The media and Iraq

If anybody were to walk into a pet shop in Australia the resident galah would be talking about microeconomic policy, so Paul Keating declared when Treasurer.

Microeconomic reform has been a core concern of both Labor and Liberal governments since the 1980s. As the government budget papers stipulate, microeconomic reform is concerned with introducing greater competitiveness into the private sector and greater commercialisation in the public sector.

The Government’s media reforms are touted as bringing microeconomic reform upon the media industry: but it is well acknowledged that the upshot of these reforms is to further cement the very high levels of capital concentration, at the behest of Australia’s media moguls.

That’s hardly microeconomic reform. If it were really microeconomic reform then the government would be more interested in breaking up the domination of the media sector by a few big players and encouraging the development of smaller and more innovative start ups. Greater diversity in media ownership in turn would lead to greater diversity of opinion in Australia’s marketplace of ideas.

Those who question the soundness of the government’s policy correctly point out that greater concentration will lead to a stifling of public debate in Australia.

But this position obscures one very important point, namely we don’t have much diversity of opinion as it is. Australia, curiously unlike other advanced industrial states, does not have a vibrant series of journals of opinion and public policy such as say The New Republic or The Spectator, The Nation and so on that span the political spectrum.

On Line Opinion provides a good example of what Australia needs. There is true diversity of opinion and many contributions are of genuine intellectual interest yet tailored for the broader public.

Given the dearth of such publications, however, most intellectual commentary takes place on the opinion papers of Australia’s major broadsheets and The Australian Financial Review, hence is necessarily limited. Much of the agenda driving public debate is centred on these pages. If you read them carefully you’ll rarely find true diversity of opinion. The debate proceeds along very narrow grounds within a set band of respectable opinion.

Consider Iraq, perhaps the best contemporary example. The debate is seemingly a vigorous one between both proponents and critics of the government’s policy. But if you examine the debate closely you will find, generally speaking, both sides share a common foundational assumption: namely, policy in Iraq is concerned with instituting a stable democracy.

Critics point out that because of poor planning, the “depravity” of the Iraqi’s, and wrong headed assumptions, things have gone awry in Iraq and a change of direction is in order.

For instance the founder and leading light of "critical" International Relations, former Monash academic Andrew Linklater, writes that on Iraq "one crucial question is whether the United States and the United Kingdom have displayed a similar lack of vision which threatens to deepen the divisions of international society by combining the defence of liberal-democratic values with a 'war against terror'".

David Wright-Neville, Australia’s leading analyst on global terrorism and vocal critic of government policy on Iraq, wrote in The Age that “the original criteria that Downing Street set down for assessing victory in Iraq - the establishment of a viable democratic multi-ethnic state - cannot be achieved.”

The prescient strategic analyst Gary Brown, also a noted critic of Government action, observed that the Iraq war was due to a “mad ideological belief that democratic institutions can be imposed on any country by force and made to work”, a view now “utterly discredited”. (On Line Opinion.)

Robert Manne, Australia’s leading public intellectual, in The Sydney Morning Herald has written of a similar democracy promotion ideology held by the neo-conservatives who “fantasised that if only Iraq could be democratised it might provide a model for the entire Middle East”.

But the thinking person finds something very strange in all this. Occupying powers do not have rights. They have only responsibilities. Yet it is we that are debating the future of Iraq, even though the water crisis, interest rates and carbon trading are not much debated in Baghdad. It is a strange democracy where the key debates are occurring a world away from home.

Notice that this also applies to the terms of our military presence. It is not for us to debate about, and ultimately decide upon, whether a surge or a withdrawal of combat troops and such is a good idea or not. That is for the Iraqis to decide.

Public opinion in Iraq is clear. Overwhelmingly, the population of Arab Iraq would rather the US, and by implication Australian and UK, troops be withdrawn. Arab Iraq just so happens to be where the troops are deployed. If Iraq were a democracy then there would be no outside Western military presence in Iraq and certainly we would not be deciding upon the matter here.

We do not need much more than that to see whatever our motive for being in Iraq, democracy isn’t it.

If Iraq was a democracy then the government would reflect the needs and concerns of the Shia dominated population. An Iraqi Government accountable to its people, rather than the master in Washington, would be interested in greater regional integration, particularly with Iran.

Also, the Shia have traditionally been the downtrodden in Iraqi and Arab society. Any government in Baghdad that would address their needs and concerns would be social democratic in character, using the indigenous resource wealth of the country to redistribute wealth and power to the destitute. Instead, Iraq’s wealth is to be plundered by US investors. The interests of Washington are diametrically opposed to the interests of Iraq’s population.

Initially the US sought to create a “caucus” political system whose effect would be to dilute popular sovereignty, given that Washington is well aware of the conflict of interests it has with Iraq’s people. The Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani expressed his opposition to this scheme and, fearing a Shiite revolt, Washington backed down and allowed elections for a parliament to proceed. However, despite this, as Seymour Hersh has shown, Washington sought at once to undermine the elections by a covert operation to boost the vote of its preferred candidate. This has not prevented Team Bush from subsequently using these forced elections, which it attempted to subvert, in a cynical attempt to enhance its democratic credentials.

