going to keep working on this same project or do you consider it over with the passing of the legislation?

RS: No, the program is not over. There are a few things to be done in the near future. We have to decide what those metrics are. We have a meeting scheduled at the State Department for January to discuss precisely that. Then we need to figure out what process will be used to implement this bill. In the longer term, we are going to have to develop new legislations to close some of these loopholes that were snuck in at the last minute, particularly by the Republicans. Although this was a bipartisan bill, in the final moments when people were trying to compromise and get things done, there were changes made.

In short, I believe this is a huge victory. We are only the second country in the world (the only other one is Belgium) that has a legislation of this kind. But there are still many things to do to improve it.

VP: Personally, when and how did you start working on this issue and what have you learned from this 10-year-long process?

RS: I started working on child soldiers when I first came to CDI in 1998 because there had already been an established child soldiers program here. But I didn’t want to work on it from the perspective of children’s rights, because there are already many people that do this. It is a children rights issue, I don’t mean to suggest that it is not, but there are many organizations working on this side of it. So I simply asked myself; what personal contribution can I make to this field? What expertise can I bring to the table that can help improve the situation for the children? The answer was in the weapons connection. Child soldiers are not caused by small arms proliferation, but certainly arms proliferation contributes to the lethality of child soldiers, because it is very easy for them to become effective killing machines with a gun. This legislation was a long term goal that the campaign established back in 1998.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – Only a few days before stepping down from his position as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations to accommodate President Obama’s appointee Susan Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad drew a few conclusions about his years at the UN, and about his career as a diplomat, at an event organized by the New America Foundation (NAF) in Washington D.C.

Describing his overall experience as a “net positive,” Ambassador Khalilzad argued that the UN is an institution that “can and has been useful,” whenever the United States finds ways to approach it effectively. During his tenure, Khalilzad stood apart from his predecessor John Bolton by being more attentive towards the opinions of other representatives. “The mere factor of engaging and listening moves your interlocutors towards your domain,” the ambassador said during his conversation with Steve Clemons, Director of the American Strategy Program at NAF.

Prior to serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad was the Chief of Mission at the American embassies in Kabul and Baghdad. In Afghanistan, he oversaw the strenuous negotiations that led to the drafting of the country’s constitution, was involved with Afghanistan’s first elections, and helped to organize the first meeting of the Afghan parliament. “We worked very hard during those days, using persuasion and engagement. Sometime we would summon the threat of the use of force, we had to deal with all sorts of people,” Khalilzad recalled. In 2005, the ambassador was transferred from Kabul to Baghdad. Although at that point things in Afghanistan seemed to be turning for the better, Khalilzad remembers that “the Afghan people were quite concerned with the general assumption that Afghanistan had already succeeded.”

Today, crippled by a new spike in violence and an increasingly corrupted central government, Afghanistan seems to have plunged back into its worst days. President Barack Obama’s more immediate plans entail sending more U.S. troops into the country. “I think it is a mistake to think that you can solve this as a military issue,” Ambassador Khalilzad claimed, stressing the need for a more comprehensive approach that focuses increased resources on strengthening governance. According to Khalilzad, the Afghan Government must also improve its below-standard performance. “Success in Afghanistan will not be achieved without the Afghan Government doing its part,” the ambassador argued. Khalilzad praised the idea put forward by the new administration of nominating a czar that would oversee U.S. policies towards Afghanistan and Pakistan as inherently interrelated (former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was appointed to this job on Thursday). The ambassador also argued for a more active role for the UN in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan. With many players active on the ground, he noted, there is a growing need for coordination. “The right representatives from the UN can certainly do that job,” Khalilzad claimed.

Born in Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad was the highest ranking Muslim in the Bush Administration (there are none yet in the cabinet President Obama has assembled.) “I am who I am but I don’t get up every day thinking that I’m a Muslim born in Afghanistan,” the ambassador claimed, denying that he ever felt particular tensions between his professional role as a representative of the U.S. Government and his personal ties to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, he admitted that Afghanistan remains “very close to his heart.” It was no coincidence that Afghanistan was at the heart of the conversation with Steve Clemons.

Beyond issues ravaging his native land, Zalmay Khalilzad also addressed the gravity of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, arguing that it is one of the key factors destabilizing the Middle East. According to Khalilzad, a widespread agreement already exists on the fact that the only solution to the conflict is that of two co-existing states. Only Hamas and Iran continue opposing the plan, Khalilzad said, and refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. Nevertheless, the ambassador doubted that Israel could ever achieve anything with an exclusively military approach: “I don’t know if there is any military solution that is feasible. You can’t just get rid of Hamas,” Khalilzad said. Rather, in the long-term Israel might be better served by a strategy of engagement and by trying to turn Hamas into a more willing interlocutor.

A difficult moment for Zalmay Khalilzad came when he was asked about the decision of the U.S. Government to abstain from voting on the UN Security Council resolution of January 9^th, which called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The cease-fire and the resolution itself had been negotiated directly by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spent three full days in the Middle East to personally participate in preparatory talks. Secretary Rice also personally attended the session of the UN Security Council in question and, then surprisingly, abstained from voting on her own resolution. “Our abstention was a matter of the timing of the resolution and not of the content,” Ambassador Khalilzad tried unconvincingly to explain at NAF. “Secretary Rice said clearly that we supported the content of the resolution,” he added.

Khalilzad, who was a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was also asked by a person in the audience whether he was ready to apologize for a decision that many now consider to have been misguided. The ambassador defended his stance explaining that it had stemmed from a personal assessment of what had gone wrong at the end of the first Gulf War. Then, U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq without toppling Saddam Hussein. This left the Iraqi people dealing simultaneously with a brutal dictator and with a strict regime of international sanctions. Khalilzad believed that something had to be done: “I stand behind what I wrote after the liberation of Kuwait,” declared the ambassador.

“On balance, I’m very satisfied,” Ambassador Khalilzad said in reference to his term at the UN. He admitted, however, to a number of areas where he wishes he had accomplished more but was not able to. Among others, the ambassador listed the crises in Darfur and Zimbabwe and the puzzle that is the regime in Burma. He also admitted to have not completed the kind of reform and streamlining of the UN bureaucracy that he had hoped to achieve while in office.

In the future, Ambassador Khalilzad sees himself doing research at a think tank, writing a book, and possibly participating in a working group that focuses on Afghanistan and its surrounding region.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Bruce A. Williams is a Professor of Media Studies & Sociology at the University of Virginia. In the past, he has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the London School of Economics. His current research interests focus on the role of a changing media environment in shaping citizenship in the United States. He has received funding for this research from the National Science Foundation and the Cultures of Consumption Research Program of the University of London. He has published three books and more than forty scholarly journal articles and book chapters. Professor Williams recently came back from a trip to Israel where he attended an international media studies conference on media coverage of crises and conflicts. In this interview with Valentina Pasquali, Professor Williams offers his assessment of the quality of the coverage provided by U.S. media on the ongoing conflict in Gaza, a coverage that he says he has been following “obsessively.”

Valentina Pasquali (VP): There has been some criticism of the U.S. media coverage of the ongoing Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. What is your assessment? Do you find there to be biases in the way American media have been covering the conflict?

Bruce Williams (BW): As an academic, I don’t think the word bias is a useful one. I believe that anytime you tell a story, whether you are a journalist or anybody else trying to describe world events, you always have a perspective. I don’t believe there is any such thing as a neutral, objective perspective.

Rather, I can point out some of the things that I noticed in the coverage, especially in comparison to what I was watching and reading while in Israel. Please note that I don’t know Hebrew and, as such, I was following things on the English-language versions of the Israeli media, such as the Jerusalem Post, or on Sky News and Fox on the satellite.

I think that there are stark differences in the coverage in the United States and in Israel, at least as far as I’ve been able to see. But I wouldn’t capture them by saying than one is more biased than the other. I think they are just different.

The coverage that I saw in Israel very much emphasized the Israeli perspective, for example, in the very prominent, very individualized coverage dedicated to the soldiers who got killed. In the coverage that I’ve been following in the American media instead, I think the stories reflect the numbers. U.S. coverage talks a lot more about Palestinian deaths and Palestinian casualties, and this is a reflection of the difference between almost over 900 dead on the Palestinian side — by most accounts — as opposed to 13 dead — all of whom but three were soldiers — on the Israeli side. In the American coverage there seems to be more attention for Palestinian deaths because they so far outnumber Israeli deaths.

VP: Do you have an example of this?

BW: I’ll give you one that I was struck by when I was in Israel. The same day the U.N. school was hit by the IDF and 30 people seeking shelter there lost their lives, a rocket from Gaza destroyed a kindergarten in southern Israel. True, there were no casualties on the Israeli side, because the school was closed. But I happen to know that the Israeli Minister of Education was there that day debating whether she should open the schools or not. To me, the idea, on both sides, that schools can be destroyed is an important issue. I would have liked to at least see a brief mention of that in the American coverage. Maybe I missed it, but I did not. I recognize it is difficult for journalists, because the fact of the matter is that 30 Palestinians who thought they were safe and sheltered under U.N. protection were killed, while nobody was killed in the Israeli kindergarten. But it seems to me that one can at least point to that connection.

VP: What do you think of the prohibition to access Gaza imposed by the Israel Government on foreign journalists?

BW: To back up one step, I think the Israeli Government had a very well defined media strategy when it came to this conflict. It was not going to repeat what it saw as the mistakes made in the invasion of Lebanon. There was an attempt to keep reporters out, to tightly cover all of the information and images that were coming out of Gaza. Both in the U.S., and, for what I was able to see, in Israel, there were rather frustrated reporters having to stick by the military and having to take pictures from quite the distance.

Initially, over a short period of time, this led to the ability of the Israeli Government to shape the kind of coverage that they were getting. Overtime, however, such tight control has eroded. As a result, now we are getting some rather horrific images coming out of Gaza, images that are being shown on Al-Jazeera and in general produced by the Palestinians themselves.

My impression is that the media strategy that the Israeli Government developed was rather sophisticated and, for a short period of time, effective. However, I believe that the reality of media coverage of conflicts today is that any strategy that aims to control information has a pretty short lifespan.

My own sense is that the Israeli Government media strategy was designed for a very brief war, or incursion, one in which you get in, you do what you planned on doing as quickly as possible, then you get out and declare victory. But the longer this military campaign goes on, the more it tilts the coverage, and increasingly places the whole idea behind it in a pretty unfavorable light.

In this case, like in many military adventures, things can get out of control very quickly. What you are seeing now, I believe, is what is sometimes referred to as “mission creep.” You go in, you have pretty well defined goals to achieve, and, if you are initially successful, then you create many new goals. For someone who studies media, if we put aside the military and political issues that are raised, it is very clear that the longer this goes on, the more the coverage is going to support the Palestinian perspective.

VP: How do Israeli journalists feel about their own government media strategy? Are they frustrated or do they think they have sufficient access to information?

BW: I think they are also very frustrated. I think that journalists, whether they are Israeli, American or anyone else, want to be there, want to see it for themselves. What is interesting is that, at a time like this when Israeli public opinion is still overwhelmingly in favor of this conflict, Israeli journalists would be unlikely to write very critical things, even if they were given access. However, I think they feel incredibly frustrated that they are not given access.

VP: You mentioned that one important reason why the coverage has been changing and tilting towards a more pro-Palestinian perspective is the fact that images from Gaza have increasingly been broadcasted out by Al-Jazeera and by the Palestinians themselves. Do you think that U.S. media organizations are doing all they can to get access?

BW: What truly strikes me is that the situation in Gaza looks a lot like the situation journalists face in Baghdad. There, as long as you stay inside the Green Zone, you are relatively safe. At the same time, the more you stay inside the Green Zone, the more what you see, what you say, and what you can write is shaped by what the American and Iraqi governments want you to see, say and write.

However, if you leave the Green Zone, the work becomes very dangerous. There already are many dead journalists to prove this.

I would imagine that Gaza is also a pretty dangerous place to be. It is hard to say what more journalists could actually do a situation that appears so dangerous and volatile.

I read the New York Times the closest, the Washington Post coming second. My opinion is that the Times’ coverage has been of a very high-quality, even-handed but realistic. I also think that, like in much of the rest of the coverage, overtime it has become more and more critical of Israel.

VP: The assumed notion that the U.S. media coverage is tilted towards a pro-Israeli perspective seems to have roots in opinion pieces and editorial pages rather than news coverage. Do you agree?

BW: I kind of disagree. However I can see why it could look that way from a Palestinian perspective.

