The Alchemist

Sebuah novel karya Paulo Coelho. Sebuah novel besar yang bernilai besar. Bacalah karena sudah dicetak 43 juta eksemplar di seluruh dunia.

Kisah perjalanan seorang pemuda mencari harta karun ke Piramida di Mesir. Perjalanan yang banyak mengandung makna kehidupan, makna perjuangan dalam mencapai cita-cita. (bersambung)

New horizon
I have been long time not to write in this blog. This is because I have no time to fill it. Start today I will check it more often, at least once a week.

I will post new trend in the world.

ON THE MIDDLE EAST
The article in this page as result of a conference will be interesting to read.

Cheers


Summary Report on Wilton Park/National Intelligence Council Workshop WPS04/22
NIC 2020 PROJECT ON THE MIDDLE EAST

Friday 12th - Sunday 14th March 2004

Introduction
1. In a fast-changing, globalised world government policymakers can no longer afford to base their decision-making on purely short-term prognoses. They must now extend their horizons and make strategic plans over a much longer 15-20 year time frame. A difficult task at any time, it is now even more so as many of the political and economic "certainties" that have traditionally underpinned strategic planning in the US and Western Europe have, in recent years, been severely shaken.

2. In response to this challenge, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) 2020 project, a consultative and participatory exercise, aims to uncover the most important influences that will, or could, shape the global community over the years to 2020. The NIC uses estimative intelligence to elaborate possible responses based on plausible scenarios, which do not discount major shocks or `wild cards'. 9/11 was arguably the most dramatic `wild card' the world has ever seen. The NIC encourages creative thinkers from around the world in the fields of academia, business and civil society to produce innovative and provocative ideas about the major forces likely to drive global developments in the next 15 or so years.

3. As part of the process, a variety of regional scenarios are being developed that represent alternative futures for different areas, and explore how they impact on wider global issues. This workshop, held under Wilton Park auspices, focused on the Middle East. The participants were a broad mix of experts, primarily but not exclusively from the region, who collectively had immense insight into this fast-changing, socially complex, economically powerful and politically turbulent part of the world.

Methodology
4. The workshop sought firstly to identify the principal `drivers' - the main themes or issues that will be the major influencing factors in determining the political, economic and social profile of the region in the years to come. Some drivers are global - globalisation itself being the most obvious. Other drivers are specific to the region, although with global significance. In the Middle East context, oil, the Israel-Palestine conflict and the uncertain future development path of Iraq following the coalition invasion and overthrow of the Saddam regime may all be considered global drivers.

5. The workshop was invited to propose scenarios for how the Middle East could possibly develop rather than concentrate solely on informed predictions based on what we know today. The way in which different drivers might interact and impinge on each other was of especial importance. An important objective of the conference was for experts from the region to identify drivers which had not previously been identified by outsiders, thus giving regional ownership of the process.

Key Issues
6. Discussion initially focussed on four key Middle East drivers that had been identified in advance of the workshop. These were:
* Natural resources - how would changing supplies of oil and gas affect relations between states in the region and with outside powers?
* Population demographics - who wins and who loses influence over time?
* Governance - will the region be more democratic in 2020?
* Social identity - will Islam be as politically important for social identity by 2020?

7. One crucial factor identified at an early stage is that in the Middle East context that all drivers are heavily politicised - every decision taken on any issue invariably has a political dimension or sub-text.

8. Other drivers identified in the course of the workshop were: information technology; culture; and poverty.

Oil
9. Energy security is an overwhelming interest of the industrialised world. The West's heavy reliance on oil, particularly from the Middle East, has significantly affected the way the West has conducted its relations with the countries of the region. It was pointed out that estimated reserves are based on current technology - what can actually be accessed now - and they do not reflect the amount of oil that is in the ground. Optimists argue that globally there is more than sufficient oil to meet world demand for the foreseeable future, even allowing for what some consider profligate US consumption.

10. Some argue that the Middle East could possibly double its production of oil by 2025, especially when one considers that the capacity of the principal Gulf producers has not increased since the 1970s. The question of where the incentives and finance would come from to do so remains unanswered. A key factor is that most Gulf oil production is through state-owned enterprises - directed by governments using public money, rather than market-driven private resources which would probably react more dynamically and proactively.

11. Ironically, the US policy objective to reduce its reliance on Middle East oil is undermined by the fact that the US is very inefficient in its use of that oil. US administrations have seemingly been unwilling to get tough with American `gas guzzlers', both domestic and industrial, and to impose taxes at European or Japanese levels. The EU is much more advanced in looking for alternative sources of energy, though it was suggested that the point where renewable forms of energy will overtake oil is probably 50 years or so away.

12. Most considered that oil shortages per se would not be a major driver in the future, but that oil flow problems, or fears of shortages as a result of conflicts, could be significant. However the interdependent relationship of the Middle East and the West over the production and consumption of oil is in itself seen as a stabilising influence.

13. It was generally agreed that oil revenues have contributed little to economic development in many Middle East countries, though Kuwait and Abu Dhabi were cited as exceptions. Instead, income from oil has been squandered on prestige projects or creamed off for the benefit of a small elite. Governments have usually provided just enough in terms of health and education provision to keep their people passive - the general standard of life has neither significantly improved nor deteriorated enough to provoke widespread unrest. Many Middle East states are complacently dependent on their oil revenues for financing all areas of government expenditure and so far have had little incentive to diversify into other industries.

14. It is possible that, in the future, competition between the major producers could intensify leading to a breakdown of the OPEC consensus and a greater volatility in the market. It was suggested that Iraq, for example, could try to increase its market share by reducing its price and increasing production to the benefit of the US. The majority thought it more likely that a new regime in Iraq would not wish to break OPEC ranks and therefore would stick to agreed quotas. If the political situation deteriorates in Iraq to the extent of civil war, the oil infrastructure would undoubtedly be targeted. Some believe this would have little effect on the rest of the world. The international market has been very flexible in the face of the Iraq crisis and even if Iraqi oil were to go semi-permanently off-line, the world would readjust fairly easily. In short, oil security is well assured at a global level but there will always be a massive economic impact on the producers when there are big swings in oil prices. The challenge for the Middle East will be to try to ensure that major shocks are avoided.



Demographics
15. The workshop tended to view Middle East demographics as an influencing factor rather than as a major driver in its own right. It is a truism to say that the people factor and the dynamic between population, resources and technology are key in any form of strategic planning. Population factors may exacerbate any conflict particularly when there are severe pressures on land and other natural resources such as water. Migration or the influx of refugees may also create heightened tensions. How individual governments respond to the health, education, and employment needs of increasing populations is a major influence on stability.

16. There is considerable variation in population estimates for the region. The more optimistic view is that there will be no long-term population explosion in the Middle East but, as in Europe, the problem of ageing populations will become an increasingly important issue. Advances in recent years in the percentage of girls receiving secondary education are cited as a factor influencing family size. Areas of conflict such as Gaza and the West Bank have witnessed very high fertility rates as a mechanism for coping with conflict - the notion of security in numbers - but these are now levelling off. Countries like Saudi Arabia have in the past followed policies to promote birth rates. It is arguable that advances in technology will reduce the demand for labour and that smaller families will become the norm.

17. Despite these developments, many still see the number of young people, including increasing numbers of young women, entering the labour market in the next five to 10 years to be problematic, especially since most economies of the region are largely stagnant. Participants recognised the importance of the European Union (EU) as an area that could continue to absorb a significant amount of surplus labour from North Africa and other parts of the Middle East. However, with the enlargement of the EU and a reaction to perceived security threats, certain European governments are under strong pressure from their electorates to tighten up their policies on immigration. A hardening of the EU's borders would undoubtedly cause problems, although some considered this European `safety valve' to be relatively insignificant in relation to the actual increase in the population. Others also identified less welcome aspects of this labour movement. The EU (and indeed the US) is generally highly selective - it wants to skim off the best professional people but not take the unqualified. This is creating a brain drain in some countries.

18. Another factor making accurate population forecasts difficult is the massive percentage of migrant workers from Asia residing in certain countries in the Gulf, in some cases outnumbering the indigenous population. There was some discussion of the extent to which migrant workers might influence domestic politics should they be allowed to become citizens and participate in the political life of the country. This could greatly change the political landscape but many thought such a scenario was unrealistic, as it would never gain the support of the ruling elites.

19. Do population pressures and lack of employment opportunities for young men drive people towards extremist political movements (and not just Islamic ones)? It was recognised that when people are faced with stress in their daily lives they are likely to look to anyone holding out a promise of better things. In some areas Islamic institutions have a dual role: providing basic social services as well as pursuing religious and political agendas. Although population pressures in themselves do not lead directly to extremism, a combination of high population growth with economic stagnation can produce thwarted economic and social aspirations. The frustration born out of this is ripe for exploitation by organised groups of whatever religious or political persuasion.

Democracy and Governance
20. Democracy has not made the same advances in the Arab region as it has in some other Muslim majority states. There is a unanimous view in the region that the move to pluralist societies can only be achieved incrementally and cannot be imposed as a blueprint from outside. The workshop tended to feel that the West placed too much emphasis on the holding of elections, which, while important, is only one element of the process towards democratisation. Additionally, some felt greater emphasis needs to be given to building the institutions for the rule of law. It was felt that the more the United States and Europe engage with and encourage reformers, rather than confront and hector, the sooner genuine democracy will be achieved.

21. As mentioned above, most of the Middle East suffers from an excessive politicisation of every sphere of life. Economic decisions, for example, are more likely to be made on the basis of political expediency than economic common sense. In most states independent civil society organisations are barely allowed to exist since such groups are seen as a threat to the political system. Trade unions and women's organisations, for example, are more often than not quasi state bodies run by arms of the central government. In academic life, appointments are often subject to political vetting to ensure that `subversive elements' are kept out. This over-politicisation inhibits initiative and results in a poor utilisation of human resources. The best people for particular jobs often get overlooked because their views do not fit with the ruling orthodoxy. In some cases this is a deliberate attempt to resist change and reform as, like elsewhere, many vested interests do well out of the status quo and have no desire to cede their privileged positions to others. Some say that outside political influences, notably from the United States, have been complicit in helping to maintain this situation since they have preferred to deal with personalities they know and understand rather than with new and unknown quantities.

22. There is hope that governance in the region can be improved in incremental steps, but the workshop was adamant that the push for change must be internally driven. Externally imposed blueprints of democracy will not be acceptable or sustainable, although the Middle East should look to other examples such as Eastern Europe where democratisation has been successfully introduced in a number of countries. It was agreed, though, that if the Iraqi democratisation experiment succeeds, this may well influence change in other countries of the region. One important caveat is that the process of democratisation does not automatically have to lead to a western style liberal democracy. Middle Eastern democracy and development is more likely to be achieved through a gradual depoliticisation of the economy, the spread of education and expansion of a real civil society. The establishment of the rule of law, including an independent judicial system and independent media, were identified as the foundation on which to build.

23. Some argue that democratic experiments in the Middle East have often failed because they have allowed extremist elements to win power. Conversely, others see this as fundamentally healthy since it brings their philosophies and policies out into the open and gives people a chance to reject them electorally. In an authoritarian state, extremist elements have to work in the shadows but by doing so they often penetrate more deeply into a society than otherwise would be the case.

Islam and social identity
24. The workshop considered it important to underline that in Islam, as in other religions, people demonstrate a wide spectrum of religious behaviour from believers but non-practitioners to extreme fundamentalists. It must also be acknowledged that while Islamic leaders can and do play a political role, a person's Islamic identity bears little relation to his or her practical political and voting behaviour. It is therefore possible to distinguish between cultural Islam, traditional Islam and, finally, political Islam which is indeed controversial even in Islamic countries. Many people reject the notion of the inseparability of Islam and the state, and the degree of their Islamic religiosity has little correlation with their preference for a democratic or an authoritarian style of government.

