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Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Changing Times 
| | Blogging from and about emerging democracies is more than Internet news from the front. The high-touch feel and inter-connectivity of blogs allow participants to confront and outflank old media in force, while building transnational political communities. |
| | It's mostly about bloggers in Iraq that favor the American efforts, and their friends in the blogosphere. Not mentioned are bloggers less friendly to the occupation, such as Riverbend's Baghdad Burning. Which is fine. It's an opinion column, not a news story. And it's a good one. |
He's everywhere
Shaving the Net
| | This Internet may be dying. At the behest of powerful interests, the FCC is buying into a warped vision that open networks should be replaced by closed networks and that the FCC should excuse broadband providers from longstanding non-discrimination requirements. ... |
| | ...The FCC is rushing toward breathtaking change in regulatory policy. Whether it's the giant media companies or telecom's gatekeepers, we are closing networks, undermining competition, stifling entrepreneurship and threatening consumer choice. At this rate, it won't be long until we look back, shake our heads and wonder whatever happened to that open and dynamic high speed Internet that might have been. ``What promise it held,'' we'll say. If that happens, history won't forgive us. Nor should it. |
10) Tools Rule
| | - The Control Revolution
- Donating Talent
- Distributed Ownership
- The Inactive Switch Sides
- Campaign as Curriculum
- The New Sociability in Politics
- The Discovery of Voice
- The Self Informing Citzenry
- It's a Two Way World
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| | The essay is excellent, as usual. It should be required reading for candidates preparing to mix it up as the political season gets into full swing — and for journalists looking for welcome ways to break the mold of campaign coverage, which has become so predictable and formalized that stories from its inside tend to read like chants. |
| | Of course, I wouldn't be a techblogger if I didn't add one more story line, without which the other nine wouldn't mean squat. |
| | We've only begun to see what can be done with tech tools as instruments of applied democracy. |
| | More later, after I get some sleep. |
| | [Later, in the morning...] Journalists write stories because stories are what interest people. (I've written about stories before here, here and here.) And Jay's essay is about what journalists are trained to do, which is fill the market's demand for stories. It's good advice: |
| | These nine items are not so much story ideas, as ideas for generating an arc of stories. You could call them points on a map of shiftting terrain in politics. Maybe the easiest thing is to call them beats, as a newsroom would. |
| | Newspaper and TV reporters require a story. Each story requires a frame. How was the election of Arnold Schwartzenegger framed? Here is a selection: |
| | - Voter Revolt
- The Great Noncommunicator
- Those Kooky Californians
- The People Beat the Politicians
- Just a Celebrity
- Up By His Bootstraps
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| | George's piece is a good companion to Jay's, because it examines the successful Repubican campaign, which he says goes back years, to replace Gray Davis with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Karl Rove would not be doing his job if he weren't busy framing up a campaign for George Bush that didn't leverage the current Bush Beats Saddam story currently running in all the major media. |
| | The story lines Jay suggests, however, are not just Democratic ones. They are stories that can only be told in a networked, connected democracy. They are about democracy itself, and how it's changing. |
| | The Old Stories are message-driven from the supply side: from the candidates. And, as we almost said in Cluetrain, there is no demand for messages. You don't turn on your TV or open your paper and say "Hey, I wonder what message _______ is sending me this morning." |
| | The new stories will emerge more than they'll be driven. Such is the nature of the Net. |
Seeing through slides
| | Scott Rosenberg: The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides. Agreed. It always exasperates me to see slides used as speakers notes rather than as helpful visual aids. |
| | Want to know how to give a good presentation with slides? Here's what I learned from two masters. It's more than a half-decade old, but its tips are no less useful. |
Iraq key?