Moving away from the day to day newsgathering that gets done, I think it is important to point out that, unlike many previous actions taken by the Israeli Government, including the invasion of Lebanon, Israel enjoyed this time an unusual amount of international support, right from the get-go.

I believe that is because of Hamas. It is certainly not surprising that the United States would aggressively defend Israel’s right to act and denounce Hamas. The European Union was also very supportive of Israel’s right to intervene. This is a result of the fact that Hamas controls Gaza and the recognition that it was Hamas that ended the cease-fire with Israel.

All this said, I was struck by how even-handed The New York Times was in its own editorial pages. From the very beginning The New York Times recognized Israel’s legitimate right to act but also urged them to get out quickly and to deal seriously with the Palestinian issue.

The paper was very much in line with this idea that Israel had a very short window of time to act. They needed to do what they needed to do very quickly and then they had to put broader attention to a real peace settlement.

But, as I said, I do understand where some of the concerns could come from. To go back to something I said before, to the long-term threat of the rockets that get launched from Gaza: in the end I think that they pose very little real risk to the Israeli citizens. I don’t know how many Israelis have been killed by these rockets, but I’m sure it’s a pretty small number. I don’t want to minimize this. I certainly wouldn’t want to live thinking whether there was someone that would try to mortar Charlottesville, Virginia, every day. It is an intolerable situation. But this amounts to a sort of existential crisis, a crisis of how people feel as they try to live an ordinary life.

Living in the Gaza Strip for the same kind of ordinary Palestinian citizens, instead, is a nightmare. It’s not an existential question; it’s a question of starvation, of not having a job, and not having any sense of what a future could look like. From the perspective of ordinary Palestinians, the situation just seems to keep getting worse and worse. We are further away from having a Palestinian Government that can speak for all Palestinians in some kind of a peace settlement. We are further away from this than we were five years ago, further away that we were even three weeks ago. That is a horrible situation.

VP: Do you think that this even-handedness is true only for the New York Times? Or does it apply in general to the U.S. media?

BW: To be honest I have not seen the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I think the Washington Post has been pretty even-handed. With the exception of maybe Fox News, I think there is recognition that Israel has a right to defend itself, but, at the same time, that it has an obligation to do this very quickly and that it must deal soon with some kind of serious attempt to negotiate a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

In any case, I think that, by far, the best and most interesting coverage I heard is on National Public Radio. For example, NPR recently interviewed Mustafa Barghouti, who is someone that I have actually met and I have huge respect for. He is not politically affiliated either with Hamas or Fatah. In this respect, he speaks for a Palestinian view that I agree with. One of the things he said in his interview with NPR is that Israel and the United States have tried to turn Hamas into the bad guys and Abbas into the good guy. At the same time, it’s not like they have done anything that would lead Abbas to succeed.

In another story that I heard on NPR just this morning, Palestinians in the occupied territories were being interviewed and said what Barghouti has been saying, that there are many more military checkpoints now that they were a year ago. And the truth is that, no matter what Ehud Olmert has said, he has not closed down not even the settlements his own government declared illegal. From this perspective, there is a feeling of real hopelessness now.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York City. His research and teaching encompass the history of the modern Middle East with an emphasis on the emergence of national identity and the involvement of external powers in the region. He is particularly interested in the role of the press in the formation of new publics and new senses of community. An American of Palestinian descent, Professor Khalidi has often been an outspoken voice in the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this phone interview with Valentina Pasquali he expresses his criticism for the coverage of the ongoing Israel invasion of Gaza offered by the U.S. media, which he calls “one-sided” and “unbalanced.”

Valentina Pasquali: What is your opinion of the coverage of the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza provided by the U.S. media?

Rashid Khalidi: I find the coverage absolutely appalling, extremely one-sided and not meeting the lowest of journalistic standards. It consists of a mere repetition of Israeli talking points, without any attempt to determine whether they are accurate or inaccurate. There is also a lack of proper coverage of the Gaza side, despite the fact that the majority of the casualties are in Gaza.

The U.S. media has quietly submitted to the Israeli-mandated blockade of Gaza that has kept journalists out for well over a month before this invasion began. The American media has been systematically manipulated with the talking points that are being distributed by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which have become the backbone of the American coverage. This is actually one of the best examples of media manipulation I have ever seen. And it is all part of the Israeli planning for the offensive.