25. Recent research has shown, however, that younger people are increasingly identifying themselves in terms of their religious identity rather than their national one. The historical division of the Middle East into nominally independent `nation states' in the aftermath of the colonial period is seen by many as artificial. Instead, a trans-national Islamic basis of identity is strong. This is likely to become politically significant as the current young generation matures over the next 15-20 years and becomes the new generation of political leaders and policy makers. An interesting thesis is that at a time of rapid globalisation many societies are feeling a strong need to assert their individual identity. This may explain why there is a resurgence in the Middle East of support for Islam and the Arab language, and why, for example, many young Muslim women living in the West are taking up wearing the veil as a highly visible symbol of cultural and religious identity. An interesting phenomenon is that Muslims returning home after living in the West are often more radical in their views and more willing to espouse extremist politics than those who have never been away.

Possible scenarios for developments in the Middle East to 2020
26. Having discussed the principal drivers as relatively discrete elements, the workshop sought to elaborate scenarios that could develop as a result of their interaction. Although there was variation in views on potential outcomes for the Middle East to 2020, the scenarios regarded as the most plausible are described below.

(a) Stagnation
27. This case rests on the supposition that there will be little change over the next 10-15 years in the current status quo. Governments will muddle through without major conflicts taking place, or serious shocks. Yet there will be little political advancement either, particularly on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Regimes would have just enough income and growth to keep the situation stable in their countries; the electorate would not be particularly happy but neither would they be in open revolt. It was agreed that this situation could change dramatically if there was a major fall in oil revenues although this was considered to be highly unlikely; there may be small changes taking place rather than a major readjustment.

28. The most worrying effect of stagnation is that it is the scenario most likely to encourage the continuance of terrorism. Poor economic performance and lack of progress in the development of democratic institutions fuels unemployment, lowers living standards and leads to frustration that can be exploited by groups that espouse violence as a means to promote change.

29. By contrast, an ideal scenario would see Arab-Israeli peace, leading to an extension of democracy, increased economic growth and employment, greater regional integration and a move towards secularisation in which moderate forms of Islam would be the predominant culture. In reality, the prevailing opinion is that there is likely to be a mix of good and bad along the way. The Middle East is not one homogeneous region and each country is likely to develop differently. Some leaders may try to avoid significant change, but social and economic pressures will force many of them to embrace change. The role of US foreign policy in the region will continue to be crucial. The perceived propping up of defunct regimes by the US in exchange for secure oil sources has in itself helped to promote continued stagnation. Disengagement is highly unlikely but would in itself have an incalculable effect.

(b) Democratisation and political reform
30. A more optimistic scenario envisages gradual democratisation and political reform. The process will be different in individual countries and the end result will be a group of states that share common democratic values but which are organised and behave in different ways. The challenges of democratisation must not be underestimated. Most Middle East regimes are authoritarian and oligarchic by nature and it will require a major change in mindsets to achieve the desired result. As democratisation progresses there will be an opening up of political systems, greater public participation in political life, the development of a genuine and strong civil society, greater freedom of information, helped especially through increased access to internet sources of information, and the development of independent media. Autocratic regimes which were previously tolerated if they provided a reasonable standard of living to the majority of their citizens, will be thrown out of power if they fail to deliver. Once the process has started, a broader cross-section of political opinion will develop and new political parties emerge. Traditional Islamist parties will need to regroup and organise themselves to meet the challenge of political competition. The result will be that even if they continue with a socially conservative agenda they will have to adopt politically democratic principles in order to gain support and election.

31. Liberal democracies will allow freedom of worship within a secular system and radical Islamists may well gain positions of power. It should not be taken for granted, however, that radical regimes would automatically be anti-western provided there was not undue interference in their affairs. In this sense they can be extremist in their internal governance, but not in their dealings with the wider world.

32. The prospects for change vary from country to country. Iraq is seen as the best hope as it is evolving from a completely new situation. The old regime has been dismantled and there is a good chance that it will develop its own new democratic constitution. Saudi Arabia presents a different challenge. As an executive monarchy its rulers have no roots in democratic traditions. Although there may be modest reforms, it is unlikely that there will be a sudden willingness to cede power to a democratically elected body.

33. In summary there is no single road map towards democracy. Each country is likely to take its own course. There will inevitably be tensions as new political forces develop within countries, but once the new democratic culture becomes firmly embedded extremist, elements are likely to be gradually neutralised. Individual leaders will need to provide a model and be willing to give up their position if they are voted out of power, for example.

(c) Arab-Israeli conflict
34. Despite the current stalemate, some participants were of the opinion that a settlement of the Palestine issue, leading to new and peaceful relations between Israel, Syria, Lebanon and the wider Middle East was a viable scenario. It was argued that the conflict has so preoccupied the politics of the region for so long that it has allowed regimes an excuse for not making more progress on economic and social reform. Although peace would not in itself help to promote democracy elsewhere in the region, it would have a strong positive regional effect and force governments to address other pressing problems.

35. The converse of this scenario - the creation of an unstable Palestinian state and prolonged conflict with Israel, was also regarded as a distinct possibility. In this case it is likely that the area would be `compartmentalised' by the rest of the region because of their fear that the consequences of a major conflagration would spill over into their territories. On balance, the workshop felt that, whatever the outcome, the Israel-Palestine conflict would not be the dominant driver in the region over the next 15-20 years that it is currently, although it would indeed colour all other political developments. The lesson would be for the region to learn how to compromise and accommodate.

(d) Fragmentation of Middle Eastern states
36. A doomsday scenario would see the intensification of inter/intra state conflict in the region, fragmentation and an increase in the number of failed or failing states. This scenario rests upon the highly debatable thesis that Middle East states are not solid enough to withstand severe economic and social pressures. If it were to come about, new states could emerge from the remnants of fragmented states, such as a separate Kurdish state. Others raised the possibility of Saudi Arabia fragmenting into a series of mini states as a result of a final showdown between modernists and traditionalists.

37. Fragmentation of the region would result from failures of the international community rather than from purely internal and regional dynamics. If the US-led war on terror and the military intervention in the region failed to secure a lasting peace this could add fuel to internal divisions and conflicts providing a real catalyst for disaster. The consensus was that this is unlikely to happen; but it would be wrong to discount the possibility of a catastrophic situation too complex for countries to manage in the traditional political manner, such as the future emergence of a new and hostile nuclear power. Rather than complete fragmentation of states, it was thought more probable that there would be pressure for regional devolution and semi-autonomous regions within states. Some saw this as a potentially dangerous development as such areas could be exploited by extremists not wishing to work within the normal mainstream political institutions of the country.

38. Once again, the workshop also juxtaposed the opposite scenario - a major coming-together of states and factions in the region as a united and peaceful entity. This scenario would require the emergence of a new Arab statesman accepted by all, including Israel, who would have a unifying effect on the whole region. It was agreed that, while not impossible, no one of such stature has yet emerged to fill such a role.

(e) Weapons proliferation intensifies
39. Another gravely pessimistic scenario sees an increase in armaments in the region, fuelled by current tensions, leading to an arms race and Iran's open declaration of military nuclear capacity. This would be watershed for the region. Would Egypt, for example, be prepared to see Iran develop such a capacity without responding itself? It was pointed out that nuclear technology can nowadays be `bought in' rather than developed `in-house'... Others, like Saudi Arabia, could conceivably decide that they too needed to develop this capability. The conclusion was that an intensive arms race in the Middle East is in fact unlikely to happen unless one nation has the temerity to promote actual friction through conducting missile tests or similar unfriendly actions.

Global scenarios for 2020
40. The conference concluded by looking at how the Middle East may contribute towards or be influenced by possible global scenarios for 2020. Firstly, it was suggested that continuing globalisation, though with more variety in economic systems than was originally envisaged, would produce a dominant trend to open markets, open borders and increasingly interdependent partnerships between producers and consumers in global markets. Successful World Trade Organisation (WTO) and EU negotiations will have led to better access to developed country markets for agricultural products. A second scenario, if there is no progress made in global trade, will lead to a regionalisation of trade and payments, and a more multipolar order. A third scenario underscores a rampant increase in global insecurity. In the face of this security dilemma, cooperation atrophies and self-help is the order of the day. A fourth scenario envisages deepening economic and strategic competition between the US and China.

41. Although the Middle East has a lot to gain economically from globalisation, it was agreed that Arabs/Muslims are nervous that certain aspects of globalisation, especially the pervasive influence of western, particularly American, values and morality are a threat to traditional cultural and religious values. A modest increase in inter-Arab integration was felt to have occurred in recent years, although whether there is the psychological shift to Arab cooperation is an open question. The rise of another superpower, China, will provide an interesting juxtaposition. The latter is likely to become a major oil importer as its huge economy continues to grow and it may well wish to make major investments in the Middle East.

42 No firm conclusions can be drawn about what the Middle East of 2020 will look like. But it can be said with certainty that developments in the region will continue to play a very important role in shaping the political and economic scene far beyond its own borders.

Identity and Ideology
Is national identity a contested concept in Asia? How plastic are these identities once established; how permeable are they to what has been termed "global mass culture"?


Asia is a vast and extremely diverse region that defies simplistic generalisations. While a number of countries have fairly homogeneous populations, such as Japan and Korea, the population of a great number of countries in the region are multi-racial and multi-ethnics. For instance, Indonesia has over 700 ethnic groups with distinct languages (not dialects) and traditions, while Malaysia is primarily composed of indigenous Malays and two other racial groups, Chinese and Indians. At the same time, almost all of the world's great religions and civilisations have left their imprints in Asia. South East Asia in particular has for centuries been at the cross roads of civilisations, adopting and adapting Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, as well as different variants of Christianity and western cultures. The historical experience of one Asian country to another has also been different. While a few countries escaped direct foreign colonialism, several Asian countries experienced colonisations by different western colonial powers for long periods of time. Modern ideological conflicts have also touched different parts of Asia, sometimes violently, leaving their indelible marks in the region.
Given all of these varieties and differences in historical experience, it is to be expected that the formation of national identity and how it evolves over time would not be uniform throughout Asia. Nevertheless, despite the great regional diversity there are a number of common themes that can be found. This brief paper will only look at the experience of a few countries in Asia by trying to answer three major questions: Is national identity a contested concept? How plastic are these identities once established; how permeable are they to what has been termed "global mass culture"?
Is national identity a contested concept in Asia?
With the possible exceptions of Japan and Thailand, which escaped long periods of direct foreign colonialism, and therefore have enjoyed relative political continuity as nation-states with well defined national boundaries and identities, the construction of national identities in most Asian countries was a Twentieth Century phenomenon. The nationalist movements that began to emerge in the early Twentieth Century began to gather momentum in the post World War II period, which saw the end of western colonialism and the birth of several new nation-states. On the whole it can be argued that in Asia the development of national identities, which are closely linked to the political formation of modern nation-states, has mostly been formed as a reaction to, or a by product of, foreign occupations and interventions.
In a number of cases there have been disagreements from the very beginning about the nature of the polities to be established, while in others the departure of the common enemies soon revealed fundamental differences in societies. In other words, national identity is indeed often a contested concept, so that nation building and state building have remained the central preoccupations of the developing countries in Asia to the present day. The failures to develop inclusive national identities in multicultural societies have at times led to secessionist movements, communal conflicts and racial riots. To illustrate these points we only need to look at the experiences of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Despite its tremendous diversity Indonesia has been characterised by its strong sense of nationalism and national identity. The shared historical experience of being under brutal Dutch rule had been the most important ingredient in uniting the heterogeneous people of the Indonesian Archipelago, who for the first time in history had been brought together under a single political unit by the Netherlands East Indies colonial administration. The nationalist movements succeeded in developing a new Indonesian national identity that transcended ethnic, racial and religious differences, uniting the peoples from different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds in a common struggle for independence and the creation of a new Indonesian nation state. One of the most prominent founding fathers of modern Indonesia, Sukarno, engaged in myth making to create a new Indonesian national identity in the years before independence by glorifying the common past, castigating the dark colonial present and promising a bright future for the united and independent country.
Yet no sooner was independence achieved, Indonesia was wracked by over two decades of violent conflicts, including a civil war. A fundamental difference over ideologies, about whether Indonesia would become a pluralist secular state, an Islamic state or a communist state led to insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, massacres and political purges. The issue of ideology was only finally resolved in the mid 1980s when Pancasila was accepted as the sole foundation of the state. Despite the existence of a radical minority that continues to struggle for the creation of an Islamic state or the imposition of the sharia on Muslims, in general one can say that today ideology is no longer a contested issue in Indonesia. Nevertheless, Indonesia continues to face secessionist movements in its most outlying provinces, in Aceh and West Papua, driven by the latter's grievances against what they see as the central government's economic exploitation and socio-political marginalisation of their areas. The Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Organisation of Papuan Independence (OPM) have long struggled to establish separate states in Aceh and West Papua respectively.
In the Philippines, the formation of a national identity has closely been linked to the long period of Spanish colonisation and the Filipino's revolutionary struggle for independence in the late Nineteenth century. Interestingly, the Philippines's relations with the United States, which took over from Spain as the new colonial power, have generally been seen in positive light, making the Philippines-US special relations an important part of the current Filipino national identity. This was despite the fact that after helping the Filipinos drive out the Spaniards, the Americans brutally crushed local resistance to subsequent American rule.
Although the Philippines' fought for independence against Spain its national identity has in fact been closely been identified with Roman Catholicism, since the Spanish rulers succeeded in converting most of their subject people to Catholicism. This is in marked contrast to the rest of South East Asia, where conversion to Christianity had been much more limited as most of the peoples were already Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus. The strong identification of the Philippines' national identity with Catholicism, however, has alienated the Muslim minorities living in the southern part of the country. Some of these Muslim subjects do not regard the Philippines' polity as being sufficiently inclusive, for Muslim minorities are being relegated to a secondary position, so that they want to establish a separate Muslim state. For many years the island of Mindanao has been a scene of periodic conflicts between various rebel groups and government troops.
At the same time, the special Filipino-American relations have also been contested by nationalist groups. The most violent opposition came from the communists, who for many years launched a guerrilla war against the government. Although without violence, there have also emerged strong nationalist oppositions to the continuing special military relations between the Philippines and the United States. These can be seen from the opposition to the renewal of agreement on military bases, leading to the closure of US military bases in the Philippines and from the strong public criticisms against the direct involvement of American soldiers in the Philippines' government fight against the Abu Sayaf rebels in Mindanao. . Nationalist historians have also tried to highlight the war between the Filipino nationalists and the Americans in 1899, causing the deaths of between 250,000 to 600,000 Filipinos, thus challenging the conventional Philippines-U.S. historiography that paints the U.S. as the liberators of the Philippines.
In Malaysia the development of a single transcending national identity has been even more problematic. Unlike in Indonesia where a new national identity was forged initially as a means to obtain independence from colonial rule, in Malaya no such nationalism emerged. The indigenous Malay rulers seemed to be quite happy under British rule as long as the Malays continued to enjoy special privileges. The problem was that the British had brought in large numbers of Chinese and Indian migrants to work in the tin mines and rubber plantations. These migrant communities came to be predominant in the economic field, though the British protected the social and political privileges of the Malays.
An attempt made by the British in the late 1945, to grant the migrant population liberal citizenship rights and to create a new and equal Malayan identity for every citizen, in preparation for eventual self-rule were strongly resisted by the Malays. The indigenous Malays feared that they would lose their special privileges and might in fact become marginalized in their own land by the more aggressive new comers. As a result after the granting of independence in 1957 Malaya, later called Malaysia after the incorporation of Sabah and Sarawak, was established as a state based on communal lines. The terms of independence were that the migrant communities would be granted citizenship with certain restrictions, while the Malays would retain their special political status. The official religion of Malaya/Malaysia is Islam, and to be Malays means to be Muslims as well. Although after its rapid economic development and modernisation the Malaysian identity seems to have become much more pronounced, communal divisions have continued to define Malaysian politics, which at times have led to racial tensions and even violence. It remains to be seen whether at some future date a new Malaysian identity transcending the current communal differentiations would eventually emerge.
Nowhere, however, is the concept of national identity so bitterly contested as in Taiwan. While the struggles to formulate and sustain a common national identity in other countries are primarily regarded as domestic affairs, the creation of a Taiwanese national identity has led to both international tensions and domestic controversies. It all started with the civil war over ideologies in China, pitting the nationalist against the communist forces, which ended with the defeat of the nationalist government of the Kuo Min Tang (KMT) and the transformation of mainland China into a communist state and society. The People's Republic of China views Taiwan as a renegade province after the defeated nationalists escaped to the island. At the same time the KMT government in Taipei, which continued to lay claim to the whole of China, also regarded the people living in Taiwan as Chinese belonging to the larger China.
In the past decade, however, a new Taiwanese nationalist movement has developed and gathered momentum, demanding a separate de facto and de jure Taiwanese national identity and a separate independent state. The Democratic People's Party, that has Taiwanese independence as its political platform, won the presidential election in 2000 and has attracted more supporters over the years. This phenomenon has naturally alarmed China, which has threatened to launch a military attack against Taiwan if it were to declare independence, and has divided the Taiwanese people between the pro-independence and pro-status quo groups, as can be seen from the recent presidential election. Unless there are fundamental changes in Beijing's attitude towards Taiwan, which at the moment seem unlikely, the issue of Taiwan's national identity will remain a contested issue, particularly as the development of a separate Taiwanese identity will only become stronger over time.
How plastic are these identities once established; how permeable are they to global mass culture?

In Asia the construction of national identities has often been an arduous and painful process, often involving bloody conflicts. Not surprisingly most Asian countries, particularly those that have achieved independence from colonial rule or imperial subjection, have attached great value to their respective national identities. While in Europe nationalism has come to be regarded as a dangerous sentiment, as national chauvinism had led to two world wars, in Asia nationalism is equated with patriotism and is considered to be a high virtue. Only through the development of a common national identity and nationalism could the disparate people of the Indonesian archipelago unite to overthrow colonial oppression and establish their own independent state. Since many countries in the region are still in the process of nation and state building, and few can take their national unity or even survival for granted, national identities tend be guarded jealously.
The experience of a number of Asian countries, however, revealed that the nature of the regimes in power determine how national identities are treated, whether they are seen as dynamic and open so that identities can be plural and evolve over time, or whether they are regarded as closed and utterly unique, thus allowing no more room for changes or for competitive identities to emerge. In fact, a number of authoritarian regimes in the region created or manipulated national identities, endowing them with certain rigid characteristics as a means of political control. The Indonesian experience under 32 years of Suharto's New Order authoritarian rule can help to illustrate this point.
Just as Indonesia's founding fathers had engaged in myth making to foster a common national identity that transcends racial, ethnic and religious differences, the Suharto regime also engaged in myth making by imbuing the Indonesian national identity with certain unchanging characteristics. Although the development of the nationalist movement and the birth of the modern nation states in Asia cannot be separated from western history and influences, particularly western education and the influence of the French and the American revolutions, the New Order government argued that Indonesian national values wholly originated from within. The regime then proceeded to define what the Indonesian national identity was as well as the correct, and therefore politically acceptable, values associated with that identity. Such values included a strong sense of nationalism, an emphasis on consensus, respect for authority, the rejection of communism, Islamism or western liberalism, as well as the deification of the national ideology and the 1945 Constitution so that the constitution could never be amended. By monopolising the definition of the national identity the New Order government was able to impose strict social and political control, accusing those with different ideas as subversives and enemies of the state. Ideas such as democracy and respect for human rights were considered foreign ideas, and therefore should be rejected. Continuing attachments to local or primordial identities or attraction to a supra-national regional or global identity were regarded as dangerous since these could undermine the national identity.
The experience of Indonesia was not unique. Just as national identities in Asia had in many cases been artificially constructed for political ends, such as national independence and the formation of modern nation states, politics had also played a dominant role in the articulation of national identities in the subsequent years. Before the Asian financial crisis many leaders in the region extolled the virtue of the "Asian Values", usually signifying that the people must be discipline, work hard, save their earnings and show unquestioning loyalty to their governments. The national identities that had been established in the respective countries were idealised, protected from challenges coming from within or outside the countries. As the protectors of the "true" national identities the regimes in power can then legitimately prosecute all of those who contest them, particularly those trying to offer alternative forms of identities. The "Asian Values" argument emerged as a reaction by certain Asian leaders, in particular Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia, to western criticisms regarding the lack of democracy and respect for human rights in a number of Asian countries.
Despite the sometime crude and heavy- handed attempts by some governments to "protect" their national identities and cultures from insidious foreign influences, very few have in fact succeeded in insulating their countries from the forces of globalisation. With the exception of North Korea and till recently Myanmar, most countries in East Asia have been enthusiastic proponents of economic development and international trade, and history has shown that trade links with peoples from different cultures had also led to exchanges of ideas and values. In modern time, economic development, with education as its corollary, has been the single most important agent of social transformation,
As has been mentioned earlier, South East Asia has always been at the crosswords of civilisations. This is quite different from North East Asia where China and Japan had for long periods of time sealed themselves from the outside world. Before the arrival of the western colonial powers, which transformed local societies by military and political force, South East Asian countries had been converted to Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam through peaceful means, often by means of trade over a long period of time. The cultures and traditions of South East Asia have mostly been the products of adoptions and adaptations of the great world religions and civilisations coming from outside the region. The introduction of western education in the early twentieth century, introducing such new ideas as nation states, sovereignty, freedom, democracy and political parties that had never existed before, transformed the Asian political landscape. Nevertheless, despite these acculturation and similarities across regions, each Asian country has been able to form a distinct and unique identity of its own.
Given the basic permeability and adaptability of some of the cultures in the region it is only to be expected that the onslaughts of the forces of globalisation, which among others have led to the creation of global mass culture, have also left their imprints in Asia. North East Asia is no exception. Since being forcefully opened to the outside world Japan has embraced modernisation with great determination, adopting and adapting western ideas, customs and technologies without losing its Japanese identity, which seems be both changing rapidly while at the same time remaining essentially Japanese.
In a number of South East Asian countries globalisation has been both feared as threats to traditional values and hailed as liberators from the forces of feudalism and repression, depending on the viewers' perspectives. There is little doubt that the democratic waves that toppled authoritarian regimes in many countries, including in North and South East Asia can largely be attributed to the forces of globalisation. The success of the "people power" movements against authoritarian regimes in certain countries could be seen and give inspirations to similar movements elsewhere. The imposition of "universal values" is becoming harder to resist, thus putting those governments who continue to talk about particularistic values on the defensive. In the social arena, the emergence of a metropolitan super culture manufactured in Hollywood, marked among others by consumerism, has also swept Asian cities, making one city very much like another.
Despite the difficulties encountered by many Asian countries, it can generally be argued that with the exception of Taiwan the nation states that now exist in the region are fairly well established, with clearly drawn boundaries and distinctive national identities. It can also be noted that with increasing self confidence the countries in the region have also become much more open, both to aspirations from below and the forces of changes from the wider global community. Experiences of periodic conflicts over ideologies and identities, which in the past had led to the imposition of authoritarian regimes, in a growing number of countries have led to a greater political openness and willingness to accept plurality. At the same time, the desire to compete and be accepted in the wider regional and global community has also made a growing number of countries in the region to be more open to such concepts as "universal values" as well as to binding regional and international ties.
This process is still at a fairly early stage, but one can foresee interesting trends developing in which greater convergences at the regional and global levels will be matched by greater autonomy and plurality at the local level. In other words, as national identities become more well established in Asia, they can afford to become much more open and dynamics. Local identities, supra-regional identities and global citizenships will likely exist alongside established national identities, each having an influence in the evolution of the other. For Asian societies, with their rich cultural traditions, there lies a hope that in the future they can contribute to the enrichment of a more plural global culture, instead of being merely consumers of a monolithic global mass culture.***

The Future of Force in the Region

May 4, 2004


With the growing interdependence of economies in East Asia, security relations among nations in this area have been improved to some extent. As nations are focusing on non-traditional source of threats, e.g., trans-border terrorism, Washington's relations with Beijing have been improved (though the US is not geographically a state in the region). Currently, South Korea's trade volume with China has surpassed that with the US. This has also strengthened Seoul's tie with Beijing, and will serve the stability of the Korean Peninsula positively. Another positive case is that both China and the US will participate in late May in an 18-country naval exercise initiated by Singapore and Indonesia, for disposing explosives on the high sea.

Despite the demise of the Cold War and the expanding economic interactions among the economies in East Asia, however, security relations in the region have not been improved dramatically. The tensions of the Korean peninsula remain high and North Korea's nuclear weapons program, as so reported, have concerned all actors in the region. China's rapid economic growth, planned to be re-quadrupled in the coming two decades, and hence the national strength this will translate into, are inevitably to be viewed as a force that will challenge the regional and possibly global balance of power. Coupled with growing push for independence of Taiwan, security relations across the Straits are increasingly intensified. Other factors in the region, such as Japan's revamping of its constitution to allow rights of armed forces and waging a war, and Russia's possibility to build up a brand-new armed force by 2020, are all possible to contribute to the security pattern of East Asia gradually.

As security drivers in East Asia toward 2020, the most prominent of them are likely to include:

- nuclear weapons development in the region;
- China's growing power and its implication;
- Japan's normalcy and ramification.

First and most pressing is the nuclear weapons development in the region. East Asia has already encompassed major nuclear weapons states: US, Russia and China. The region has also witnessed nuclear weapons development of South Korea and Taiwan. Also, it is well known that Japan has the capability to acquire nuclear weapons quickly given a political decision.

But most pressing is the nuclear weapons development in North Korea. It is understood that the North may have reprocessed all fuel rods of its Yongbyon-based nuclear reactor, providing it some 35 kg of plutonium, equivalent to at least 4 (or 8) atomic bombs assuming each Hiroshima /Nagasaki-level bomb would require 8 (or 4) kg of plutonium. It is also speculated that North Korea may have acquired some uranium enrichment capability.

Currently, a multilateral effort is being made to negotiate with North Korea to trade its abandonment of its weapons program for a number of benefits. Two rounds of "six-party" talks have been held already in Beijing and the third round is to follow likely next month. However, such negotiation is by no means to guarantee the success of the effort. North Korea could relinquish its nuclear weapons program as a result of the talk, or move on to a nuclear arsenal comparable to that of Pakistan.

Thus, North Korea's nuclear weapons program plays a driver of security situation in East Asia. Depending who is in the White House and how Washington-Pyongyang plays the game of action-reaction, such weapons development could lead to various possibilities:

- North Korea gives up nuclear weapons program;
- The North keeps its weapons program, stimulating proliferation in the area;
- The US eventually accepts it, and restrains its allies to follow suit;
- The US could not tolerate this and launches an attack.

Though North Korea's nuclear weapons program could drive regional security to various destinations, none of the outcomes would be ideal if the North would not abandon its program: it could be a war between the US and the North, possibly involving US allies and other players in East Asia, or could be a pure proliferation under the most "peaceful" circumstance.

As a security driver in East Asia, basically the regional situation will be clear in about five years: either North Korea commits nuclear disarmament that is inducive to regional stability, or refuses to do so, forcing the US to accept the fait accompli, or to launch a counterproliferation offensive. Therefore, the picture in 2020 due to this driver shall be relative clear by the end of this decade.

Even so, there is reason to extrapolate a future of 2020 when North Korea, if it continues to exist, will have removed its nuclear weapons for a number of reasons: all regional actors don't welcome its going nuclear; its security relations with China provide it with assurance; the US government may have met North's demand in quid pro quo of its nuclear abandonment; grim economic opportunity with external world given a nuclear arsenal.

The second driver of military development in the region out to 2020 is China's growth. Since 1978, China has dramatically grown economically, with GDP growth per annum at over 8% in average. Though it is GDP per capita is still way behind, China's overall economic strength has reached the level of some G7 members. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), China is one of the leading economies in the world already.

Plus its economic target of further quadrupling of output by 2020, China's growth pace will allow it to have an economic share in the world from current 3% to possibly 8-9% in the next twenty years. This will place China in the top leading economies in the world, even without the PPP consideration.

This also indicates that China's defense expenditure will rise from current $25 billion to $100, assuming defense budget grows in commensurate with China's economic growth. Such a budget by 2020 is just a quarter of that of the US at this time, but two times as big as that of current Japan.

Such drastic re-shaping of world economic and military landscape indicates a shift of balance of power in China's favor. Other states will subsequently meet the quandary: how to welcome China bidding farewell to poverty while sustaining status quo of the world?

Leadership in Beijing has noticed this consequence, and has recently advocating a theory of "peaceful rise". It is argued that China's rise is of its legitimate rights, and is for peaceful purpose. It is explained that both the process and outcome of China's rise shall be peaceful. Such explanations are helpful as they help reduce the apprehensions of other nations, and remind Beijing that even the exercise of legitimate rights may not be always productive.

As many have noted, China is indeed moving toward a revisionist country: a country that preserves status quo. On Korean peninsula, China is now the most prominent actor that works on the peaceful resolution of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. And, for the across Taiwan Straits relationship, China has noted anti-independence has been a more imminent priority than national unification. Therefore, tactically China and the US have converged their interests in maintaining the status quo there.

China's rise and Taiwan's inclination to independence will be entangled in the years to come. Under no circumstances one would expect mainland China relinquish its claim of demand of unification with Taiwan, while popular support to this is getting thin on the island. A contrast of both advantage, in terms of hard power, and disadvantage, in terms of Taiwan's heart, is growing high on both ends. This complicates the regional security equation.

As the US has Taiwan Relations Act that obliges America to certain defense responsibility of Taiwan, so far the across Straits balance of power has been maintained. But as Taiwan is transforming further drifting away from the mainland, the chance of war-fighting in this area is increasing. Therefore, China's rise and Taiwan's move toward independence constitute another driver of military development in East Asia.

This driver will play its role of across-Straits arms race, and the unsymmetrical arms race, with sole focus on the Taiwan question, between China and the US. If the Taiwan independence will be controlled at official level, there may be no war occurring before 2020, but the race of military capability and interoperation development will be tense throughout 2020, with Taiwan gradually losing the edge. But should Taiwan declare independence in the next few years, this driver will lose its validity as by that time, the status of Taiwan may take shape as a consequence of its declaration.

One more security driver is Japan's normalcy. From this January Japan's Liberal Democracy Party (LDP) started debate in the party as to revise Japan's Constitution, primarily to revise Article 9 that stipulated that Japan abandons military means for international disputes and possesses no armed forces. This issue was submitted to the Diet in February, officially starting the legal process of the revision. It is noted that currently 72% of Japan's Diet Members support the Constitution's revision.

At the same time, Japan's has sent armed forces to Iraq. From 2004, Japan will build up missile defense system and revise its Defense Plan Outline that will replace its defense-orientated posture with a more aggressive overseas-mission emphasizing stance.

Japan's adjustment reflects its strategic view of strengthening security relations with America, and hedge against China as a rising power. Its new emphasis of developing long-range delivery means as well as strategic-striking weaponry indicated Japan's changing security perception in the region. As Japan is co-developing missile defense platform with the US, Japan inevitably will share with the US its military R&D products, breaking Japan's long-held policy of export of weapons.

Undoubtedly, Japan's shift of military doctrine and defense posture will affect China's security perception. China has taken note of Japan's revised security guideline that allows Tokyo to assist the US when the latter is engaged militarily in Japan's "surrounding" waters. China would not assume that Japan would sit idle when the US intervenes militarily in the Taiwan question.

This cross negative security perception between China and Japan plays no constructive role in mending Beijing-Tokyo's political trust. One would expect that the two countries would continue to expand their economic and trade relations, but remain cool in dealing with each other on political and military matters, for many years to come. Such a relationship looks unhealthy and is likely to be the reality, for the coming two decades. At least for this reason, the two Asian giants will compete in security quarter with distrust toward 2020.

In sum, security equation of East Asia by 2020 will be largely driven by three factors: North Korea's nuclear weapons development, China's rise and Taiwan's independence, and Japan's military "normalcy". They are interacting and intertwined. Nuclear path of Pyongyang would affect choices of Tokyo, and if Japan goes officially nuclear, its alliance with Washington, and relations with other actors in the region, will be complicated. China's rise will strategically shift the center of world power, and this course could be interrupted by Taiwan's quest for independence. A war between Beijing and Washington for Taipei's sake, at any time by 2020, will be hard to measure and shall be avoided. Eventually, China and Japan need to seek strategic reconciliation for their own benefits and those of the region.

By 2020, the US will be plausibly playing a balancer role in East Asia, though with more factors to complicate the assuredness of its success.

Rebuilding Iraq's Media
By Borzou Daragahi


Hassan Hadi, a Muslim cleric and would-be director of television and radio for the Islamic Information Network, sat in his Baghdad office and fumed. It was late May, and six weeks earlier the U.S. military had freed Iraq of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, allowing Hadi to freely practice his Shiite faith, speak his mind, and even launch a newspaper called Voice of Friday. But now he railed against the Americans who had taken over the Iraqi capital's television and radio facilities and begun broadcasting.

A petition signed by former television employees authorized Hadi to speak in their name, and thus the Americans, he said, were defying the will of the Iraqi people. The Hawza, a famed Shiite seminary run by ayatollahs in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf, had granted Hadi authority over Baghdad's airwaves, and thus the Americans were also defying the will of God. "In America there is freedom of everything," says the white-turbaned cleric. "Press, food, drink, dancing, and even sex. The Iraqi people are a Muslim people, and such things are not acceptable here. The media is just like food. You have to clean it and make sure there's no poison before you distribute it."

Across town, behind razor-wire-shrouded checkpoints manned by peach-faced American soldiers, a group of Iraqi journalists and American advisers assembled news segments for the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), the U.S.-backed reincarnation of the country's hated -- and now dissolved, bombed, looted, and torched -- Ministry of Information. They have their own dream for the Iraqi media: a freewheeling cross between the BBC and PBS. "The vision is to provide the Iraqi people with a European broadcasting system model," says Mike Furlong, a senior adviser to the U.S. media reconstruction effort.

IMN employees -- many of whom are former low-level information ministry employees who now wear U.S. Defense Department badges -- use the makeshift broadcast equipment in the dilapidated Baghdad Convention Center to put together reports about mass graves, freed prisoners, electricity shortages, and even a few stories critical of the pace and style of the American reconstruction effort.

Their boss in Baghdad, Ahmad al Rikabi, a thirty-three-year-old Iraqi who was raised in Sweden, says he's keen on teaching his employees the rules of balanced journalism. "Trying to create a free media based on the experience of the journalists in the last thirty years is almost impossible, so you have to change the mentality," says al Rikabi, a former London bureau chief of Radio Free Iraq. "We don't serve the government."

Time will tell whether the U.S. advisers -- working with like-minded Iraqis -- can create an Iraqi Jim Lehrer without provoking the country's traditionalists and Islamists. The Islamists, in turn, are joined in their battle for Iraq's airwaves by Iran's ubiquitous, anti-American television and radio broadcasts. The Iranian broadcasts -- often the only television available to Iraqis -- mix poetry, music, and language classes with news reports about the "Zionist entity" and experts urging Iraqis to ignore the U.S. and take control of the government.

What the Americans hope to create is unprecedented in authoritarian Arab countries like Iraq, says Massoud Derhally, an editor of Arabian Business, a Dubai-based monthly magazine. "In Arab countries, you have media that toe the line," he says. And it may also be unrealistic to expect the Iraqi media to be a carbon copy of the U.S. press. But in between the efforts of the Americans on one end of the scale and the Iranians on the other, a new and unexpected media force has emerged from the rubble of Iraq. By late May, nearly 100 new publications and a handful of broadcast outlets were available in Baghdad, with others launching in major Iraqi cities such as Kirkuk, Mosul, and Basra. They are communist, monarchist, Kurdish, Assyrian, Islamist, nationalist, and secularist. Some are shrill and tawdry, like London tabloids. Others are staid and dry, like a New York broadsheet. But they are Iraqi.

And what their editors and reporters say about their visions for a post-Saddam media challenges the assumptions of both Iraq's foreign administrators as well as its domestic guardians of virtue.


Iraqis like to say that they gave mankind the written word 5,000 years ago. Iraqi journalists boast that the first Arabic newspaper, Al Zawra, was printed in Baghdad 135 years ago, and that the nation's first television station was launched in 1956, the same year that TV came to Sweden. Spirited, mostly politically partisan papers flourished until the late 1960s. Iraqis continue to pride themselves on their appetite for the printed word. "What is written in Cairo is published in Beirut but read in Baghdad," the saying goes.

All this ended in the violent coup d'?tat of July 17,1968, that ushered in the era of Hussein's Baath Party. One of the Baathists' first acts was to jail Abdel Aziz Barakat, then head of the journalists' union, and shut down his newspaper, al Manar, which at the time was one of the most professional dailies in Iraq. Barakat was charged as an American spy and executed a month later.

Baathists placed a stranglehold on the press, turning it into a tool to glorify Saddam and his family. Underground or independent media were unheard of. Decree number 840, which Saddam signed in 1986, made death the maximum penalty for criticizing the government. Even carrying copies of unofficial newspapers posed a huge risk. In 2001, Kurdish officials say, a man was caught in the city of Khaneqin with a copy of al Ittihad, one of the newspapers published in the Kurdish-run northern section of Iraq. He was sentenced to twenty-one years in jail.

Tales from Saddam's prisons filled the nightmares of fearful journalists. The names of disappeared journalists went unspoken. Theraqem Hashem, a writer for Horass al Waqtan magazine, was arrested in 1992 and never heard from again. Aziz al Sayed Jassem, who wrote political books, was arrested in 1991 and disappeared after he refused to write a book extolling Saddam's glories. That same year Durgham Hashemi, a young journalist at al Thawra, disappeared a week after he criticized articles in his own newspaper that claimed Iraq's Shiite Arabs came from India. As many as 500 Iraqi journalists, artists, writers, and intellectuals have been executed or disappeared and are presumed dead since 1968, according to the International Alliance for Justice, a French human rights group.


But Saddam's grip on the media wasn't airtight. Though heavily infiltrated by the intelligence services, for example, the faculty of the University of Baghdad's College of Mass Media tried to teach their students the fundamentals of good reporting. "When I taught I would give the academic view," says Mo'ayed al Khafaf, a lecturer at the college. "How to write news, how to write a column, how to conduct an investigation. We taught students that they had to be brave, tell the truth, and be accurate." The problem, al Khafaf says, wasn't what students studied, but rather that the Ministry of Information controlled everything they wrote.

Even Iraq's American administrators are impressed with the skills of Iraq's journalists. "There are a lot of talented young people who just need some training, some highly technically competent people," says Mike Furlong.

In 1992, Saddam's oldest son, Uday -- by all accounts, a brutal man who treated his pet lions far better than his many underlings -- was "unanimously" elected head of the journalists' union and launched a number of purportedly independent publications, television stations, and radio operations. These allowed Saddam and Uday to attack their opponents without the formal imprimatur of the state-owned media. They also allowed the government to expand its system of rewards for sycophantic journalists. One broadcaster, for instance, received $2,500 and a Honda for his on-air call for the reelection of Saddam Hussein, says Khalil Ibrahim, a reporter for Fajr Baghdad.

But some of the journalists on Uday's payroll -- many were graduates of the College of Mass Media -- took the independent label seriously.

In 1997 Nab al Shabab, the Uday-controlled weekly paper of the Youth Union, began publishing articles that were unprecedented both in terms of their subject matter and as examples of journalists trying hard to retain their integrity in the harshest environment. "We criticized the government's behavior," says Mohamed Bedewi al Shamari, a former Nab al Shabab writer who is now an editor for Ashiraa, a new, 5,000-circulation weekly. "We criticized the checkpoints, the limited freedoms of the people, the actions of the Baathist security officers. We called on the government to respect the people's rights." Al Shamari and others who worked at these "independent" publications say they were able to get away with such criticism, ironically, because of the twisted reality of life under Saddam. Because they were known as Uday's publications, others in the regime mostly left them alone. And although Uday was a despot in his own right, he was also a bit of a loose cannon, these journalists say, and he argued with his father over what the papers wrote. Still, journalists did not dare criticize Saddam Hussein directly.

Instead, they pecked around him. One article in 1998 by Hashem Hassan, Nab al Shabab's editor, accused Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz of wasting his time and the country's money on foreign trips and speeches. Others chronicled the growing prostitution and crime problems. "We always went out in the streets and reported these stories out," says Saad al Awsi, a former news director of Nab al Shabab.

But in March 1998 the newspaper pushed too far, publishing a satirical front-page piece about Iraqi opposition groups. The headline, announcement #1, typically heralds a coming change in government. The piece included photos of opposition figures, such as Ahmad Chalabi.

Saddam cracked down. The paper's staff was pushed out. Al Awsi was banned from writing. Al Shamari managed a job at Musawar al Arabi, another Uday-owned weekly, and began writing an opinion column that touched upon the same themes. In September 1998, two men in an unmarked car came to his office and took al Shamari away. He was jailed for eight days without charges. "They didn't even take down my name," al Shamari says. "They were trying to send a message."

Hashem Hassan was briefly jailed, too, and eventually fled to the autonomous Kurdish north early last year, where freedom from Saddam's rule since 1991 has ushered in a relatively free press, including several newspapers completely independent of political parties.

Over time, many Iraqi journalists fled Saddam's rule and found success in other countries. And today's media bloom springs in part from these long-dormant seeds of press freedom planted years earlier.

The media universe in Iraq these days is populated by everything from Islamists to exiled media tycoons to local politicians to collectives run by idealistic journalists. Regardless of their ultimate goal, though, all are far more likely to look for guidance to the wider Arab world, or to their own traditions, than to America and the West.

The London-based Azzaman, run by an exiled Iraqi journalist, began planning to publish an Iraq edition months before Saddam's fall. The full-color, twenty-page daily, carrying international and local news as well as celebrity gossip and sports, has wowed Baghdad. Filled with news from around the world and the Middle East, the mildly Arab-nationalist paper often publishes articles skeptical of U.S. aims in Iraq and the region. And it's the hottest paper in town, with a circulation that Hathem Aziza, Azzaman's general manager, claims has grown to 30,000. He hopes to reach 50,000 by summer's end, and 100,000 by the end of the year. Editions of Azzaman are also published in London, Bahrain, and Algeria.

Just days after the regime fell, volunteers in the city of Karbala, southwest of Baghdad, took over an abandoned 100-watt television substation and began broadcasting over a range of about twelve miles. Karbala TV mixes Koranic verses with pirated satellite news broadcasts, cartoons, and local news segments about the city's electrical and water problems, put together by volunteers using handheld camcorders. Announcers sit in a scruffy "studio:" a desk and chair in front of a black backdrop. A committee of locals runs the station, making programming decisions by consensus. "It's a free, independent television station," says Haydar Noori, an electrical engineer who spends his spare time as a technician. "We don't receive any support from anyone."

Meanwhile, Najaf TV broadcasts eight hours a day from a tiny one-kilowatt substation once used to strengthen Baghdad broadcasts. "We cover all of Najaf's problems, the city council elections, the gas shortage," says Ali Abdul Kareem Kashaf al Qeta, the volunteer station manager who fled Iraq after he launched Radio Najaf during the Shiite uprising against Saddam that was brutally crushed in 1991. "We found out early that the problem of water was connected to the electricity problem," he says. "We broadcast images of the destroyed power stations and got people to fix the problem. Now the water is back."

New newspapers include Al Riazy al Jadeed, a sports weekly, and the Baghdad Bulletin, an English-language bimonthly launched by American college students studying in Lebanon. The twice-weekly Al Ahrar was launched with $10,000 by a thirty-six-year-old candy merchant. The twice-weekly Asaa, with a print run of 10,000, is overseen by Adeeb Shabaan, Uday's longtime personal secretary, who had a falling-out with him and was imprisoned in the last months of the regime.

The new publications mostly crib reports from the wires as well as major international and Arabic newspapers. Some of them, though not all, are little more than mouthpieces for political parties and groups that have sprung up. The free, eight-page Communist party paper was among the first to hit Baghdad's streets after Saddam's fall. "It appears the political press is getting in first and gaining advantage," says Mark Pomar, president of IREX, a Washington-based group that has helped train independent media in Eastern Europe and Asia.

The new press remains obsessed with the Saddam era and haunted by his Baath party's thirty-five-year rule. Articles about his misdeeds and mass graves fill the pages. The papers pump out salacious stories about Saddam and his family's troubles and exploits, making them sound like characters in Dynasty rather than fearsome dictators. qusay grabbed $1 billion and 70 billion euros before the war, screamed a headline in Al Adala, a new daily published by the pro-Iranian Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. uday and his mother killed man who introduced him to saddam's second wife, said Al Shams, a new weekly. uday offered $1.5 million to fire editor in chief of jordanian newspaper, said Al Sumer, a highbrow daily published by the Iraqi Media Network. after three years of a secret relationship, woman married saddam after he forced her to divorce her husband, reported Al Resalah, a religious weekly.

The new press also hasn't been shy about publishing negative articles on the motives and methods of the American invasion force, which now numbers nearly 160,000. u.s. and europeans race to win iraq mobile phone contracts, reported Al Ayam. security has become a dream that will never come true, read a headline in al Adala, over an article declaring that Iraq will never have true safety until the Americans leave and a national government takes over. under america's watch, raping, killing, burning and looting, said Al Ahrar.

Despite all the freedom, criticism of the influence and methods of Iraq's religious leaders is still off limits. Many journalists say Iraq remains at heart a traditional, religious country. "We don't have to criticize sacred values, especially in the beginning," says Hamid Ali Alkifaey, a former Iraqi exile journalist.

If the press has refrained from critiquing the political power of the Islamic hierarchy, it has enthusiastically published photographs of scantily clad women that would offend Islamists' cultural sensitivities. Back pages are filled with celebrity gossip and chatter from the Arab world as well as Hollywood. who will be miss universe? asked a headline in Alahali, a new weekly, above a picture of a former Panamanian beauty queen, Justine Pasek, wearing a see-through blouse. egyptian actress chosen to portray saddam's girlfriend in upcoming movie, declared a headline on the back page of Azzaman.

The media explosion will likely abate unless the Iraqi economy -- eroded by twelve years of sanctions and then knocked flat by the war -- quickly picks up and generates advertising revenue, say experts at nonprofit organizations who've rebuilt media in other war-torn countries. "Now we can see a thousands flowers blooming," said Antti Kuusi of the Baltic Media Centre, a Denmark-based organization. "But it won't last, because no media here is able to function profitably."

In addition to money, the newspapers need a legal framework in which to operate. In early June, Iraqi opposition figures and journalist-rights activists gathered in Athens for a forum on an Iraqi media law. "We want to have an independent media," says Hamid Ali Alkifaey, one of the conference's organizers. "And you can't have new media without a new media law that clearly defines the relationship between the press and the government."

Meanwhile, the U.S. authorities in Baghdad were drafting a media "code of conduct" -- including the licensing of broadcast outlets and a possible regulatory board to monitor media. This elicited howls of protest from Iraqi journalists, who called it censorship. At press time, details of the code -- as well as its ultimate fate -- were not available. But the idea, say U.S. officials, is to prevent hate speech or ideas that hinder the development of a civil society. "There's no room for hateful messages that will destabilize the emerging Iraqi democracy," says Mike Furlong.

In addition to the Americans, a handful of international organizations have mobilized to help Iraqi journalists. In late April and early May, representatives from media charities and liberal publications such as The Nation and Salon met in London to coordinate efforts to rebuild Iraq's media, says Rohan Jayasekera, a veteran of reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sri Lanka, Georgia, and Cyprus. "Of all these countries, Iraq has the resources to rebuild its media in the long run," says Jayasekera. "You have money, education, political participation. You add all that together and it's a great growing environment for independent, professional media."

For now, though, most Iraqi journalists have put aside worries about long-term survival as they dive joyfully into new freedoms and reconnect to their nation's literary past. After graduating from journalism school, Ashtar Ali Yasseri, twenty-five, wrote for al Zawra, a mouthpiece for Uday's journalists' union. After the fall of Saddam, she and her father relaunched Habezbooz, a satirical Baghdad paper last published in 1932. One early issue of the illustrated weekly included a mock interview with Jay Garner, then the Pentagon's top man in Iraq, in which he describes his love of Mosul's kabobs. "This is the best time for this kind of newspaper," says Ali Yasseri. "It's good to make fun of things. It feels good to laugh."

Al Manar has also been relaunched after a thirty-five-year absence, and dedicated to its founder, Aziz Abdel Barakat, the journalism union chief whose execution in 1968 marked the beginning of the Iraqi media's darkest days. The 15,000-circulation daily has ambition, with forty journalists and bureaus in Hilla, Karbala, Najaf, Basra, Kirkuk, and Mosul. Without working phone lines, reporters file stories via courier, says Taha Arif Muhammad, the sprightly sixty-seven-year-old editor for whom Barakat was a mentor. "Some day, we would love to add bureaus in Jordan, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates," he said.

One day in late May, two American soldiers -- most likely from Army civil affairs units -- came by to ask Muhammad what his newspaper needed. "I told them, `We don't want financial support or equipment or any other kind of help,'" he recalls. "`But if you have any news tips, please give them to us.'"

Re-thinking Objectivity
Re-thinking Objectivity

By Brent Cunningham

In his March 6 press conference, in which he laid out his reasons for the coming war, President Bush mentioned al Qaeda or the attacks of September 11 fourteen times in fifty-two minutes. No one challenged him on it, despite the fact that the CIA had questioned the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and that there has never been solid evidence marshaled to support the idea that Iraq was involved in the attacks of 9/11.

When Bush proposed his $726 billion tax cut in January, his sales pitch on the plan's centerpiece - undoing the "double-taxation" on dividend earnings - was that "It's unfair to tax money twice." In the next two months, the tax plan was picked over in hundreds of articles and broadcasts, yet a Nexis database search turned up few news stories - notably, one by Donald Barlett and James Steele in Time on January 27, and another by Daniel Altman in the business section of The New York Times on January 21 - that explained in detail what was misleading about the president's pitch: that in fact there is plenty of income that is doubly, triply, or even quadruply taxed, and that those other taxes affect many more people than the sliver who would benefit from the dividend tax cut.

Before the fighting started in Iraq, in the dozens of articles and broadcasts that addressed the potential aftermath of a war, much was written and said about the maneuverings of the Iraqi exile community and the shape of a postwar government, about cost and duration and troop numbers. Important subjects all. But few of those stories, dating from late last summer, delved deeply into the numerous and plausible complications of the aftermath. That all changed on February 26, when President Bush spoke grandly of making Iraq a model for retooling the entire Middle East. After Bush's speech "aftermath" articles began to flow like the waters of the Tigris - including cover stories in Time and The New York Times Magazine - culminating in The Wall Street Journal's page-one story on March 17, just days before the first cruise missiles rained down on Baghdad, that revealed how the administration planned to hand the multibillion-dollar job of rebuilding Iraq to U.S. corporations. It was as if the subject of the war's aftermath was more or less off the table until the president put it there himself.

There is no single explanation for these holes in the coverage, but I would argue that our devotion to what we call "objectivity" played a role. It's true that the Bush administration is like a clenched fist with information, one that won't hesitate to hit back when pressed. And that reporting on the possible aftermath of a war before the war occurs, in particular, was a difficult and speculative story.

Yet these three examples - which happen to involve the current White House, although every White House spins stories - provide a window into a particular failure of the press: allowing the principle of objectivity to make us passive recipients of news, rather than aggressive analyzers and explainers of it. We all learned about objectivity in school or at our first job. Along with its twin sentries "fairness" and "balance," it defined journalistic standards.

Or did it? Ask ten journalists what objectivity means and you'll get ten different answers. Some, like the Washington Post's editor, Leonard Downie, define it so strictly that they refuse to vote lest they be forced to take sides. My favorite definition was from Michael Bugeja, who teaches journalism at Iowa State: "Objectivity is seeing the world as it is, not how you wish it were." In 1996 the Society of Professional Journalists acknowledged this dilemma and dropped "objectivity" from its ethics code. It also changed "the truth" to simply "truth."

TRIPPING TOWARD THE TRUTH

As E.J. Dionne wrote in his 1996 book, They Only Look Dead, the press operates under a number of conflicting diktats: be neutral yet investigative; be disengaged but have an impact; be fair-minded but have an edge. Therein lies the nut of our tortured relationship with objectivity. Few would argue that complete objectivity is possible, yet we bristle when someone suggests we aren't being objective - or fair, or balanced - as if everyone agrees on what they all mean.

Over the last dozen years a cottage industry of bias police has sprung up to exploit this fissure in the journalistic psyche, with talk radio leading the way followed by Shout TV and books like Ann Coulter's Slander and Bernard Goldberg's Bias. Now the left has begun firing back, with Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media? (CJR, March/April) and a group of wealthy Democrats' plans for a liberal radio network. James Carey, a journalism scholar at Columbia, points out that we are entering a new age of partisanship. One result is a hypersensitivity among the press to charges of bias, and it shows up everywhere: In October 2001, with the war in Afghanistan under way, then CNN chairman Walter Isaacson sent a memo to his foreign correspondents telling them to "balance" reports of Afghan "casualties or hardship" with reminders to viewers that this was, after all, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11. More recently, a CJR intern, calling newspaper letters-page editors to learn whether reader letters were running for or against the looming war in Iraq, was told by the letters editor at The Tennessean that letters were running 70 percent against the war, but that the editors were trying to run as many prowar letters as possible lest they be accused of bias.

Objectivity has persisted for some valid reasons, the most important being that nothing better has replaced it. And plenty of good journalists believe in it, at least as a necessary goal. Objectivity, or the pursuit of it, separates us from the unbridled partisanship found in much of the European press. It helps us make decisions quickly - we are disinterested observers after all - and it protects us from the consequences of what we write. We'd like to think it buoys our embattled credibility, though the deafening silence of many victims of Jayson Blair's fabrications would argue otherwise. And as we descend into this new age of partisanship, our readers need, more than ever, reliable reporting that tells them what is true when that is knowable, and pushes as close to truth as possible when it is not.

But our pursuit of objectivity can trip us up on the way to "truth." Objectivity excuses lazy reporting. If you're on deadline and all you have is "both sides of the story," that's often good enough. It's not that such stories laying out the parameters of a debate have no value for readers, but too often, in our obsession with, as The Washington Post's Bob Woodward puts it, "the latest," we fail to push the story, incrementally, toward a deeper understanding of what is true and what is false. Steven R. Weisman, the chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and a believer in the goal of objectivity ("even though we fall short of the ideal every day"), concedes that he felt obliged to dig more when he was an editorial writer, and did not have to be objective. "If you have to decide who is right, then you must do more reporting," he says. "I pressed the reporting further because I didn't have the luxury of saying X says this and Y says this and you, dear reader, can decide who is right."

It exacerbates our tendency to rely on official sources, which is the easiest, quickest way to get both the "he said" and the "she said," and, thus, "balance." According to numbers from the media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from last September to February, all but thirty-four originated at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. So we end up with too much of the "official" truth.

More important, objectivity makes us wary of seeming to argue with the president - or the governor, or the ceo - and risk losing our access. Jonathan Weisman, an economics reporter for The Washington Post, says this about the fear of losing access: "If you are perceived as having a political bias, or a slant, you're screwed."

Finally, objectivity makes reporters hesitant to inject issues into the news that aren't already out there. "News is driven by the zeitgeist," says Jonathan Weisman, "and if an issue isn't part of the current zeitgeist then it will be a tough sell to editors." But who drives the zeitgeist, in Washington at least? The administration. In short, the press's awkward embrace of an impossible ideal limits its ability to help set the agenda.

This is not a call to scrap objectivity, but rather a search for a better way of thinking about it, a way that is less restrictive and more grounded in reality. As Eric Black, a reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, says, "We need a way to both do our job and defend it."

AN IDEAL'S TROUBLED PAST

American journalism's honeymoon with objectivity has been brief. The press began to embrace objectivity in the middle of the nineteenth century, as society turned away from religion and toward science and empiricism to explain the world. But in his 1998 book, Just the Facts, a history of the origins of objectivity in U.S. journalism, David Mindich argues that by the turn of the twentieth century, the flaws of objective journalism were beginning to show. Mindich shows how "objective" coverage of lynching in the 1890s by The New York Times and other papers created a false balance on the issue and failed "to recognize a truth, that African-Americans were being terrorized across the nation."

After World War I, the rise of public relations and the legacy of wartime propaganda - in which journalists such as Walter Lippman had played key roles - began to undermine reporters' faith in facts. The war, the Depression, and Roosevelt's New Deal raised complex issues that defied journalism's attempt to distill them into simple truths. As a result, the use of bylines increased (an early nod to the fact that news is touched by human frailty), the political columnist crawled from the primordial soup, and the idea of "interpretive reporting" emerged. Still, as Michael Schudson argued in his 1978 book Discovering the News, journalism clung to objectivity as the faithful cling to religion, for guidance in an uncertain world. He wrote: "From the beginning, then, criticism of the 'myth' of objectivity has accompanied its enunciation . . . . Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift."

By the 1960s, objectivity was again under fire, this time to more fundamental and lasting effect. Straight, "objective" coverage of McCarthyism a decade earlier had failed the public, leading Alan Barth, an editorial writer at The Washington Post, to tell a 1952 gathering of the Association for Education in Journalism: "There can be little doubt that the way [Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges] have been reported in most papers serves Senator McCarthy's partisan political purposes much more than it serves the purposes of the press, the interest of truth." Government lies about the U2 spy flights, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam War all cast doubt on the ability of "objective" journalism to get at anything close to the truth. The New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer was in part a reaction to what many saw as the failings of mainstream reporting. In Vietnam, many of the beat reporters who arrived believing in objectivity eventually realized, if they stayed long enough, that such an approach wasn't sufficient. Says John Laurence, a former CBS News correspondent, about his years covering Vietnam: "Because the war went on for so long and so much evidence accumulated to suggest it was a losing cause, and that in the process we were destroying the Vietnamese and ourselves, I felt I had a moral obligation to report my views as much as the facts."

As a result of all these things, American journalism changed. "Vietnam and Watergate destroyed what I think was a genuine sense that our officials knew more than we did and acted in good faith," says Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times reporter and columnist. We became more sophisticated in our understanding of the limits of objectivity. And indeed, the parameters of modern journalistic objectivity allow reporters quite a bit of leeway to analyze, explain, and put news in context, thereby helping guide readers and viewers through the flood of information.

Still, nothing replaced objectivity as journalism's dominant professional norm. Some 75 percent of journalists and news executives in a 1999 Pew Research Center survey said it was possible to obtain a true, accurate, and widely agreed-upon account of an event. More than two-thirds thought it feasible to develop "a systematic method to cover events in a disinterested and fair way." The survey also offered another glimpse of the objectivity fissure: more than two-thirds of the print press in the Pew survey also said that "providing an interpretation of the news is a core principle," while less than half of those in television news agreed with that.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

If objectivity's philosophical hold on journalism has eased a bit since the 1960s, a number of other developments have bound us more tightly to the objective ideal and simultaneously exacerbated its shortcomings. Not only are journalists operating under conflicting orders, as E.J. Dionne argued, but their corporate owners don't exactly trumpet the need to rankle the status quo. It is perhaps important to note that one of the original forces behind the shift to objectivity in the nineteenth century was economic. To appeal to as broad an audience as possible, first the penny press and later the new wire services gradually stripped news of "partisan" context. Today's owners have squeezed the newshole, leaving less space for context and analysis.

If space is a problem, time is an even greater one. The nonstop news cycle leaves reporters less time to dig, and encourages reliance on official sources who can provide the information quickly and succinctly. "We are slaves to the incremental daily development," says one White House correspondent, "but you are perceived as having a bias if you don't cover it." This lack of time makes a simpleminded and lazy version of objectivity all the more tempting. In The American Prospect of November 6, 2000, Chris Mooney wrote about how "e-spin," a relentless diet of canned attacks and counterattacks e-mailed from the Bush and Gore campaigns to reporters, was winding up, virtually unedited, in news stories. "Lazy reporters may be seduced by the ease of readily provided research," Mooney wrote. "That's not a new problem, except that the prevalence of electronic communication has made it easier to be lazy."

