Voices of the New Arab Public

Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today

Marc Lynch

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780231508810
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations have transformed Arab politics over the last decade. By shattering state control over information and giving a platform to long-stifled voices, these new Arab media have challenged the status quo by encouraging open debate about Iraq, Palestine, Islamism, Arab identity, and other vital political and social issues. These public arguments have redefined what it means to be Arab and reshaped the realm of political possibility. As Marc Lynch shows, the days of monolithic Arab opinion are over. How Arab governments and the United States engage this newly confident and influential public sphere will profoundly shape the future of the Arab world.

Marc Lynch draws on interviews conducted in the Middle East and analyses of Arab satellite television programs, op-ed pages, and public opinion polls to examine the nature, evolution, and influence of the new Arab public sphere. Lynch, who pays close attention to what is actually being said and talked about in the Arab world, takes the contentious issue of Iraq-which has divided Arabs like no other issue-to show how the media revolutionized the formation and expression of public opinion. He presents detailed discussions of Arab arguments about sanctions and the 2003 British and American invasion and occupation of Iraq. While Arabs strongly disagreed about Saddam's regime, they increasingly saw the effects of sanctions as a potent symbol of the suffering of all Arabs. Anger and despair over these sanctions shaped Arab views of America, their governments, and themselves.

Lynch also suggests how the United States can develop and improve its engagement with the Arab public sphere. He argues that the United States should move beyond treating the Arab public sphere as either an enemy to be defeated or an object to be manipulated via public relations. Instead of wasting vast sums of money on a satellite television station nobody watches, the United States should enter the public sphere as it really exists.

1

Iraq and the New Arab Public

At the end of August 2003, the controversial al-Jazeera talk show host Faisal al-Qassem introduced the topic for the night’s live broadcast of The Opposite Direction: do the Iraqi people have the right to demand an apology from the Arabs for their support of Saddam Hussein over the years? With Abd al-Bari Atwan, editor in chief of the Pan-Arabist newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, facing off against Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), Qassem framed the show—as he always does—by posing a long series of questions. The first dozen questions offered a strong defense of Arabs against their accusers: “Do Iraqis have the right to demand an apology from the rest of the Arabs? Should the Arabs actually make such an apology, or should the Iraqi people extend their thanks to the Arab regimes who did terrible things to the departed regime? Aren’t they the ones who conspired against [Saddam] and allied with the occupiers against him? … Do they want an apology from the Arab regimes which enforced the embargo? Why don’t we hear the Iraqis demanding an apology from the Americans and British who starved them and blockaded them and enslaved them? … Who is the real traitor to the Iraqi people: the one who minimized Saddam’s crimes or the one who rode American tanks to occupy Iraq? Aren’t those who opposed the invasion of Iraq worthy of praise?”¹

In the popular stereotype of al-Jazeera, Qassem’s questioning would have ended with this defense of the Arabs and attack on their critics. But it did not. Instead, Qassem pivoted 180 degrees and posed a series of sharp questions to his Arab audience: “But on the other side: why were the Arabs silent politically and in the media for years about the horrors of the Iraqi regime? Aren’t all of those who defended Iraq in the past now free to apologize to the Iraqi people after seeing the mass graves? Doesn’t the revelation of the mass graves give Arab states some moral responsibility for the crimes of the old regime? Why did Arab rulers and information ministers and editors in chief of newspapers and television stars incline toward Saddam and not toward the people? … Why do some use the question of the relations between the Iraqi opposition and the Americans to justify their refusal to condemn the repression faced by the Iraqi people under Saddam? … Was there a single Arab government which issued a statement condemning the massacres of the Iraqi people? Isn’t it the right of the Iraqi people to ask for an explanation for the Arab silence?”

Qassem’s framing of the arguments to come is remarkable in part for not being remarkable. Such open arguments over the most sensitive issues, involving strong representatives of both sides of the dispute, represent the hallmark of al-Jazeera’s approach to Arab politics. Where Arab public life had for decades been dominated by the voice of the state, al-Jazeera ushered in a new kind of open, contentious public politics in which a plethora of competing voices clamored for attention. Rather than imposing a single, overwhelming consensus, the new satellite television stations, along with newspapers, Internet sites, and many other sites of public communication, challenged Arabs to argue, to disagree, and to question the status quo. These public arguments, passionate in their invocation of an aggrieved Arab identity, sometimes oppressively conformist and sometimes bitterly divisive, sensationalist but liberating, defined a new kind of Arab public and new kind of Arab politics.

What I call the new Arab public is palpably transforming Arab political culture. It has already conclusively shattered the state’s monopoly over the flow of information, rendering obsolete the ministries of information and the oppressive state censorship that was smothering public discourse well into the 1990s. The new public rejects the long, dismal traditions of enforced public consensus, insisting on the legitimacy of challenging official policies and proclamations. This has created an expectation of public disagreement, an expectation vital to any meaningfully pluralist politics. The new public has forced Arab leaders to justify their positions far more than ever before, introducing a genuinely new level of accountability to Arab politics. By focusing relentlessly on the problems facing the Arab status quo—social, cultural, and political—it has generated a sense of urgency for change that had long been lacking. And by placing political developments both positive and negative into a common Arab narrative, treating protests demanding political change in Egypt alongside mass demonstrations against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and elections in Iraq and unrest in Saudi Arabia, the new Arab public has made it impossible for any Arab state to set itself apart from these demands. While this new Arab public cannot alone substitute for electoral democracy, it is doing something in many ways more important: building the underpinnings of a more liberal, pluralist politics rooted in a vocal, critical public sphere.

This new public was highly self-aware of its own role in challenging the status quo, giving it a self-defined sense of mission that sometimes sat uneasily with the standards of objective journalism. And challenge the status quo it did, with a fierce drive toward internal reform and foreign policy changes that led Arab governments and the West alike to regard it with great suspicion. This new public emerged in something of a cocoon, with a sharp contrast between its internally extraordinarily public politics and its general isolation from wider international debates and concerns. Its arguments took place within a common frame of reference, an Arab identity discourse that shaped and inflected all arguments, analysis, and coverage. Together, these three elements produced a distinctive kind of political public sphere, an identity-bounded enclave, internally open but externally opaque.

Whether such a populist, identity-driven, enclave public could be the foundation for reform and liberalization—at a time when neither Arab states nor the most powerful popular movements such as Islamism offer such a foundation—represents one of the most urgent problems facing the Arab world today. The centrality of identity politics to the new Arab public, with its avowed goal of giving voice to an oppressed and long-silenced Arab political society, is rife with paradoxes. It is fueled by a determination to bring publicity to the closed, repressive Arab political world, shattering every taboo and crossing every red line with abandon. At the same time, its politics of identity could all too easily slide into a tyranny from below, excommunicating those who disagree and demonizing outsiders to enforce internal unity.

The new media has dramatically affected conceptions of Arab and Muslim identity, linking together geographically distant issues and placing them within a common Arab “story.” In a 2001 survey, Shibley Telhami found that watching Arab television news made 46 percent of Saudis feel more sympathetic to Arabs in other countries, a sentiment shared by 87 percent in the United Arab Emirates and 75 percent in Kuwait.² Even more striking, large majorities in the Arab countries he surveyed ranked the Palestinian issue as the most important political issue to them personally. But these greater feelings of closeness capture only half of the story. At the same time, Telhami found upwards of 40 percent in each population felt that despite feeling closer to other Arabs, differences among Arabs had grown greater in recent years. Why? I argue that this seemingly paradoxical finding follows from an exceptionally important change in the way this new public conceives of Arab identity.

In the new Arab public, Arab and Islamic identities serve as a reference point, but no single set of policies or orientations necessarily follows from that identity. Arabs take for granted that Palestine and Iraq are Arab issues about which Arabs should agree, but they often disagree vehemently about what should be done about them. In contrast to earlier eras of Arabism, such as the “Arab Cold War” of the 1950s and 1960s (Kerr 1971), the public political arguments today throw wide open fundamental questions of what it means to be Arab. Anti-American voices routinely square off against pro-American figures, or against Americans themselves; defenders of Saddam argue with representatives of the Iraqi National Congress; Islamists argue with secularists. Al-Jazeera, in particular, thrives by pitting people who sharply disagree against one another, thereby proving by example that Arabs can disagree and still be authentic Arabs. Al-Jazeera’s innovation was to open the phone lines during live broadcasts, to let ordinary Arabs into the arguments for perhaps the first time in their history. By 2005, political talk shows had become an entirely normal and indispensable part of Arab political life, with dozens of such programs broadcast by a bewildering array of satellite television stations. Virtually any political trend or position could be found by channel-surfing Arab viewers: pro-American “moderates” on the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya, radical anti-American Islamists on the Hezbollah-owned al-Manar, and all points in between. In later chapters, I present some of these exchanges in detail to show the diversity of opinions and the style of political argument that ensued.

The ramifications of a rapidly emerging public sphere for Arab politics are only beginning to be felt. Fueled by technology, by a shared identity, and by enormous frustration with the status quo, this new Arab public has already reshaped the regional and international political terrain. In what direction, however, remains unclear. Arabs can interact, argue, and mobilize in revolutionary ways, defying the attempts of states to maintain their dominance over all aspects of life. At the same time, the new Arab public offers no mechanism for translating its ideas into outcomes. Lacking effective Arab international institutions or domestic democratic politics, and feeling besieged by hostile powers and unchecked global forces, many Arabs find themselves frustrated within their new consciousness. And with that frustration, the public sphere is increasingly consumed with sensationalism and anger, which threaten to undermine its contribution to liberal reforms.

Where political talk shows have transformed the nature of Arab public opinion, the impact of the news coverage has similarly revolutionized political behavior. News coverage has inspired contentious politics on the so-called Arab street, from the fierce demonstrations sparked by al-Jazeera’s coverage of the American-British bombing of Iraq in December 1998, to the intense waves of sustained popular protests over the bloody fighting between Palestinians and Israel in 2000 and 2002, to the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the wave of protests demanding political reform that swept from Lebanon through Egypt into the Gulf in the first months of 2005.

The new information environment has palpably affected American strategy in the region as well. In Operation Desert Storm (1991), the American-led coalition was largely able to control the information war, shaping the media coverage and carefully managing perceptions of civilian casualties and the course of events (MacArthur 1992; Tayler 1992). In 2003 the Americans proved unable to control the flow of information, images, or reporting from Iraq. Al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, and other Arab satellite stations reporting live from Iraq conveyed a picture of the war dramatically different from that emanating from the coalition, one that emphasized civilian suffering and American setbacks rather than a bloodless and popular liberation. As the occupation turned uglier, the Arab media’s coverage of the violence gripping Iraq infuriated the Americans, who wanted to maintain information dominance but seemed powerless to achieve it. Al-Jazeera’s reporting from the besieged city of Falluja in April 2004 contradicted the coalition’s narrative so graphically and dramatically that it determined the outcome of that battle. The new Arab media arguably represented the single greatest strategic difference between 1991 and 2003.

Given the magnitude of its challenge on every political front, it should be no surprise that the new Arab media has become as intensely controversial within the Arab world as it has in the United States. Many Americans view al-Jazeera and the new Arab media as a fundamentally hostile force generating anti-Americanism and complicating foreign policy objectives in Iraq, Israel, the war on terror, and more. Inside the Arab world, al-Jazeera has generated equally intense criticism, as well as impassioned defense. For its supporters, al-Jazeera represents the best hope for challenging the repressive Arab status quo and for defending Arab interests. For its critics, al-Jazeera represents a tremendously damaging cultural phenomenon, one which threatens to drag the struggling Arab world down into the abyss.

As it has risen in influence, then, the Arab media has become a topic as divisive as Iraq itself. The political war over the media raging in the Arab world resembles American battles over media bias from the left and the right in its intensity and its venom. For example, the journalist Fadhil Fudha laments that al-Jazeera betrayed its vast potential by transforming itself from an objective news station into a self-proclaimed carrier of an ideological message.³ Abd al-Monam Said, director of al-Ahram’s Center for Strategic Studies, blames al-Jazeera for the failures of Arab interests; according to Said, al-Jazeera’s propensities for crowd-pleasing radicalism make it too easy for Israelis and Americans to portray Arabs as radical.⁴ The American-based Egyptian columnist Mamoun Fandy denounces the Arab media for succumbing to sensationalism and a “political pornography” of violence, extremism, chaos, and beheadings.⁵ Mohammed Ma’wadh of Kuwait University complains that the new media “incline to the superficial and the sensational and they lack focused and scientific dialogue…. They are dominated by accusations and settling of scores.”⁶ A cartoon in al-Sharq al-Awsat portrays “the satellites” spooning garbage into the heads of Arab viewers.⁷ Al-Hayat journalist Hazem al-Amin argues that al-Jazeera is dominated by the spirit of a dogmatically Islamic Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the legacy of former director Mohammed Jassem al-Ali, who allegedly was on the Iraqi payroll, with the “embarrassing comedies” of Faisal al-Qassem and Ahmed Mansour drowning out more serious voices.⁸