What is interesting is that the Israeli media has covered extensively this effort to ensure an Israeli spin to this operation. But nobody talks about it here in the U.S.

For example, in keeping with the recommendations of the Winograd Commission — this looked into the Israeli failure in Lebanon in 2006 and determined that Israel had failed to control the message — the Israeli Government set up the National Information Directorate, under the control of the Foreign Ministry, six months ago. This has been planning for the management of the invasion’s PR for months.

We are now seeing it put in practice. I have received, through my own sources, some of the daily briefings with bullet points sent out to the media by the Foreign Ministry and the game played by Israel is very clear. This is amply covered in the Israeli media, even in English, and yet the U.S. media chooses to look at things in the way the Israelis want them to. This interview is the first to date where anybody even asks me about this issue.

VP: Do you find any specific U.S. outlet being more of a victim of such manipulation or is this a general trend?

RK: It is a general trend. Television is particularly vulnerable, but I find it across the board, in commentary on television, in commentary on the newspapers and in the general daily news coverage. The bottom line is that you cannot cover a conflict if your journalists are not allowed to be on the ground. U.S. media are submitting to this ridiculous blockade since November and they are covering exactly what Israel wants them to cover. As a result there is an inherent built-in bias. You don’t have journalists on the frontline covering the deaths of over six hundred people. And the four or five Israelis that have been killed have been covered by hundreds of journalists. There are no western journalists, except one working for Al-Jazeera, in the whole of the Gaza Strip.

VP: Do you see any qualitative difference between opinion pieces and straight-out reporting?

RK: Some of the reporting has been better than average. I have actually not seen much in the way of opinion pieces on the American media that reflect anything but an Israeli point of view. There might have been, but I haven’t noticed. Instead, some of the reporting from stringers inside Gaza, for example in the New York Times, has been adequate.

VP: What do you think of Israeli media coverage of the invasion, of the English-language media especially?

RK: The media coverage is much better in Israel, especially when it comes to the print press. There is a greater variety of commentary in the Israeli media. I have read at least eight-twelve opinion pieces which are far more hard-hitting than anything I’ve seen in the American media. I’m currently writing an op-ed for the New York Times and, if they publish it, I think it will be the first piece in the U.S. media.

VP: What do you think is the effect of this kind of coverage on the American public and, as a result, on the political debate in the U.S.?

RK: It reinforces the universal pro-Israel bias of the American political class. We are at a point where you have to watch the Daily Show to get a sense of how unbalanced the American coverage is. On Monday they had a very amusing piece showing how one-sided the American coverage, on both the Republican and Democratic side, has been on this issue.

VP: Given the restrictions that the Israeli Government is trying to impose on foreign media, what would you say American media organizations should do that they are not doing?

RK: They should not cover any story unless they are allowed to go in. Any self-respecting journalist should demand that their editors and publishers insist on access to both sides, which is been denied only by Israel, as a condition for covering the side that dominates the battlefield, which is the Israelis.

VP: Would you want to add any other thought?

RK: I would want to add that images tent to trump words. And the images that Israel produces and that might engender sympathy are few and far between, whereas the images that come out of Gaza in spite of this systematic, and quite cynical, censorship have been heart rending and have balanced out to some degree the spin that has dominated the written media or the television. You can see in the front page of the New York Times the day it published the image of the dying Palestinian child. Even in the very limited coverage of the carnage in Gaza that is allowed in the American media, the images outweigh the words. Israel is suffering the same kind of problem it had in 2006, in 1982 during the invasion of Lebanon, and during the first couple of years of the intifada in 1987-1988, when the images outweighed all the lies and the spin and the manipulations. This might happen now again, it depends on how long this operation continues.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Marina Ottaway is the Director of the Middle East Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She specializes in democracy and post-conflict reconstruction issues, particularly on problems of political transformation in the Middle East and reconstruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, and African countries. Before joining the Endowment, Ottaway carried out research and taught at universities in Africa and in the Middle East, including the American University in Cairo. She is the author of nine books and has edited another five. Her most recent work, Beyond the Façade: Political Reform in the Arab World (edited with Julia Choucair-Vizoso), was published in January 2008. In her interview with Washington Prism, Ottaway explores issues of political transformation and democratization in the Middle East.

Valentina Pasquali (VP): You have studied political transformation in the Middle East for a long time. Why would you say democracy has not flourished in the region, at least so far?

