Kurd and Way
By Callimachus | Related entries in The War On Terrorism, The WorldKevin Sites has a report from Iraq’s Kurdish region. If there’s truth to the journalistic axiom “if it bleeds, it leads,” the general lack of reporting from Kurdistan is proof of it. It’s not that the big media have forgotten the place entirely. Every couple of weeks I see a piece move on the news wire about how the economy is booming, the cities are tranquil, democracy is in full flourish, the people are happy, and Arabs from elsewhere in Iraq are going there to find good jobs.
But those long, sunny stories never seem to make print, pushed off the page by the latest suicide bombing or IED attack. Even in the papers that have the resources to get the story — NYT, Boston Globe, etc. — the annual Happy Kurdistan piece gets an inside treatment. And none of that coverage ever bleeds over into the main Iraq stories. There’s never a “Meanwhile, in Kurdish regions,” graph in the Iraq wrap on the AP or Reuters.
Deliberate case-by-case exclusion? No, probably not. Institutional bias based on habitual ways of thinking about Iraq, yes, probably.
Sites reports on some interesting stuff here, including a “peshmerga military academy” that I had no idea existed. It seems that, at least among the Kurds, the commitment to a unified Iraq is being taken seriously, if warily. “The academy now literally gets its marching orders from Baghdad and the Iraqi Ministry of Defense,” Sites writes.
The academy, which was created in 1991, just after the withdrawal of Iraqi forces, now has been integrated into the Iraqi army. Here both Kurdish and Arab cadets are put through an abbreviated one-year program to commission them as second lieutenants in the new Iraqi army.
The commandant of the academy, Maj. General Sarwad Qader Barzingy, a Kurd, is philosophical about past Arab persecution and the order to integrate the academy.
“As Kurds we don’t care much about the past,” he says. “We are confident now and need to move forward.”
Currently the academy has 105 Arab cadets. Ironically, all were admitted to the Iraqi army’s military academy in southern Baghdad during the regime of Saddam Hussein. They are sons of Baath Party members who weren’t able to finish their studies because of the war. Now they are here, training in the mountains of east of Sulaymaniyah. Barzingy says things don’t always go smoothly.
“We are having lots of problems, not so much because of the ethnic backgrounds, but because of the different cultures. There are two cultures here: one that grew up under the dictatorship [Arabs] and one that grew up under democracy [Kurds]. But that is starting to melt away,” he says.
The academy uses the traditional Iraqi army training curriculum and even teaches all the courses in Arabic. In one of the nearby buildings, Maj. Salim Tofiq uses a pointer to describe a large room-sized topography display, complete with depictions of roads, rivers and houses.
In another area, called the darkroom, is a scaled replica of a nighttime battlefield with toy tanks on pulley wires, sound effects and even tiny lights in the ceiling to teach cadets to navigate by the stars.
The instruction seems all too conventional for young officers that will be joining a war that is anything but. Yet Barzingy says there’s much more to it.
“We Kurds know about partisan warfare,” he says, smiling. “We are instructing the cadets on counterinsurgency and that is something that those in [the Iraqi Ministry of Defense] are learning from us.”
And while they’re united against a common foe, there are still ethnic tensions between the students.
“Some of our cadets from the Baathist families complained that the Kurdish cadets were cursing them in Kurdish,” says Barzingy. “So one of our instructors made them stop speaking Kurdish completely. But that was going too far. I told him Saddam Hussein couldn’t stop us from speaking Kurdish and neither will you.”
For goodness sake, if you make a New Year’s Resolution, make this one: Don’t get your Iraq news from political talking points sources, and don’t rely entirely on legacy media for it.
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December 2nd, 2005 at 10:02 pm
If it doesn’t fit the Vietnam defeat meme it is excluded. I saw the American press change its orientation when Cronkite came out against the Vietnam war. Reinforced by Watergate the MSM has been in anti government mode ever since. It may not be entirely conscious, but a strong element is the post modern notion that control of the story controls the truth and it seems the MSM knows the truth and is just trying to make sure we do too. My policy toward the MSM is the same as when someone accuses me of calling them a liar. I say, “Only you know if you are a liar, I just know that I don’t believe anything you say.”
December 3rd, 2005 at 7:37 am
The reporting is perfectly as-per-usual. Absolutely true that they don’t run a lot of upbeat stories — they never do. It isn’t a ’since Vietnam” phenomenon, it’s a “since forever” phenomenon.
Of course they don’t run a lot of “happy status quo” stories. They don’t run those stories in any context. Is there a daily report in the NYT about all the perfectly nice, pleasant goings on in Brooklyn? No, there are reports of crime and corruption and tragedy. There’s never a headline, “Everything Fine In Harlem.” Those stories are in the Lifestyle section, or the Arts section, and foreign news almost never escapes the front page section. I doubt there’s a single “Style” reporter in Iraq. If there were we might see more feature stories, but none of this is a conspiracy, or at all unusual.
Consumers of news get this and make the appropriate adjustment.
December 3rd, 2005 at 11:40 am
Think about reading this (out this month), a work by Almighty God for the salvation of our nation’s souls: Our country’s falling into the Abyss of Misery faster than the Indy 500, faster than a fully-loaded-747. But, yet, our novel has a plethora of extremely helpful insights; engrossing wit, sardonic satire; and basically straight-forward-Jesus that’d make anyone realize this is only a test of our Finite Existence.
We talk of a Heavenly Scent, an ardent desire with the whiff of a definite locale, while we bolster the Great Beyond with the passion of a magnanimous madman: Full of some gorgeous, panoramic, tall-true-tales that’ll make U.S. yearn and sigh for Heaven Above. A novel of short-stories, quotes, prayers, poetry, heartbreaking/hardcore hilarity, aggressive conundrums, and a collision substantial from a severely-head-injured-Catholic. At the risk of sounding too verbose, friend, far beyond any sinful mortal, I use the personal pronoun ‘WE’ because I didn’t write this. I only held the pen.
Read our novel, America. Then, you’ll be able to see with enough vision to find your Way outta the stagnant hole mosta U.S. have dug ourselves into. What you’ll find in our wonderful, fruitFULL, dynamic novel is a treasure, unlike any other. If you decide to read this indelible script, here’s the next step: Get in touch with my CPA, Edward Foree, at 1-800-266-9111.
MAY GOD BLESS YOU WITH DISCERNMENT!
Long Live Christ the King!
-Fido
[FI = Latin prefix for ‘FAITHFUL’;
DO = Japanese for ‘WAY’ or ‘PATH’]
December 3rd, 2005 at 10:29 pm
Michael, I would say that, in the case of post-Saddam Iraq, any wide swath of “happy status quo” is an element of the bigger story. Since one measure of the success or failure of the U.S. is measured in stability and progress. Consumers of the news need to know enough to judge the progress, or lack of it, before they can make an informed decision about the entire project. Or ask questions like, why was the overthrow of Saddam a great thing for one part of the country, but the rest of it remains stuck? And what does that say about overall U.S. policies and objectives?
I think it’s a case of the media overlooking this leg of the story, and reporting Iraq 2005 like it’s New York 1977. It’s not. That’s why I credited it to an institutional bias that, just coincidentally, underplays the part of the story that doesn’t jibe with the Michael Moore version of events. Though, I have to tell you, working in a newsroom, sometimes it’s a great effort of will on my part to keep believing it’s unintentional.
And anyway, having lived most of my life in or near cities, I can tell you the civic leaders in metropolises complain bitterly about the media coverage that makes their communities — falsely — look like cess pools of crime and vice and scares away tourists and suburbanites.