| | A few months back, when I was hanging out in New York with Steve Lewis and Kurt Starsinic, we talked about the importance of libraries, of scholarship, of trusted and earned Authority certified by books and serious journals. I'm talking about the printed and published kind that scholars among us (such as Steve, Kurt, and far less often, myself) sought out before blogs came along. |
| | Anyway, memories of those conversations come back to me as I read Journal of Democracy, which has just published Iraq: Setbacks, Advances, Prospects, by Adeed Dawisha, a native Iraqi and professor of political science at Miami University of Ohio. His latest book is Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (2003). The piece is a .pdf. If I understand the way the journal works (from perusing the latest quarterly issue), the piece should be in html sometime after the print version hits the streets. |
| | Anyway, it's an interesting piece of work that suggests things aren't all that bad over there. Here are some exceprts... |
| | The coalition forces have faced serious difficulties in Iraq, and these were apparently intensifying as the end of the year approached. But to portray these difficulties as definitively signifying the failure of the reconstruction or Iraqis rejection of the U.S.- and British-led coalition¹s plans for their country would be a mistake, since it would mean unrealistically discounting many positive developments that augur well for Iraq's future as a free, democratic, peaceful, and law-governed country. Iraq is obviously not out of the woods, but to pronounce the coalition¹s effort a failure after just a few months of reconstruction following decades of dictatorship would be premature, to say the least. |
| | About the Coalition's problems: |
| | It is undeniable that insecurity and at times chaos have reigned for a dismayingly long time in some parts of Iraq, particularly in sections of Baghdad (whose sprawling environs contain around a fifth of Iraq¹s total population of about 25 million people) and in the "Sunni" zone. This area, which is often called the "Sunni triangle," is actually more of a quadrilateral whose corners rest on Baghdad in the south, Saddam¹s home city of Tikrit in the north, Ramadi in the west, and Baquba in the east. The Arabic-speaking, Sunni Muslim tribes who predominate in this area received ample largess and many privileges from Saddam, and in turn staffed much of his secret-police and military apparatus. It is in this area that the vast majority of U.S. casualties have occurred. Saddam loyalists, who stand to lose the most from the demise of his regime, have perpetrated almost-daily attacks on U.S. convoys and personnel in this zone. Well-equipped and seemingly generously financed by Saddamist remnants who raided Iraq¹s treasury before fleeing Baghdad, these guerrillas have been waging a low-intensity war that U.S. commanders have been hard-pressed to contain, let alone eliminate. |
| | It also appears that many (some say more than 2,000) violent Islamists from other Arab countries have infiltrated the porous borders of post- Saddam Iraq to strike at the U.S. "infidels." It is hard to say precisely how extensive and sophisticated is the cooperation between Saddamists and Islamists, but some does seem to exist. Adding to the CPA¹s woes are the vast numbers of convicts—some estimates run as high as 280,000—whom Saddam let out of jail in late 2002. Many of these are hardened murderers, kidnappers, robbers, and rapists who have terrorized certain cities, particularly Baghdad, and created a climate of lawlessness. |
| | Compounding all this is the veritable sea of easily accessible weaponry in which Iraq is awash. In the early days after Saddam¹s fall it was reported that one could buy five hand grenades for a dollar in the main markets in broad daylight. Some improvement had occurred by August, when the price had reportedly risen to $3 per grenade, though a bulk rate of $20 for ten grenades was also said to be available.2 Most of the armaments come from looted government arsenals: The CPA estimates that Saddam stockpiled a staggering 600,000 tons of arms and munitions. After six months of occupation, coalition forces had been able to destroy or secure no more than about 75,000 tons—or 12.5 percent—of the deadly stuff. |
| | All these things have contributed to the precarious security situation, which weighs heavily and directly on U.S. forces and the CPA, and which has led to a substantial erosion of the initial good will and popular support that was in evidence just after Saddam and his regime were forcibly unseated last spring. |
| | Of course, any fair account of the deterioration in security must recognize that many difficulties flow from the vacuum created by the collapse, under the guns of outside forces, of one of the twentieth century¹s most Procrustean and barbaric authoritarian systems. |
| | About why "Why Talk of an 'Iraqi Resistance' Is Misguided": |
| | While the situation in Iraq gives rise to much concern, it is not by any stretch of the imagination desperate. Many observers, perhaps focusing too heavily on day-to-day media coverage, seem unable to shift their attention from the security situation to other developments in the country, many of which give grounds for optimism. Perhaps first among these is that Iraqis on the whole have chosen the path of peace. It is unfortunate that many in the Arab and Western press have bestowed on the perpetrators of attacks against coalition forces the grandiose label "the Iraqi resistance." Such a categorization, whether purposely or inadvertently, creates an impression of a universal phenomenon supported by most Iraqis. Nothing could be further from the truth. |
| | Most of the attacks on coalition forces in fact have occurred in an area that is geographically and demographically narrow. My analysis of U.S. casualties since the beginning of the occupation shows that more than four out of five U.S. deaths inflicted by hostile action took place in the Sunni areas that cover parts of Baghdad and the territory to its north and west. If one looks at the total numbers of attacks (nearly all of which, every day, are "misses" that result in no harm to coalition forces and do not make the news), one sees that more than 75 percent of them have occurred in the towns north and west of Baghdad and on the roads linking them, while fewer than 2 percent have taken place in Basra, the heavily Journal of Democracy 10 Shi'ite southern city with a population of 1.75 million.4 Taken together, all these Sunni towns (including Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, Baquba, Balad, Taji, and Dhuluiya) contain no more than 1.5 million people, or about 6 percent of Iraq¹s total population. More than three times as many coalition soldiers have been killed in the area inhabited by this tiny segment of the population, belonging mainly to tribes that filled the ranks of Saddam¹s security organs, than in the entire Shi'ite-dominated region of southern Iraq, which is home to more than half of all Iraqis. Indeed, three days after a November 12 suicide truck bombing that killed 19 Italian members of the coalition forces—including 12 Carabinieri military-police troops—and 8 Iraqi civilians in the southern city of Nasiriyah, local people organized two large demonstrations, lofting placards that denounced the attack as an outside plot to undermine the fraternal relations between the Carabinieri and the townsfolk. The marchers laid wreaths of flowers at what had been the gate of the Italian barracks. |