Marina Ottaway (MO): This is a complicated issue and there is certainly more than one factor in play. I think that a very important element in impeding this transformation has been the nature of the ideas and of the political movements that have been at work in the Arab world.

There have been three main ideological currents in the modern Arab world. The first was nationalism, starting in the early 1930s. Egypt was the more important example. This type of nationalism had a democratic connotation. This kind of democratic, liberal nationalism emerged because it was driven by the educated elites, the bourgeoisie. These managed to win the support from the masses, not because the masses were democratic or liberal, but because they were nationalist. By doing so, they created a combination of nationalism and democracy that was successful for a certain period of time.

The nationalist-democratic trend died in the 1950s. In the post-war period socialism became the dominant ideology. Nationalism became coupled with socialism, whereas earlier on it had been connected to ideals of democracy.

In the 1970s, the socialist wave also started dying out, beginning with the death of Nasser. Ever since then, the liberals, the educated, the intellectuals who have always been behind the liberal trend, failed to find a language that would speak to the Arab population. One of the tragedies in the Middle East is that Arab intellectuals have been unable to turn their message of democracy into something that the masses can relate to. To this day, it remains an elite ideology. As a result, once socialism died, liberals lost out the Islamists in terms of popular language and popular message.

As a result, I think the reasons should be found in this history of the political movements in the Arab world and the failure to ever make democracy into a relevant ideology in and of itself, and not merely as an attachment to nationalism. I honestly don’t buy the argument that Arab countries don’t have a democratic culture. We can say that no country has a democratic culture before it turns into a democracy. All countries that became democratic were first authoritarian governments.

VP: There has been widespread criticism of the Bush Administration’s approach to democracy promotion. What is your assessment?

MO: The Bush Administration never stopped to think about what they were really looking for. In one sense, one could say that they wanted instant transformation, which turned out to be a very naïve expectation. They thought that if the United States put its foot down, if it told governments in the Middle East what to do and what they needed to change, all of a sudden change would happen.

However, they never paused to ask themselves whether movements existed in these countries that could make the idea of democracy relevant. One must remember that democratic transformation needs a political process. It is not a question of individual thinking but rather of group activity. The Bush Administration never inquired whether there were organizations in the Arab world ready to put up the democratic agenda. And it is quite clear that these organizations didn’t exist.

Secondly, the Bush Administration failed to recognize which were the best organized political movements and the best organized political parties and, therefore, who was likely to benefit the most from the democratic agenda. As soon as they faced the rise of the Islamists, they turned back. I still don’t understand how this happened. To me it’s a mystery that nobody ever predicted some of the outcomes.

At the time of the elections in Iraq, the Administration was really upset at the emergence of religious parties. And I never understood why that would be, since, if you looked at the parties that made up the Iraqi National Congress, you’d have seen that they were all religious parties, like the Dawa or the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution. It was all spelled out in black and white. But the Bush Administration did not know what it was doing and the mistakes were blatant.

VP:  Is there anything in the agenda of democracy promotion that you think might be worth salvaging for the future?

MO: The really important question now is whether the new Obama Administration can do something useful to promote democracy, but in a different way from Bush’s. I’m not sure that anybody knows what the U.S. can do. I think it would have to look for solutions on a country-by-country basis, searching for feasible next steps.

For example, I think it would make sense for the U.S. to put pressure on Egypt so that it opens up the process of registering political parties. At this point it is impossible to have meaningful elections there, because the government has killed all the relevant parties. The only ones that are still registered, and are allowed to participate, are unable to win votes and their leadership has not been rejuvenated in a long time. The government has allowed them to survive precisely because they don’t represent a threat.

But clearly, you can’t have meaningful elections if you don’t have working political parties. It seems to me that one concrete step we could take is to put pressure on the government to open up the registration of political parties and allow parties to function.

However, this is not a recipe that is good for all countries. If you take the other extreme, the most difficult case, what exactly does it mean to promote democracy in Saudi Arabia? In the realm of what is conceivable, what could be a meaningful step that the Saudi Government could take in the direction of democracy? They, of course, are not going to proclaim a constitutional monarchy tomorrow. Honestly, I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that question. I don’t know. I find it amusing to hear all these people saying that Obama should not drop the democracy agenda, that he should continue promoting democracy in the Middle East in a different way. That is nice. But what should he actually do? This issue is very nebulous. I don’t have the answer. To me, it is a question of keeping a low profile and seizing opportunities when they arise, but it is nothing like the democracy agenda of the Bush Administration.

