Chrenkoff: Good News From Iraq

[Annie]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007113

Lots more and links:

'The Terrorists and the Media'
A roundup of the past two weeks' good news from Iraq.

BY ARTHUR CHRENKOFF
Tuesday, August 16, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Conservative activist and commentator L. Brent Bozell III recently wrote about an encounter with a veteran:

My son's friend Todd Jones just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. At a celebratory gathering at his parents' home, we chatted a while, and I asked him what he thought were the biggest problems facing the military. Without hesitating, he shot back: "The terrorists and the media."

For Bozell, this pretty much confirmed what many others, on both side of the camera, have been saying lately:

In a rare moment of balance on CBS, Army Capt. Christopher Vick echoed that sentiment: "I think it's hard for Americans to get up every day and turn on the news and see the horrible things that are going on here, because there's no focus on the good things that go on. What they see is another car bomb went off." This kind of coverage is exactly what the terrorists are seeking to achieve, believes Vick.

Mark Yost, who served in the Navy during the Reagan years, caused a stir in media circles for stating the obvious in an editorial in the St. Paul Pioneer Press: "to judge by the dispatches, all the Iraqis do is stand outside markets and government buildings waiting to be blown up."

On CNN's "Reliable Sources," host Howard Kurtz asked Frank Sesno, a former Washington bureau chief for CNN, about the Yost column. Sesno acknowledged you get more depth from print coverage, but suggested "even then, the bias is towards that which is going wrong, that which is blowing up and that which is not working." He said Americans ask: "Is anything getting rebuilt? Are they really democrats over there? How engaged are the Sunnis? Could I see an interview with any of these founding fathers and founding mothers of this new emerging country? Can you find that? You'll have a hard time doing it."

The question is not whether bad things happening in Iraq should be reported back home--they should, and there are clearly many of them, a fact that no one is denying--but whether positive developments should also receive the media's attention. Judging by the coverage, the media's answer seems to be, not very often.

Here are the past two weeks' worth of underreported and often overlooked good news from Iraq.

• Society. With the constitutional process under way--albeit delayed by a week--and another election on the horizon, there are growing efforts by the Sunni leadership to make sure that this time their community does participate in the political process:

Sunni preachers have called on Iraq's Sunni Arabs to take part in upcoming elections, signalling a possible new trend towards joining a Shi'ite dominated political process that Sunni insurgents have rejected. . . .

"It is a duty for all those here to take part in the upcoming elections so that we are not politically marginalised," imam Abdul-Sattar al-Jumaili told a crowd of some 600 people in Falluja, a former insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad.

"I call upon you to register your names in Falluja and other cities. You should not feel awkward about voting since you will be helping to remove the occupiers and embarrass those who benefited from the last election," he told a packed mosque.

Many prominent Sunnis have said the January boycott was a mistake since it limited their ability to influence the future shape of the country, now run by a Shi'ite-led government. . . .

A message similar to that in Falluja was delivered at the "mother of all battles" mosque in Baghdad.

"We have to be engaged with our brothers in this country by a calm dialogue," imam Mahmoud al-Sumaida'i told a congregation at Friday prayers in the large shrine.

"Therefore let us all participate in this dialogue in order to rebuild Iraq."

The Iraq the Model blog has more on this topic.

More broadly, public participation in the constitutional process has been encouraging:

Nearly a quarter of a million Iraqis of all ethnic and religious groups have taken part in meetings to help draft their country's new constitution, despite security challenges and problematic day-to-day living conditions, a preliminary United Nations report issued today said.

"This is nothing short of extraordinary when difficult living, transportation and communication facilities are exacerbated by an equally demanding security situation," it said of the schedule of meetings during the run-up to the 15 August deadline to complete the draft.

Tallying the participation so far at more than 220,000 people, the report said: "The United Nations salutes the bravery of Iraqis who have often risked their lives in order to contribute to the constitutional process." . . .

The highlights included radio and television debates. a conference of 1,500 Imams and a forum of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which had distributed questionnaires on federalism, Shari'a law and women's rights. In these venues members of the CDC and the Transitional National Assembly listened to people's views, the report said.

"Women's groups have been particularly active, with literally dozens of conferences demonstrating that, although they have a great variety of views, Iraqi women have a common aspiration to increase their level of participation in politics," it said.

In the last several weeks, addressing "important gaps in the activity," the CDC also met with some 20,000 participants in the north-eastern Anbar, Ninevah and Saleh al-Din governorates, where there had been "a hunger for information," it said.

And here's an encouraging story of unity:

Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city, Sunni leaders and Shiite residents said. . . .

Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of Zarqawi's guerrillas and two tribal fighters, residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi loyalists pulled out of two contested neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license plates, witnesses said.

The leaders of four of Iraq's Sunni tribes had rallied their fighters in response to warnings posted in mosques by followers of Zarqawi. The postings ordered Ramadi's roughly 3,000 Shiites to leave the city of more than 200,000 in the area called the Sunni Triangle. The order to leave within 48 hours came in retaliation for alleged expulsions by Shiite militias of Sunnis living in predominantly Shiite southern Iraq.

"We have had enough of his nonsense," said Sheik Ahmad Khanjar, leader of the Albu Ali clan, referring to Zarqawi. "We don't accept that a non-Iraqi should try to enforce his control over Iraqis, regardless of their sect--whether Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs or Kurds.''

Meanwhile, free media continue to grow. Iraq's first independent news agency is launched:

The Reuters Foundation has launched what it claims is Iraq's first "independent and commercially viable" news agency.

Last year the Foundation, a charity funded by Reuters, established an online "news exchange" called www.aswataliraq.info (Voices of Iraq) as a way for Iraq freelances to share stories.

With funding from the United Nations Development Programme and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation this has now been developed into a news agency run and staffed by Iraqi journalists with reporters in each of the country's 18 regional government areas.

So far Reuters Foundation has provided training for over 50 Iraqi journalists contributing to Voices of Iraq.

Reuters editor-in-chief Geert Linnebank said: "The development of a robust, independent and reliable media industry in Iraq is of fundamental importance to the world's understanding of this nation and its people.

"This new agency, the first of its kind in Iraq's history, will have a profound effect on how this country's story is told. Staffed and run by local journalists reporting on their own people and governments, I am sure it will become an indispensable source which will provide a much fuller picture than we have today of the key issues and events really driving this country's development."

In early August, Iraqis officially took over the International Press Center in Baghdad: