by Brady Smith
The Heights (Boston College)
9/15/05
With the nation’s attempts at peace in Iraq, relations between the Middle East and the West remain uncertain, a topic explored by Salameh Nematt, Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Hayat, International Arab Daily, a newspaper based in London, and the Lebanon-Based Arab Satellite Channel (LBC).
Nematt, who has worked as a correspondent for the BBC and Arabic Service and as an adviser to Jordan’s Royal Court, focused on the numerous conflicts complicating those relations.
“There are many wars going on right now, all linked to each other,” he said. Among the most important, he claimed, was that ongoing in American politics.
“The last presidential election in the United States was the most globally-watched event in history,” he said, noting that the future of U.S. foreign policy with regards to the Middle East was by far the most important issue raised.
It was not debated sufficiently, he said.
“The debate on the matter has not been very serious,” he said, suggesting that national media had a large part to play in that failure.
“The conservative media tended to praise everything the president said, while [liberal media] just opposed it because the administration was doing it,” he said.
Nematt also briefly addressed the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11, using the issue to explain how the failures of the media and the failures of U.S. foreign policy contribute to anti-American sentiment in the region.
“I heard speeches made in New York by a number of people who said that [terrorists] simply hate us because of our way of life. That’s a strange concept to me,” he said.
Nematt offered an alternative explanation.
“[America] is hated for the fact that the United States in particular and the West in general have, for decades, been backing corrupt dictatorships over the people of the Middle East.
“You can hardly call any of them democracies. Iraq is the only country in the Arab world where anyone can get a permit to publish a newspaper,” he said, noting the positive consequences of American intervention in the country.
Shifting his focus to the Iraq war, he warned against seeing democracy there as a creation of the United States.
“In Iraq,” he said, “America did not produce democracy, but removed a major obstacle to it – Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
Nematt also cautioned those who would see the political situation in Iraq as dominated by U.S. power.
“Those who accuse the United States of setting up a puppet regime in Iraq, they are mistaken,” he said, suggesting that the role of domestic power brokers has been far more fundamental to shaping Iraq’s current political landscape than the Bush administration.
In particular he cited the role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader in stymieing the aims of the Bush administration in Iraq.
When the United States tried to delay elections, Sistani vehemently protested, saying that they should proceed regardless of whether other nations in the region see the government as illegitimate or the possibility of civil war, according to Nematt.
The United States gave in, and 8.9 million Iraqis, or approximately 60 percent of eligible voters, turned out to vote despite threats of terrorism.
Nematt went on to emphasize that the Middle East currently sits at a crossroads between democracy and the legacy of corrupt regimes that has defined it for generations.
Critical in affecting change, he argued, was an effective and reliable press, something that the politics of the region and the pressures of newsgathering have not always generated.
“When [Western journalists] go to the Middle East,” he said, “they are so docile, so willing to sacrifice principles and ethics because they want to get visas.”
The essential problem, according to Nematt, is the close relationship between Western media and the regimes they seek to cover. Journalists’ access to non-democratic Middle Eastern countries is determined by state censors, who block troublesome journalists from getting visas or demand that they submit work for screening prior to publication, according to Nematt.
The result is, in many cases, a failure to report the crimes of the regimes in question.
“Support [for military action in Bosnia and Kosovo] was there because media reported news of mass graves in Srebenica and Kosovo. The media did its job.
“In the Middle East this is not the case. [The media] knew what Saddam Hussein was doing,” he said, in reference to the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by Hussein during his dictatorship.
Despite the many problems Nematt expressed about relations between the United States and the Middle East, he remained optimistic about the future of the region, the future of Iraq, and by association, the legacy of President Bush.
“[Historians] are going to say that he will be the one who started the democratization of the Middle East,” he said.
The event was cosponsored by Americans for Informed Democracy and the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Student Association.
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