The enforcement of an order to shut down Al-Jazeera's news office in Baghdad is a peculiar step toward a free and democratic Iraq. Newly appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi defended the move saying that it was "a decision taken by the national security committee to protect the people of Iraq, in the interests of the Iraqi people." I'm still trying to understand how kicking out the Arab world's largest independent media outlet is in the interests of the Iraqi people.
Before I go any further, let us admit that Al-Jazeera has been a controversial institution since its inception in 1996. It has been banned at one time or another by the governments of Jordan, Kuwait, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan and the authority in Palestine. It incurred the ire of many ruling Saudi families. It attracted U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's condemnation. Even the former Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, accused the station of "marketing for the Americans."
Yet while the station is controversial for a myriad of reasons depending on the parties concerned, what is the justification for the Baghdad bureau's closure? There is no official line on the particular offense that the station has committed, but Iraqi foreign minister Hushiar Zibari asserted just over a month ago that Al-Jazeera as well as many other Arab media were "channels of incitement working against the interests, security and stability of the Iraqi people."
What concerns me the most, however, is the current U.S. administration's tacit support of the move to shut down the office. The Bush administration has never shown any love for the network, chastising it for airing captured American soldiers, angry Iraqi insurgents and tapes of Osama bin Laden's speeches.
The administration has also shown contempt for Al-Jazeera and other non-embedded journalists by failing to investigate coalition attacks on two buildings in Baghdad which housed Al-Jazeera and other news agencies -- one whose coordinates had been relayed directly to the Pentagon by Al-Jazeera, the other which had most recently been CNN's Iraq headquarters.
Let me be clear by stating that I do not believe in an uncensored press, especially when it comes to inciting hate and the violence associated. But what happens when a news agency is accused of threatening the security and stability of a people by covering, in the most truthful and graphic detail, the results of the very lack of stability and security which Iraq is actually experiencing? Al-Jazeera did not start this war. U.S.-led coalition forces did. It is up to them to end it. If security and stability were primary goals for Iraq, then the country should never have been invaded (I am deliberately leaving out the ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction and their production facilities).
But if there is any sincere desire for a free and democratic Iraq, then freedom of expression and freedom of the press must not only be allowed but protected. This must be so not only for idealistic purposes but for the sake of security and stability as well.
A passage from Daniel Ellsberg's "Secrets" comes to mind: "My awareness of how easily and pervasively Congress, the public and journalists were fooled and misled contributed to a lack of respect for them and their potential contribution to better policy. That in turn made it easier to accept, to participate in, to keep quiet about practices of secrecy and deception that fooled them further and kept them ignorant of the real issues that were occupying and dividing inside policy makers. Their resulting ignorance made it all the more obvious that they must leave these problems to us."
The author is talking about policy for Vietnam in 1964. The analogy for the purposes here is not perfect, but the spirit of public awareness and participation is right on.
It is virtually impossible to have trustworthy and pertinent information without a free press, impossible to hold intelligent dialogue without trustworthy and pertinent information and impossible to have democracy without intelligent dialogue. Furthermore, on the level of expediency, to claim the delivery of freedom while stifling the means by which it is attained is very, very dangerous.