Meanwhile, the Internet and cable news's Shout TV, which drive the nonstop news cycle, have also elevated the appeal of "attitude" in the news, making the balanced, measured report seem anachronistic. In the January/February issue of cjr, young journalists asked to create their dream newspaper wanted more point-of-view writing in news columns. They got a heavy dose of it during the second gulf war, with news "anchors" like Fox's Neil Cavuto saying of those who opposed the war, "You were sickening then; you are sickening now."

Perhaps most ominous of all, public relations, whose birth early in the twentieth century rattled the world of objective journalism, has matured into a spin monster so ubiquitous that nearly every word a reporter hears from an official source has been shaped and polished to proper effect. Consider the memo from the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, as described in a March 2 New York Times story, that urged the party - and President Bush - to soften their language on the environment to appeal to suburban voters. "Climate change" instead of "global warming," "conservationist" rather than "environmentalist." To the extent that the threat of being accused of bias inhibits reporters from cutting through this kind of manipulation, challenging it, and telling readers about it, then journalism's dominant professional norm needs a new set of instructions.

Joan Didion got at this problem while taking Bob Woodward to task in a 1996 piece in The New York Review of Books for writing books that she argued were too credulous, that failed to counter the possibility that his sources were spinning him. She wrote:

The genuflection toward "fairness" is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what "fairness" has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

Asked about such criticism, Woodward says that for his books he has the time and the space and the sources to actually uncover what really happened, not some manufactured version of it. "The best testimony to that," he says, "is that the critics never suggest how any of it is manufactured, that any of it is wrong." Then, objectivity rears its head. "What they seem to be saying," Woodward says of his critics, "is that I refuse to use the information I have to make a political argument, and they are right, I won't." Yet some of Woodward's critics do suggest how his material is manufactured. Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Woodward's latest book, Bush at War, in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly, argues that, while reporting on a significant foreign-policy debate, Woodward fully presents the point of view of his cooperative sources, but fails to report deeply on the other sides of the argument. Thus he presents an incomplete picture. "Pseudo-objectivity in the nation's capital," Hitchens writes, "is now overripe for regime change."

TO FILL THE VOID

Jason Riley is a young reporter at the Louisville Courier-Journal. Along with a fellow reporter, R.G. Dunlop, he won a Polk award this year for a series on dysfunction in the county courts, in which hundreds of felony cases dating back to 1983 were lost and never resolved. Riley and Dunlop's series was a classic example of enterprise reporting: poking around the courthouse, Riley came across one felony case that had been open for several years. That led to more cases, then to a drawer full of open cases. No one was complaining, at least publicly, about this problem. In a first draft, Riley wrote that the system was flawed because it let cases fall off the docket and just disappear for years. "I didn't think it needed attribution because it was the conclusion I had drawn after six months of investigation," he writes in an e-mail. But his editor sent it back with a note: "Says who?"

In a follow-up profile of the county's lead prosecutor, a man Riley has covered for three years, many sources would not criticize the prosecutor on the record. He "knew what people thought of him, knew what his strengths and weaknesses were," Riley says. "Since no one was openly discussing issues surrounding him, I raised many in my profile without attribution." Again his editors hesitated. There were discussions about the need to remain objective. "Some of my conclusions and questions were left out because no one else brought them up on the record," he says.

Riley discovered a problem on his own, reported the hell out of it, developed an understanding of the situation, and reached some conclusions based on that. No official sources were speaking out about it, so he felt obliged to fill that void. Is that bias? Good reporters do it, or attempt to do it, all the time. The strictures of objectivity can make it difficult. "I think most journalists will admit to feeding sources the information we want to hear, for quotes or attribution, just so we can make the crucial point we are not allowed to make ourselves," Riley says. "But why not? As society's watchdogs, I think we should be asking questions, we should be bringing up problems, possible solutions . . . writing what we know to be true."

Last fall, when America and the world were debating whether to go to war in Iraq, no one in the Washington establishment wanted to talk much about the aftermath of such a war. For the Bush administration, attempting to rally support for a preemptive war, messy discussions about all that could go wrong in the aftermath were unhelpful. Anything is better than Saddam, the argument went. The Democrats, already wary of being labeled unpatriotic, spoke their piece in October when they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, essentially putting the country on a war footing. Without the force of a "she said" on the aftermath story, it was largely driven by the administration, which is to say stories were typically framed by what the administration said it planned to do: work with other nations to build democracy. Strike a blow to terrorists. Stay as long as we need to and not a minute longer. Pay for it all with Iraqi oil revenue. There were some notable exceptions - a piece by Anthony Shadid in the October 20 Boston Globe, for instance, and another on September 22 by James Dao in The New York Times, pushed beyond the administration's broad assumptions about what would happen when Saddam was gone - but most of the coverage included only boilerplate reminders that Iraq is a fractious country and bloody reprisals are likely, that tension between the Kurds and Turks might be a problem, and that Iran has designs on the Shiite region of southern Iraq.
David House, the reader advocate for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, wrote a piece on March 23 that got at the press's limitations in setting the agenda. "Curiously, for all the technology the news media have, for all the gifted minds that make it all work . . . it's a simple thing to stop the media cold. Say nothing, hide documents."

In November, James Fallows wrote a cover story for The Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Fifty-First State? The Inevitable Aftermath of Victory in Iraq." In it, with the help of regional experts, historians, and retired military officers, he gamed out just how difficult the aftermath could be. Among the scenarios he explored: the financial and logistical complications caused by the destruction of Baghdad's infrastructure; the possibility that Saddam Hussein would escape and join Osama bin Laden on the Most Wanted list; how the dearth of Arabic speakers in the U.S. government would hinder peacekeeping and other aftermath operations; how the need for the U.S., as the occupying power, to secure Iraq's borders would bring it face to face with Iran, another spoke in the "axis of evil"; the complications of working with the United Nations after it refused to support the war; what to do about the Iraqi debt from, among other things, UN-imposed reparations after the first gulf war, which some estimates put as high as $400 billion.

Much of this speculation has since come to pass and is bedeviling the U.S.'s attempt to stabilize - let alone democratize - Iraq. So are some other post-war realities that were either too speculative or too hypothetical to be given much air in the prewar debate. Looting, for instance, and general lawlessness. The fruitless (thus far) search for weapons of mass destruction. The inability to quickly restore power and clean water. A decimated health-care system. The difficulty of establishing an interim Iraqi government, and the confusion over who exactly should run things in the meantime. The understandably shallow reservoir of patience among the long-suffering Iraqis. The hidden clause in Halliburton's contract to repair Iraq's oil wells that also, by the way, granted it control of production and distribution, despite the administration's assurances that the Iraqis would run their own oil industry.

In the rush to war, how many Americans even heard about some of these possibilities? Of the 574 stories about Iraq that aired on NBC, ABC, and CBS evening news broadcasts between September 12 (when Bush addressed the UN) and March 7 (a week and a half before the war began), only twelve dealt primarily with the potential aftermath, according to Andrew Tyndall's numbers.

The Republicans were saying only what was convenient, thus the "he said." The Democratic leadership was saying little, so there was no "she said." "Journalists are never going to fill the vacuum left by a weak political opposition," says The New York Times's Steven R. Weisman. But why not? If something important is being ignored, doesn't the press have an obligation to force our elected officials to address it? We have the ability, even on considerably less important matters than war and nation-building. Think of the dozens of articles The New York Times published between July 10, 2002 and March 31 about the Augusta National Country Club's exclusion of women members, including the one from November 25 that carried the headline cbs staying silent in debate on women joining augusta. Why couldn't there have been headlines last fall that read: BUSH STILL MUM ON AFTERMATH, or BEYOND SADDAM: WHAT COULD GO RIGHT, AND WHAT COULD GO WRONG? And while you're at it, consider the criticism the Times's mini-crusade on Augusta engendered in the media world, as though an editor's passion for an issue never drives coverage.

This is not inconsequential nitpicking. The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, who has written in support of going to war with Iraq, wrote of the aftermath in the March 31 issue: "An American presence in Baghdad will carry with it risks and responsibilities that will shape the future of the United States in the world." The press not only could have prepared the nation and its leadership for the aftermath we are now witnessing, but should have.

THE REAL BIAS

In the early 1990s, I was a statehouse reporter for the Charleston Daily Mail in West Virginia. Every time a bill was introduced in the House to restrict access to abortion, the speaker, who was solidly pro-choice, sent the bill to the health committee, which was chaired by a woman who was also pro-choice. Of course, the bills never emerged from that committee. I was green and, yes, pro-choice, so it took a couple of years of witnessing this before it sunk in that - as the antiabortion activists had been telling me from day one - the committee was stacked with pro-choice votes and that this was how "liberal" leadership killed the abortion bills every year while appearing to let the legislative process run its course. Once I understood, I eagerly wrote that story, not only because I knew it would get me on page one, but also because such political maneuverings offended my reporter's sense of fairness. The bias, ultimately, was toward the story.

Reporters are biased, but not in the oversimplified, left-right way that Ann Coulter and the rest of the bias cops would have everyone believe. As Nicholas Confessore argued in The American Prospect, most of the loudest bias-spotters were not reared in a newsroom. They come from politics, where everything is driven by ideology. Voting Democratic and not going to church - two bits of demography often trotted out to show how liberal the press is - certainly have some bearing on one's interpretation of events. But to leap to the conclusion that reporters use their precious column inches to push a left-wing agenda is specious reasoning at its worst. We all have our biases, and they can be particularly pernicious when they are unconscious. Arguably the most damaging bias is rarely discussed - the bias born of class. A number of people interviewed for this story said that the lack of socioeconomic diversity in the newsroom is one of American journalism's biggest blind spots. Most newsroom diversity efforts, though, focus on ethnic, racial, and gender minorities, which can often mean people with different skin color but largely the same middle-class background and aspirations. At a March 13 panel on media bias at Columbia's journalism school, John Leo, a columnist for U.S. News & World Report, said, "It used to be that anybody could be a reporter by walking in the door. It's a little harder to do that now, and you don't get the working-class Irish poor like Hamill or Breslin or me. What you get is people from Ivy League colleges with upper-class credentials, what you get is people who more and more tend to be and act alike." That, he says, makes it hard for a newsroom to spot its own biases.

Still, most reporters' real biases are not what political ideologues tend to think. "Politically I'm a reporter," says Eric Nalder, an investigative reporter at the San Jose Mercury News. Reporters are biased toward conflict because it is more interesting than stories without conflict; we are biased toward sticking with the pack because it is safe; we are biased toward event-driven coverage because it is easier; we are biased toward existing narratives because they are safe and easy. Consider the story - written by reporters around the country - of how Kenneth L. Lay, the former ceo of Enron, encouraged employees to buy company stock as he was secretly dumping his. It was a conveniently damning narrative, and easy to believe. Only it turned out, some two years later, to be untrue, leading The New York Times's Kurt Eichenwald to write a story correcting the record on February 9.

Mostly, though, we are biased in favor of getting the story, regardless of whose ox is being gored. Listen to Daniel Bice, an investigative columnist at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, summarize his reporting philosophy: "Try not to be boring, be a reliable source of information, cut through the political, corporate, and bureaucratic bullshit, avoid partisanship, and hold politicians' feet to the fire." It would be tough to find a reporter who disagrees with any of that.

In his 1979 book Deciding What's News, the Columbia sociologist Herbert Gans defined what he called the journalist's "paraideology," which, he says, unconsciously forms and strengthens much of what we think of as news judgment. This consists largely of a number of "enduring values" - such as "altruistic democracy" and "responsible capitalism" - that are reformist, not partisan. "In reality," Gans writes, "the news is not so much conservative or liberal as it is reformist; indeed, the enduring values are very much like the values of the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century." My abortion story, then, came from my sense that what was happening violated my understanding of "altruistic democracy." John Laurence distills Gans's paraideology into simpler terms: "We are for honesty, fairness, courage, humility. We are against corruption, exploitation, cruelty, criminal behavior, violence, discrimination, torture, abuse of power, and many other things." Clifford Levy, a reporter for The New York Times whose series on abuse in New York's homes for the mentally ill won a Pulitzer this year, says, "Of all the praise I got for the series, the most meaningful was from other reporters at the paper who said it made them proud to work there because it was a classic case of looking out for those who can't look out for themselves."

This "paraideology," James Carey explains, can lead to charges of liberal bias. "There is a bit of the reformer in anyone who enters journalism," he says. "And reformers are always going to make conservatives uncomfortable to an extent because conservatives, by and large, want to preserve the status quo."

Gans, though, notes a key flaw in the journalist's paraideology. "Journalists cannot exercise news judgment," he writes, "without a composite of nation, society, and national and social institutions in their collective heads, and this picture is an aggregate of reality judgments . . . In doing so, they cannot leave room for the reality judgments that, for example, poor people have about America; nor do they ask, or even think of asking, the kinds of questions about the country that radicals, ultraconservatives, the religiously orthodox, or social scientists ask as a result of their reality judgments."

This understanding of "the other" has always been - and will always be - a central challenge of journalism. No individual embodies all the perspectives of a society. But we are not served in this effort by a paralyzing fear of being accused of bias. In their recent book The Press Effect, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman make a strong case that this fear was a major factor in the coverage of the Florida recount of the 2000 presidential election, and its influence on journalists was borne out in my reporting for this piece. "Our paper is under constant criticism by people alleging various forms of bias," says the Star-Tribune's Eric Black. "And there is a daily effort to perform in ways that will make it harder to criticize. Some are reasonable, but there is a line you can cross after which you are avoiding your duties to truth-telling." In a March 10 piece critical of the press's performance at Bush's prewar press conference, USA Today's Peter Johnson quoted Sam Donaldson as saying that it is difficult for the media - especially during war - "to press very hard when they know that a large segment of the population doesn't want to see a president whom they have anointed having to squirm." If we're about to go to war - especially one that is controversial - shouldn't the president squirm?

It is important, always, for reporters to understand their biases, to understand what the accepted narratives are, and to work against them as much as possible. This might be less of a problem if our newsrooms were more diverse - intellectually and socioeconomically as well as in gender, race, and ethnicity - but it would still be a struggle. There is too much easy opinion passing for journalism these days, and this is in no way an attempt to justify that. Quite the opposite. We need deep reporting and real understanding, but we also need reporters to acknowledge all that they don't know, and not try to mask that shortcoming behind a gloss of attitude, or drown it in a roar of oversimplified assertions.

TOWARD A BETTER DEFINITION OF OBJECTIVITY

In the last two years, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been mentioned in more than 3,000 articles on the Nexis database, and at least 388 (11 percent) included in the same breath the fact that he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The same search criteria found that Yasser Arafat turned up in almost 96,000 articles, but only 177 (less than .2 percent) mentioned that he won the Nobel prize. When we move beyond stenography, reporters make a million choices, each one subjective. When, for example, is it relevant to point out, in a story about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, that the U.S. may have helped Saddam Hussein build those weapons in the 1980s? Every time? Never?

The rules of objectivity don't help us answer such questions. But there are some steps we can take to clarify what we do and help us move forward with confidence. A couple of modest proposals:

Journalists (and journalism) must acknowledge, humbly and publicly, that what we do is far more subjective and far less detached than the aura of objectivity implies - and the public wants to believe. If we stop claiming to be mere objective observers, it will not end the charges of bias but will allow us to defend what we do from a more realistic, less hypocritical position.

Secondly, we need to free (and encourage) reporters to develop expertise and to use it to sort through competing claims, identify and explain the underlying assumptions of those claims, and make judgments about what readers and viewers need to know to understand what is happening. In short, we need them to be more willing to "adjudicate factual disputes," as Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman argue in The Press Effect. Bill Marimow, the editor of the Baltimore Sun, talks of reporters "mastering" their beats. "We want our reporters to be analysts," he told a class at Columbia in March. "Becoming an expert, and mastering the whole range of truth about issues will give you the ability to make independent judgments."

Timothy Noah, writing in The Washington Monthly for a 1999 symposium on objectivity, put it this way: "A good reporter who is well-steeped in his subject matter and who isn't out to prove his cleverness, but rather is sweating out a detailed understanding of a topic worth exploring, will probably develop intelligent opinions that will inform and perhaps be expressed in his journalism." This happens every day in ways large and small, but it still happens too rarely. In a March 18 piece headlined BUSH CLINGS TO DUBIOUS ALLEGATIONS ABOUT IRAQ, The Washington Post's Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank laid out all of Bush's "allegations" about Saddam Hussein "that have been challenged - and in some cases disproved - by the United Nations, European governments, and even U.S. intelligence." It was noteworthy for its bluntness, and for its lack of an "analysis" tag. In commenting on that story, Steven Weisman of The New York Times illustrates how conflicted journalism is over whether such a piece belongs in the news columns: "It's a very good piece, but it is very tendentious," he says. "It's interesting that the editors didn't put it on page one, because it would look like they are calling Bush a liar. Maybe we should do more pieces like it, but you must be careful not to be argumentative."

Some reporters work hard to get these same "argumentative" ideas into their stories in more subtle ways. Think of Jason Riley's comment about "feeding information" to sources. Steven Weisman calls it making it part of the "tissue" of the story. For example, in a March 17 report on the diplomatic failures of the Bush administration, Weisman worked in the idea that the CIA was questioning the Iraq-al Qaeda connection by attributing it to European officials as one explanation for why the U.S. casus belli never took hold in the UN.

The test, though, should not be whether it is tendentious, but whether it is true.

There are those who will argue that if you start fooling around with the standard of objectivity you open the door to partisanship. But mainstream reporters by and large are not ideological warriors. They are imperfect people performing a difficult job that is crucial to society. Letting them write what they know and encouraging them to dig toward some deeper understanding of things is not biased, it is essential. Reporters should feel free, as Daniel Bice says, to "call it as we see it, but not be committed to one side or the other." Their professional values make them, Herbert Gans argues, akin to reformers, and they should embrace that aspect of what they do, not hide it for fear of being slapped with a bias charge. And when actual bias seeps in - as it surely will - the self-policing in the newsroom must be vigorous. Witness the memo John Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote last month to his staff after a front-page piece on a new Texas abortion law veered left of center: "I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage."

Journalists have more tools today than ever to help them "adjudicate factual disputes." In 1993, before the computer-age version of "precision journalism" had taken root in the newsroom, Steve Doig helped The Miami Herald win a Pulitzer with his computer-assisted stories that traced damage done by Hurricane Andrew to shoddy home construction and failed governmental oversight of builders. "Precision journalism is arguably activist, but it helps us approach the unobtainable goal of objectivity more than traditional reporting strategies," says Doig, who now teaches computer-assisted reporting at Arizona State University. "It allows you to measure a problem, gives you facts that are less controvertible. Without the computer power, our Hurricane Andrew stories would have essentially been finger-pointing stories, balanced with builders saying there is no way any structure could have withstood such winds."

On April 1, Ron Martz, a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution embedded with the Army in Iraq, delivered a "war diary" entry on National Public Radio in which he defended his battlefield decision to drop his reporter's detachment and take a soldier's place holding an intravenous drip bag and comforting a wounded Iraqi civilian. The "ethicists," Martz said on NPR, tell us this is murky territory. That Martz, an accomplished reporter, should worry at all that his reputation could suffer from something like this says much about journalism's relationship with objectivity. Martz concluded that he is a human being first and a reporter second, and was comfortable with that. Despite all our important and necessary attempts to minimize our humanity, it can't be any other way.

Journalism values online
Journalism values online

Online journalism ethics: A new frontier
From "balance" to "balance/ fairness/wholeness" and from "accuracy" to "accuracy/ authenticity:" In seminars across the country, editors in ASNE's Journalism Values Institute have revised the core values of journalism.
The other essentials, the JVI participants affirmed, are leadership, accessibility, credibility and news judgment.

Following those deeper and broader definitions of our principles can certainly improve journalism as we know it today. And it's obvious that in the unlimited newshole of new media, we can practice those values like never before.

So it's tempting to say we'll just transfer the values into cyberspace, and get on with it.

But it may be early to say that: online media can take us and our readers to places journalism hasn't been before. And in those places, our values may be obstacles or antiques.

Please consider:

Balance/Fairness/Wholeness
Hypertext links to more information can guarantee thorough reporting.

But we should decide:

When we should link to ads, to editorials or columns, to sites of partisan organizations, hate groups, charities seeking contributions, other news media.

What to do about readers leaving a report (via links) before they read all sides.

Since we can, when we should use all the photos and words from the scene.
Accuracy/Authenticity
Online media have room to get the facts right, and to cover the right facts.

But authenticity also asks us to understand and convey background, context and nuance - in a medium that moves at the speed of light.

Furthermore, reporters will come upon interesting remarks online and want to use them in stories.

And if we divide news from ads on a page of newsprint, do we want some design devices for the computer screen?

Leadership
Interactivity is perfect for getting people in touch with important issues and the people with whom they share community problems.
But some people don't have access and others tailor their news packages: How can newspapers make sure that communities have some common knowledge?

In an avalanche of information, glitter and noise attract attention. How can we rescue the planning commission report?

Accessibility
Interactivity is accessibility. Newsroom-sponsored chat rooms and forums were invented to connect readers to a subject, the newspaper and each other.
But that may get tricky if anonymous comments don't pass an editor en route to a forum, and too restrictive (and legally complicated) if they do.

And if we invite readers to respond to writers, photographers and editors, we ought to think through the level of civility we hope for - and how we'll deal with its absence from either direction.

Credibility
With no worry about costly space, we can make our reporting and our judgments transparent.
A linked sidebar explaining our news decisions and policies would announce we are accountable to our readers.

And readers could do their own evaluation if we linked to our sources. (But we'd need to warn a source beforehand if we might post an interview transcript.)

And leaked and anonymous information would be an even greater credibility problem if readers got accustomed to knowing more about sources.

While thinking about this, would it be self-serving or public service to weigh in on the credibility of other people's sites?

News Judgment
In the JVI thinking, good news judgment means we reflect on our coverage, know our communities and issues, offer clear thinking and explanations, respect all people and cover all dimensions of our community.
Newshole no longer limits coverage of our communities. Lists and boilerplate and civics guides stay posted. We will be very interactive (won't we?).

Ergo, being online can improve news judgment. (Though understanding communities, thinking clearly and reflecting on coverage are still plain old brainwork.)

All in all, it's a sure bet that cyberspace will help us keep our promises.

This new vehicle also allows who-knows-what, invites new interpretations, and begs for invention.

So it takes two decks to answer the question, Can these six core values guide us into cyberspace?

Absolutely.

But absolutely, not absolutely.

Byrd is a visiting professional at the Poynter Institute.

Terror detainees win Lords appeal
Mood:  cool
Now Playing: Terror detainees win Lords appeal
News from BBC here shows that people aware that human rights should be defended from abbused by politician.



Detaining foreign terrorist suspects without trial breaks human rights laws, the UK's highest court has ruled.

In a blow to the government's anti-terror measures, the House of Lords ruled by an eight to one majority in favour of appeals by nine detainees.

The Law Lords said the measures were incompatible with European human rights laws, but Home Secretary Charles Clarke said the men would remain in prison.

He said the measures would "remain in force" until the law was reviewed.

Most of the men are being held indefinitely in Belmarsh prison, south London.

The ruling creates a major problem for Mr Clarke on his first day as home secretary following David Blunkett's resignation.

In a statement to MPs, Mr Clarke said: "I will be asking Parliament to renew this legislation in the New Year.

"In the meantime, we will be studying the judgment carefully to see whether it is possible to modify our legislation to address the concerns raised by the House of Lords."

Welcome's note
Mood:  bright
Welcome to the new and fair global life where people life without fear, where people enjoy living under the sky and where pepole seek togetherness in creating the new world.