| | In fact, the Sunni community as a whole might be excused for feeling exasperated at seeing its religious affiliation associated constantly with attacks on U.S. troops. There is no evidence that the Sunni middle class in Baghdad is involved in, or even supports, the violence in Iraq. And in the northern city of Mosul, where more than a million Sunni Arabs live, there are still considerably fewer attacks on U.S. soldiers than in the area between Baghdad and Tikrit. |
| | Given all the problems that have dogged Iraq since the fall of Saddam's regime, the casual observer may be excused for thinking that all talk of promoting liberal ideals and building democratic structures is simply untenable or at best grossly premature. And the perceptible increase in guerrilla activity and military hostilities toward the end of the year could only cement such misgivings. After all, how could one expect Iraqis to think about the ways of democracy in the midst of such violence? |
| | In fact, the most encouraging sign for the long haul is the sheer frequency with which Iraqis are using such key democratic terms as elections, parliament, human rights, press freedom, minority rights, and the like as debates over the country's future proceed. In the wide-ranging discourse now being heard both publicly and privately in Iraq, the need for an elected legislature and government has become almost a foregone conclusion. When it comes to the electoral process, there may be debates over timing as well as the exact methods and institutions to be adopted, but a clear majority harbors no doubt that elections are the necessary path to governance. Even the Muslim clergy insists on elections as crucial to the legitimacy of any governmental or constitutional arrangement. Thus while the CPA was planning to appoint the members of a constitution-drafting convention, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the most senior Shi'ite cleric, insisted that any such body must itself be chosen by Iraqi voters. In another instance, the Najaf Hawza comprising Sistani and the three other most senior ayatollahs rejected a new nationality law on the grounds that only "constitutional government and parliament, elected by the people, can take such strategic decisions." Sunni leaders too have advocated the institution of democracy and have called for "general elections." |
| | This propensity reveals itself in a number of recent opinion surveys. Taken together, the Gallup and Zogby International polls mentioned earlier cover Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk, and Ramadi. On one key matter, the pollsters found that around 40 percent of those surveyed preferred a secular multiparty democracy, while only 10 percent said they wanted an Iranian-type clerical government. The Iraqi Center for Research and Strategic Studies has conducted more comprehensive surveys in Baghdad, the Shi'ite cities of Basra and Najaf, the Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, and the Kurdish cities of Irbil and Sulaymaniya. These polls show that more than half of those asked chose democracy. As for the modalities of democracy, 58 percent favored a democratic system with powers shared between a president and a prime minister, 22 percent advocated a strong presidential system, and 14 percent preferred a prime minister and cabinet alone. Moreover, in a survey conducted by an Iraqi newspaper among law professors, lawyers, and judicial experts, 74 percent preferred a secular constitution, with 98 percent insisting on protections for civil liberties and 94 percent favoring separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers. |
| | What is encouraging about these figures is that they show a strong residue of prodemocratic sentiment at a time of extensive frustration with lawlessness, lack of public services, and unemployment‹conditions that traditionally have made people long for strong centralizing institutions to keep order. Any analysis of post-Saddam Iraq must concede that security, political, and economic conditions have not developed according to what might roughly be called "the best-case scenario, prewar." Unforeseen developments for which the coalition forces seemed unprepared combined with CPA political blunders to sidetrack plans for the rapid political and economic transformation of Iraq. By the same token, much coverage of the problems that face the coalition administrators and their Iraqi partners has been exaggerated, while many successes‹achieved, let us remember, quite rapidly and often under arduous conditions‹ have gone begging for attention. Although what people formed under totalitarianism say to inquisitive strangers must always be taken with a grain of salt, it is impressive to see that in a number of different surveys the Iraqis have indicated by wide margins that they are neither incurably hostile to the coalition presence nor despondent about their future. The Gallup and Zogby International polls show that seven out of ten Iraqis are in fact optimistic about both their own and their country's future; two-thirds believe that the removal of Saddam Hussein was worth the hardships that they have endured since his fall; and two-thirds also want coalition forces to remain for another year. |
| | With civil society showing vigor, representative institutions being built at several levels, and the concepts of electoralism and wide-ranging public discussion becoming increasingly central to Iraqi political consciousness, there is room to be reasonably encouraged not only about Iraq's stability and economic prosperity, but also, and perhaps more importantly for the future of the country, about the prospects for workable and sustainable democracy. |
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