Even sympathetic Arab observers wonder whether the introduction of “Crossfire”- and “Hardball”-type talk shows could really be called a positive contribution to a political culture. Rami Khouri, a liberal Jordanian journalist, dismisses the new public sphere as “more of the same vapid talk.” Abdullah al-Ashal, an Egyptian writer, points out that the political effects of the new public can hardly be taken for granted.⁹ Despite all of the real problems of the Arab order, and despite the real need for democracy in the region, more democracy would not lead Arabs to be more accepting of American and Israeli policies. Quite the opposite, he argues—it is the craven and weak leaders of the Arab world that give in to these demands, whereas a strong Arab public would resist. It is not lost on the new Arab public sphere that many Arab states enforced the sanctions on Iraq even as public opinion denounced them, and quietly cooperated with the American war against Iraq even as public opinion loudly opposed it. Indeed, some of the most vocal critiques expressed in the new Arab public sphere emphasize the hypocrisy of Arab regimes, exemplified by their failure to act on the policy preferences that they claim to share with their publics. It is quite striking that opinion surveys have consistently found that those Arabs with access to satellite television consistently have more positive attitudes toward democracy—but not toward American foreign policy (Tessler 2003).

This book presents these debates and controversies in all aspects, both from a Western perspective and from an internal Arab view, offering substantial evidence for assessing claims on both sides. It relies primarily on what Arabs themselves have actually said rather than on what others have said about them.¹⁰ First, I have compiled a database of transcripts of 976 episodes of the five most important al-Jazeera talk shows broadcast between January 1999 and June 2004.¹¹ Second, I have compiled a secondary database of al-Jazeera programs dealing specifically with Iraq; while there is some overlap with the first data set, this one includes a number of more specialized programs, including several new programs broadcast directly from Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Third, I draw on thousands of opinion essays published in Arabic newspapers between 1992 and 2004. Fourth, I have interviewed a large number of people involved in both the Iraqi issue and the Arab media, including American, European, and Arab officials as well as a wide range of Arab journalists and political activists. Finally, I draw on additional published and unpublished public opinion surveys. All translations, except where otherwise noted, are my own.

Certain points become clear on even a cursory reading of these sources. It is manifestly untrue that the Arab media is dominated by a single perspective. On a typical day, the Saudi newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat publishes translated op-eds by Thomas Friedman and Jim Hoagland alongside essays by Egyptian Islamist Fahmi Huwaydi, the pro-American Egyptian commentator Mamoun Fandy, and the more anti-American Syrian secularist Bathina Shabaan. Next to it on most newsstands is the popular Arabist daily al-Quds al-Arabi, which highlights voices critical of Arab governments and the United States, and heavily covers the violence and traumas of Palestine and Iraq. Al-Jazeera, as I document in the chapters to come, offers an extraordinarily wide range of viewpoints, while its live call-in programs offer an unprecedented glimpse into the concerns and passions of ordinary Arabs. Al-Jazeera’s satellite television rivals offer a variety of alternative viewpoints, as do domestic television stations and other local media. American news agencies provide significant percentages of the copy used by many Arab newspapers and television stations. Where only a decade ago the typical Arabic-speaking media consumer would have struggled mightily to find serious differences of political opinion, by 2003 she would be relentlessly bombarded with political arguments across the satellite television dial.

Long before the American invasion of Iraq, al-Jazeera programs railed against the repressive, corrupt, stagnant Arab order, shattering what Kanan Makiya described despairingly as “a politics of silence” stifling Arab intellectual and political life (1995: 25). In 1999 alone almost a dozen al-Jazeera talk shows criticized the absence of democracy in the Arab world. In a January 2005 online al-Jazeera poll, almost 90 percent of some 30,000 respondents expressed their doubts that Arab governments really wanted reform. Indeed, virtually every issue that American critics claim is ignored by the Arab media has in fact been covered in these programs. Does the Arab public ignore Iraq’s mass graves? Not in the May 31, 2004, episode of al-Jazeera Platform hosted by Jumana al-Namour entitled “The Mass Graves.” Does the Arab public not question the legitimacy of suicide bombing? How then to explain the furious arguments on the May 15, 2002, episode of No Limits on “the future of martyrdom operations,” or the June 29,...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Iraq and the New Arab Public
• 2. The Structural Transformation of the Arab Public Sphere
• 3. The Iraqi Challenge and the Old Arab Public
• 4. The al-Jazeera Era
• 5. Baghdad Falls
• 6. New Iraq, New Arab Public
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index