VP: You have recently published a paper on Islamist movements and their demand for political participation in the Middle East. You see this as one of the strongest indications that there is a desire for democracy in the region. Do you see hope that some form of peaceful integration of these movements in the legitimate political sphere can occur? What are the steps that should be taken to achieve this goal?

MO: In the paper you mention we were referring to a specific category of political parties — Islamist political parties that already participate in the legal political process of the country. In other words, these are the parties that present candidates for elections.

The best example would be Morocco, where the PJD, Party for Justice and Development, is the second largest in the country. Recently it started talks with the USFP, the socialist party, as they began to see that they might have something in common as far as their political agenda and, that cooperating in parliament would make them more effective.

The Obama Administration should start treating these political parties like all other political parties. They should talk to them and maintain the same contacts they have with the other political organizations. They should make it clear that the U.S. recognizes parties that are non-violent political entities playing by the rule of the game, such as they are in their own countries. And this last caveat is important because one of the paradoxes of the U.S. policy toward the Middle East is that we expect these parties to be democratic when the countries in which they operate are not democratic. In any case, I think the US should make it clear that it considers them normal and legitimate movements. This would certainly help, it wouldn’t change everything, but at least it would represent a tangible step in the right direction.

This is important as ever because many governments in the region are making it increasingly difficult for these political parties to compete. If this continues, the danger is that the more moderate voices within the Islamist parties, the ones pushing for open political participation, will be silenced. At which point we are going to have a more radical leadership emerging, which I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest.

VP: What does the U.S., and the new Administration of President Obama, need to understand about the Middle East that it hasn’t so far?

MO: It is hard to say what will happen with the Obama Administration because we don’t know yet who is going to control the Middle East portfolio. Certainly the Bush Administration did not get that these movements are not going to disappear. They are too popular for a number of reasons and they are not going to go away simply because the U.S. ignores them. The idea that merely supporting Fatah in Palestine while allowing Israel to fight Hamas — because Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel — would cause Hamas to disappear is just not proving to be true.

Now, one must add that Hamas is an extreme example, for two reasons.

First of all, Hamas is a political party but also an armed movement. To be clear, Hamas did not win the elections because it was an armed movement, it won the elections because it is more popular than Fatah. Nevertheless it is an armed movement. Secondly, Hamas does not recognize the state of Israel. Again for clarity, the truth is that none of the other Islamist parties recognize the state of Israel as such, but the issue is only raised with regard to Hamas because we are wary of its influence.

VP: Do you see any chance that Islamist political parties might at some point decide to recognize Israel?

MO: Yes, absolutely, at least, within the framework of political movements, not the Jihadists. If there was an overall peace agreement, Islamist parties would accept Israel’s existence. I don’t think any Arab will ever accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel but they will adapt to its existence and to the fact that it is not going anywhere. Egyptians have not recognized the legitimacy of Israel, but they have recognized that, like it or not, there is a state there and that it is there to stay. They have learned to deal with it.

But this is true only if there is a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only with the execution of the so-called Arab initiative — the proposal by Arab countries to recognize Israel once the problem of the refugees is solved and once the two-state solution is implemented. I think in those circumstances, most Islamist political movements would accept the existence of Israel.

VP: Tensions in the Gaza Strip are once again reaching new heights. Following the end of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas on December 19th, the Israeli government began carrying out air-strikes on the Palestinian territories, while Hamas responded firing rockets into Israel. Finally, Israel launched the currently ongoing ground invasion of Gaza. What do you think this means for the future of Israel-Palestine relationships? Is this invasion a game-changer or just yet another chapter in an already all too tragic story?

MO: This is essentially another chapter in the long saga, not a game-changer. Even Israel has been careful not to state that it is a game changer in the sense that Hamas will be eliminated. They hope to weaken it and slow down raw firing of missiles, but are not willing to pay the political and economic price of halting the missiles completely and destroying Hamas, which would require a long term occupation.

The operation postpones a serious peace process indefinitely, because it weakens not only Hamas but also Fatah, which would be seen as negotiating with the Israelis at the expense of the inhabitants of Gaza.