The US objective in Iraq is to institute a stable neo-colonial dependency in the oil rich Middle East, not to redistribute wealth and protect and develop Iraqi industry. Washington’s contempt for democracy was well symbolised by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s use of Saddam era anti-union laws to bust up the labour movement; even Saddam was into "WorkChoices".

US planners have always regarded the energy resources of the Middle East as a “stupendous source of strategic power” the “greatest material prize in world history” that gives it “veto power” over the policies of its main industrial rivals. Controlling the Middle East gives Washington critical leverage in international relations.

A recent study has re-affirmed that Iraq holds the second largest reserves of oil in the world, after Saudi Arabia. The looming peak in global oil production with non-OPEC oil estimated to peak in 2010 made Iraq, which was known to be defenceless, a very tempting target for planners in Washington given the role that energy plays in the global system of power.

A report by The Financial Times on the study argues that it "highlights the opportunity for Iraq to be one of the world’s biggest oil suppliers, and its attractions for international oil companies - if the conflict in the country can be resolved." (“Iraq May Hold Twice As Much Oil”, Ed Crooks The Financial Times April 18, 2007)

De-classified war planning documents drawn up by Central Command (PDF 92KB) demonstrate that a key objective of US military operations in the first phase of the conflict was "seizure" of Iraq's oil fields. By contrast the seizure and dismantlement of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction", the no longer discussed initial rationale for war, was a low priority for strategic planners.

One of the key architects of the Iraq war, Paul Wolfowitz, has stated, “the most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.” Wolfowitz has attempted to clarify this remark, stating that military action was needed in the Iraq case because Saddam’s oil meant he could resist US economic pressure. In reality, this clarification is unsatisfactory.

First, it flatly contradicts a previous interview with Vanity Fair where Wolfowitz reveals that “weapons of mass destruction” was but a pretext for the war chosen for internal bureaucratic reasons in which case the denial is instantly rendered invalid. Second, as Wolfowitz well knows Iraq was subject to comprehensive economic sanctions that decimated its oil infrastructure.

Cementing US global primacy through military power, not spreading democracy, is the key underlying doctrine of the neo-conservatives. The “new” doctrine of preventive war, announced prior to the Iraq war, was to be enshrined in Baghdad. The Bush administration sought to use Iraq to demonstrate that it meant what it said in its 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States that officially re-affirmed the tenets of a controversial 1992 draft Defence Planning Guidance written by Cheney and Wolfowitz.

It must be added that the contempt for democracy does not just apply to Iraq. The Bush Administration had sought to use Iraq in order to ram through unpopular reform measures at home in order to further cement the power and privilege of a highly concentrated elite. So did the Howard Government. For Canberra, Iraq was to be a wedge behind which they could corral a frightened population. Use of the threat of terrorism and turban headed hordes in order to wage a neo-liberal jihad against the population has been one of the central, if not the central, features of the Howard years.

We may say that the US invaded Iraq in order to deter democracy in Iraq, to deter democracy globally by shifting the burden of statecraft in international relations further toward the employment of military power where the US maintains a comparative advantage (the world is economically tri-polar and militarily uni-polar with the rise of China threatening to make it multi-polar and bi-polar respectively hence less amenable to control from Washington) and to deter democracy at home.

One can see the link in the issue of troop withdrawal. As noted, bumper majorities in Arab Iraq desire the occupation of Iraq to end. The mid term congressional elections demonstrate that so does the population of the United States. When Nancy Pelosi calls for the occupation of Iraq to be wound down she is acting on the mandate given to her by the voters. This demonstrates that so far as Iraq is concerned the preferences of the people of Iraq and the United States are not reflected in actual policy, but our scribes are still able to use the term democracy with a straight face all the same.

Of course, the analysis presented above could well be wrong, but Iraq demonstrates that our Government’s contempt for democracy both abroad and at home would not be a thesis displayed prominently either now or post media "reform" in the opinion pages of our major broadsheets no matter how compelling the empirical evidence.

Whenever we observe that a series of opinions are widely held, even by critics of government action, but are at odds with empirical reality we know we are entering the realm of ideology. What Iraq demonstrates is that there is a hidden underlying dominant ideology that sets the framework for permissible analysis in International Relations. Why that is so is a matter for the “sociology of knowledge”, understood as an empirical undertaking.

This is of concern because, as noted, intellectual commentary in Australia is dominated by the agenda setting broadsheets. The intellectual community is meant to provide perspective on government policy. This is an essential task for informed debate is critical to the fashioning of rational policy outcomes in a democracy. However, this cannot happen so long as critics of government action are allowed to go thus far and no further.

Indeed, most commentary in the big media places a premium on pithy language and emotionally potent over simplifications. Combined with a dominant ideology this means that in our opinion pages there is a premium placed on irrationality.

There can be little doubt that timid analysis has played its part in the mess we find ourselves in Iraq today. In fact, a US colonel has slammed America’s generals as being incompetent partly out of such analytical timidity.

So long as even the critics of the Iraq war maintain their opposition on strictly pragmatic criteria, without questioning our right to intervene if we judge it to be feasible, it follows by simple logic that other interventions of a similar type will follow in future. The media, which has played an important role in this war, is helping to set up the framework for the next one.