Irony As Policy, Tragedy As Strategy

Anonymous says:

WSJ EUROPE
February 1, 2005

REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Europe’s Left in Denial

The European left’s attempts at damage control came right away. Just
hours after the scenes viewed around the world of joyous and determined
Iraqis defying terrorists by casting their votes, Germany’s Social
Democratic parliamentary group sent out a press release with the
following headline: “Iraq elections: A good step but no retroactive
justification for the war.”

It says much about the decline of Germany’s left (and Europe’s for that
matter) that the removal of a fascist dictator and the spread of
democracy cannot be considered a worthy end in itself — at least not if
the dictator is Arab and the liberators American.

The same bias runs through much of Europe’s media. According to a common
narrative, nothing good could possibly come out of this “illegitimate”
war. But that their ideological zeal to uncritically condemn American
policy surpasses that of Arab media surely should be cause for some
introspection.

Media-Tenor, a media analysis center headquartered in Bonn, Germany,
studied the Iraq election coverage of 41 main European media outlets in
Germany, France, the U.K., Spain and Italy between Jan. 17 and Jan. 26.
The analysis compared this with 12 leading Arab TV stations and
newspapers. Specifically, the researchers looked at how the journalists
presented the legitimacy of the elections. The results “even stunned our
Arab researchers,” Markus Rettich, director of political studies at
Media Tenor, told us.

“European media portray a dramatic picture ahead of the elections in
Iraq. The legitimacy of the election is strongly questioned. Almost no
positive Iraqi sources are quoted,” Media Tenor writes.

The Arab media, on the other hand, “make significantly fewer skeptical
statements regarding the legitimacy of the elections in Iraq. In
contrast to the Europeans, the Arab coverage quotes more Iraqi sources.
As far as legitimacy is concerned, Al Jazeera & Co. seem to be reporting
about a different election,” Media Tenor concludes.

During the observation period, ambivalence or outright negative
reporting about the legitimacy of the election always topped at least
60% of the European coverage. In the Arab media, positive reporting
about the legitimacy usually topped 60% and sometimes was even 100%.

In Germany, the coverage appeared particularly biased. Nearly 80% of the
reports regarding the legitimacy was negative in the coverage of ARD and
ZDF, the two main state-funded broadcasters, which produce the
“most-trusted” news shows. “The trend of the reports from ARD and ZDF
correspond to the extremely one-sided pattern of reporting that we have
observed since [Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder’s change of his U.S. policy
in the final phase of the 2002 German general elections,” Media Tenor
editor-in-chief Roland Schatz said in a press release. “The media
present the German public with a situation in Iraq that is twice as
negatively portrayed as the one under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.”

“As long as the same daily topic is offered from Baghdad, the viewers
cannot come to an independent judgment about what has been achieved in
Iraq,” Mr. Schatz said.

We can add to this from our own observation of the media in Germany and
beyond. French-state owned TF1, for example, Sunday made much of a
report from Amman in which a German diplomat was complaining of
“irregularities” and absence of monitors. As Michael Rubin wrote on
these pages yesterday: “Judging an Iraqi election from Amman is the
geographical and political equivalent of monitoring an American poll
from Havana.”

Some European media are struggling today to reconcile this incredible
display of courage and yearning for democracy by the Iraqi people with
the distorted picture they have been painting of supposedly abject
American failure in Iraq. The shock in some quarters is not unlike that
which followed the re-election of President Bush. The inability to
predict or even contemplate Mr. Bush’s victory stemmed from the same
type of ideological bias that “informed” much of Europe’s Iraq coverage.

Then as now some are still in denial. “Americans are stupid,” was
Europe’s verdict as the results came in Nov. 2. Surely there must be an
equally facile answer to why Iraqis risked their lives to vote. Given a
little time, someone in Europe will come up with it.

Anonymous says:

There were intellectually and morally honest arguments against going to war in Iraq. But once the war began, a moral person could not oppose it. No moral person could hope for, let alone act on behalf of, a victory for the Arab/Islamic fascists. Just ask yourself but two questions: If America wins, will there be an increase or decrease in goodness in Iraq and in the world? And then ask what would happen if the Al Qaeda/Zarqawi/Baathists win.

The Left, in general, as opposed to individually good people who side with the Left — in America, in Europe and around the world — should apologize: to the men, women and children of Iraq and elsewhere for not coming to their support against those who would crush them.

Anonymous says:

As long as it is democratic, I don’t care if shiites, or athiests, bathists, or bathiests who get elected. And you shouldn’t either. As long as the morons they vote in can get voted out, the system will stablize on moderate candidates.

No wacky islamic or communist party that could be voted out, ever stayed around for long if they couldn’t do what people what governments to do — have the garbage picked up on time, stop crime, secure the borders, pave the roads.

No democracy is slavery of varying decrees and to support any dictatorship is supporting slavery. Democracy is a good thing, and if it’s allowed to work for a couple of elections will result in stable moderate leaders.