VP: In the last six years or so, Iraq has been at the center of the storm. Where do you think it is going now?

MO: It really depends on whether they find a way to reach an agreement amongst them, once the U.S. withdraws. It is already quite clear that they are not going to reach an agreement along the lines proposed by the Americans.

The U.S. has in mind a step-by-step process according to which a series of laws will be passed in order, one after the other. That is just simply not going to happen. It is possible that with a smaller U.S. presence, different groups will have to come to terms with each other and maybe reach an agreement. But at this moment there really is no agreement. The tensions with the Kurds are increasing. The same is true not only across confessional lines. Within each group there are tremendous tensions. The Sawha groups and the Sunni Islamist Party don’t see eye to eye. On the Shi’aa side, Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council don’t see eye to eye. We are very far from a political pact.

VP: What lessons from Iraq should the new US. Administration apply to Afghanistan?

MO: I think there are two lessons that are relevant. First of all, the number of troops on the ground is crucial. All the experts I hear claim that 20.000 more troops in Afghanistan are not going to make a difference. Everybody says it is just a drop in the bucket considering the overall situation.

The second lesson is that you are not going to have any long lasting gain without a political settlement. The problem in Iraq now is that there is no political settlement, and the same is true for Afghanistan. But I honestly don’t see anybody having a clue of what a political settlement in Afghanistan might look like. This is probably the reason why they are beginning to talk to the Taliban. But any success in that department really is a long way off.

VP: It has been argued that Iran emerged from the two U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq a significantly more powerful player than it was before. Do you agree? Do you think the U.S. could ever use a more powerful Iran to its advantage?

MO: It is absolutely accurate that Iran has become more powerful. Just take a look at the countries around Iran. Iraq is now essentially a collapsed state. We might not talk about it in these terms because we rather talk about the progress that has been made. But the simple fact that there is a debate in this country about what would happen in Iraq if the U.S. withdrew is enough of an indication: a country that cannot fully function without the presence of U.S. troops is a collapsed state.

Saudi Arabia, which is the only country of any size in the Gulf, has never developed a strong foreign policy, it has no military experience, and the king has no desire for confrontation.

The other countries in the Gulf are midgets; what in the world can Bahrain do, except hoping not to be overrun? Egypt is also out of the picture, until at least after the succession. Whether after Mubarak dies and there is a succession Egypt will become a regional power once again I don’t know, but it is quite clear that, until all of that takes place, Egypt is completely out of the picture.

So, yes, Iran is in pretty good shape.

I think this would be tremendously beneficial to the U.S. if it could develop a working relation with Teheran. You have to remember that the U.S. benefited a great deal during the days of the Shah from the fact that Iran was a regional power. But we are a very long way from there.

I think the U.S. should aim to create some sort of regional pact, in which Iran and Iraq and the Gulf countries are all working together. Instead the Bush Administration tried to create an anti-Iranian alliance in the Gulf, which is something that the Gulf countries are not interested in because they don’t want to provoke Iran.

So I wouldn’t go as far as saying that a stronger Iran is a blessing in disguise. The question is, rather, could there be a positive outcome of this situation? Perhaps, but we are a very long way from there.

VP: Finally, do you think it is important to have democracy in the Middle East? Why?

MO: I would say that it is very important to have political systems that can actually govern the countries. One of the problems of many Middle Eastern countries, particularly in the Gulf but not exclusively, is that the political systems were designed for societies that were completely different from what they are now. The Saudi ruling family was put in charge of a very chaotic informal system meant to control a population of only about 4 millions and mostly Bedouins living in the desert. This political system has never evolved. These totalitarian rulers in the Gulf are completely outdated, if one considers the reality on the ground. Even in the case of Egypt, its cumbersomely bureaucratic system holds the country back. This is not a question of democracy; it is simply that the country cannot run itself.

What really is crucial is that these countries find more functional and efficient systems of governments. If they were also more democratic, it would be even better. As of now, the only way for an opposition to bring down a government that is unpopular is by an insurrection; they must overthrow the government. Such a system prevents these countries from ever achieving real stability.

I’ll just make one point to put my comments into perspective. I think that democracy is a pretty good political system. But at the same time I don’t think we have any evidence that allows us to say that it should be the inevitable destiny of all countries.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism