Time for a quick “day-after” survey of French press coverage of the Iraqi elections.

As usual, “day-after” is sometimes too early when it comes to significant, multi-dimensioned world events, as journalists and editors get all caught up with the reporting and don’t yet have time to sit back and think about what it all really meant. If you want an example of what I’m talking about here, and can read French yourself, I refer you to Le Monde’s editorial this morning, The Iraqi Wager. Spotlight on young French-Iraqi student; for her and her mother, being able to vote for the first time is truly a moving experience. (And this in what Le Monde explicitly labels its “editorial,” written collectively by the editors.) Yes yes, and you know, Iraq has truly never had elections. These first were admittedly imperfect: Sunni underrepresentation, the threat of violence. Still, they were at least a relative success, and hopefully Iraqis can look forward to much less imperfect elections next December. Right, moving on . . .

Libération is a bit better in analyzing what author Jean-Pierre Perrin terms in his piece’s title The Lessons of a Confessionalized Election. (more…)

And now to the latest Iraq-related scandal. No, really: this one centers around the person of Ahmed Chalabi, of the Iraqi National Congress, long the Pentagon’s favorite anti-Saddam Iraqi exile, recipient of a monthly $335,000 payment from the (US) Defense Intelligence Agency, and, in return, the source of juicy intelligence from within the Hussein regime, most notably about its stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The recent raid on Chalabi’s Baghdad house to seize computer records and documents, performed by Iraqi policemen under the protection of US soldiers, was a signal that perhaps this relationship is not so cozy anymore, something understandable given the record so far of those WMD actually turning up in practice. Now there is talk that Chalabi might have been an agent in the pay of Iran all along, feeding the Bush administration with the false information on Iraq that it wanted to hear as a justification to depose Hussein, while at the same time feeding his Iranian paymasters with truly exclusive top secret American intelligence information.

Yes, the suspicion is dawning that the United States might essentially have been hoodwinked into going to war against Iraq – and that officials at this administration’s highest levels might eventually have to answer charges of the unauthorized passing-on of choice information to their good comrade Chalabi, only to see it transferred right along to officials in Tehran. The broad outline of all this, at least, should be familiar by now to anyone who peruses the major American papers (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) on a regular basis; I myself rather like the extensive account given here on the Parapundit weblog (and updated here). One interesting side-question that Parapundit’s Randall Parker raises is: How long before the rest of the world wakes up to the fact that, when it comes to international intrigue, we (i.e. the Americans) are nothing but “a bunch of country hick rubes”?

Well, the Danes probably are already aware of this, for one. (more…)

President Bush kicked off on Monday night his five-speech offensive to demonstrate to American voters (primarily) and also to the rest of the world that he has a plan for effectively handing off “sovereignty” to some native Iraqi administration at the end of June. That same day Britain and the US had tabled a proposed UN Security Council resolution which, if adopted in the proposed form, would leave occupation troops able to remain in Iraq indefinitely even as that native administration would supposedly be granted the “responsibility and authority to lead a sovereign Iraq.”

Coverage of the President’s speech in the German press generally found it less than fully convincing. (more…)

It’s time to resuscitate the long-dormant “Poles in Iraq” series, dealing as it does with coverage in the Polish press of what’s happening with that contingent of Polish soldiers sent to perform occupation duty – indeed, to command a sector – in support of Coalition forces. And you probably can figure out why now is a good time to bring “Poles in Iraq” back to life: the country is in an uproar, or at least the central “Sunni triangle” is (which has already been in at least a state of simmering rebellion since the war) as well as the heretofore quiet Shiite-dominated south, which is exactly where the Poles command their very multi-national occupation force, because it was considered a safe part of the country back when the occupations were drawn up.

Now that is no longer true, what with the uprising lead by the young Shiite cleric as-Sadr and his “Mahdi Army,” which is still in control of parts of a number of southern cities. I was looking for a good account of all of this in the Polish press, one that didn’t just repeat the general news reports about what was currently happening but that also included some Polish angle for the local readers. There was coverage, of course, but coverage that didn’t really meet this criterion, in Gazeta Wyborcza (generally) and in Dziennik Polski (Calm Before the Storm?), but the series of articles on one webpage published by Rzeczpospolita (starting at the top with Every Day a Kidnapping) was better. (more…)

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish daily, has sent its own correspondent (by the name of Thomas Heine) to check things out in Iraq. Being on-the-scene has put him in a position to uncover some interesting discrepancies, as he reports in Iraq’s Disguised Foreign Legion. (more…)

In the end, last Thursday’s and Friday’s Madrid Iraqi Donors’ Conference seems to have turned out better than expected. The coverage in Denmark’s Politiken (Japan Gives Iraq $5 Billion) gives a final verdict that is middle-of-the-road: yes, donor countries “reached deeper into their pockets than had seemed would be the case even hours before the conference closed.” (As the headline recounts, Japan upped its contribution during the course of the conference, ultimately offering a soft loan of $3.5 billion, and an outright grant of $1.5 billion.) On the other hand, Politiken still calls the results disappointing for the Americans, who had hoped to call forth much more money than the result of $18 billion to add to the ca. $20 billion that the US Congress approved (half of it a loan). On yet another hand, the article points out, for a long time there were doubts whether there would even be enough support to hold the conference in the first place.

Overall, the world’s press has plenty in the results of the Madrid Conference to see either a glass half-full or half-empty, according to the given newspaper’s (and/or its journalist’s) inclination or political stance. It’s rather more refreshing to come across a piece of commentary on these happenings which is willing to put them into a wider context, even if it turns out to be a very anti-Coalition one. This is what we have in the article in the Danish commentary newspaper Information entitled A New Iraq. (more…)

George W. Bush yesterday gave his long-awaited speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations. It hardly went over like gangbusters. I assume that you’ve already consulted the accounts from the mainstream American press: the New York Times – An Audience Unmoved; the Washington Post – A Vague Pitch Leaves Mostly Puzzlement. And that unflattering coverage was from American media, which need to behave themselves vis-à-vis the Administration to ward off John Ashcroft shutting them down as subversive organizations under the Patriot Act. (OK, so it’s not like that, at least not yet. At least not among the newspapers – but I’ve read some interesting analysis about the factor that makes the American broadcast media so nice towards Administration policy, and its initials are F, C, and C.)

How bad is the coverage of the same event (and its appendages – like the Bush-Chirac meeting) likely to be in the French press? Let’s take a look.

The analysis piece in Le Monde, Paris-Washington, Two Opposing Diagnoses on the Situation in Iraq, shows a surprisingly mild tone. (more…)

Today we progress towards fulfilling yesterday’s mention of current French points-of-view towards the Coalition troubles in Iraq. The on-line dailies are treating the subject hit-or-miss (see a review of a contribution from Libération at bottom). But what’s that over there on Le Monde diplomatique? That’s the sister-publication to Le Monde – of course – but it comes out monthly, and so with longer, “deeper” articles which are mostly opinion-pieces that take a broader look at current affairs. And on the front page of the latest (Sept. 2003) issue we have L’onde du chaos (“The Wave of Chaos”), an examination of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Bush Administration by writer Alain Gresh.

Le Monde diplomatique can be relied upon to lay out a “French” point-of-view carefully fashioned to be about as opposite to what the American administration would want you to believe as possible, short of setting up your own direct feed to Osama bin-Laden’s propaganda department. But stepping out of the confines of Fox News and the various other US media outlets which often are but thinly-disguised cheerleaders for administration policy, to be confronted with a foreigner’s viewpoint, is what this site is supposed to be all about, right? (Or is it instead about foreigners discovering the various innovations that make America great, such as Hooters Air? Or America discovering the innovations that make Europe great, like medically-prescribed marijuana? Just let me know.) (more…)

I do go look at the on-line Polish press from time to time – I promise! “Poles in Iraq” still lives! – but lately there’s been little that I’ve found about the ongoing deployment of Polish peace-keepers to Kuwait, for eventual transfer to the assigned Polish occupation zone in Iraq. They’re simply deploying these days – that’s all.

But Polish news organizations nonetheless can still come up with stories out of Iraq that are largely overlooked by the English-language press. For example, as Gazeta Wyborcza reports today (from the Polish Press Agency, but also from Agence France-Press), Rada Zarzadzajaca chce przejac bezpieczenstwo w Bagdadzie – “The Governing Council wants to take over security for Baghdad.” (more…)

Can democracy be established in Iraq? Would that then solve our problems, our “gripe,” with that country? Or do we really want democracy there at all?

Die Zeit On-Line is currently particularly rich with opinion pieces which address these issues, and so (in different ways) are natural sequels to Georges Suffert’s assessment in Le Figaro of the American efforts in Iraq which I reviewed here. For one, there is the article by Richard Herzinger which was the subject of my last post: Yes, things are going well in Iraq and democracy is being built, is his view. Anyway, even if they aren’t going well Europeans have their own obligation to help out to make sure that they do.

But then there are a couple of additional pieces sharing homepage-space on the current Die Zeit website which take rather more subtle views. Jens Jessen offers an interesting viewpoint in Die hilflosen Missionäre – “the helpless missionaries.” OK, our objective is to transplant our political system, democracy, into Iraq; it’s also to transplant our economic system (namely capitalism) there. The rationale behind these objectives is that successfully completing them will ensure that Iraq will become a friendly, reasonable sort of state that we can welcome back into the community of nations. (more…)

A welcome antidote to the half-hearted support for Coalition (and particularly American) efforts in Iraq of Frenchman Georges Suffert, discussed in my last €S posting, comes from Germany, and specifically from Richard Herzinger writing in Die Zeit: Der Moralismus des Zynikers, or “The Morality of the Cynic.” The key fact so often overlooked by Germans watching from the sidelines, Herzinger claims, is that, slowly but surely, real progress is being made in Iraq. Rather than view events through “the eyeglasses of an anti-imperialistic resistance-romanticism,” as he accuses many of his compatriots of doing – or worse, actively hoping for failure there, so that German resistance to the war against Saddam Hussein can in the end be proved “right” – Germans (and all Europeans) have a duty to support the occupation authorities to ensure that Iraq is ultimately rebuilt as prosperous and democratic, a goal which lies no less in the interest of the Old Continent as it does of America. (more…)

One thing the German papers can all agree about covering is the record heatwave currently raging there. (It’s sunny and somewhat warm here in Amsterdam, too, but not really too bad.) But that’s boring; my cursory examination of the heatwave-related articles in the various German on-line papers unfortunately failed to turn up any piquant points of the “man-bites-dog” variety that I could usefully bring to your attention, not even any weather researchers willing to see the current wave as the forerunner of a longer warming trend in Northern Hemisphere temperatures.

Otherwise we could talk about Liberia. Maybe some other time; instead there is some interesting coverage in the German press of the ongoing situation in Iraq. (Unfortunately, none of it – yet! – discusses the deployment of Polish troops going on there.) Die Welt has an interesting article about the so-called “terror tourists”. These are the Islamic volunteers out of lands such as Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, the Palestinian areas, and, yes, Egypt and Saudi Arabia (the former the second-largest recipient world-wide of US foreign aid money, by the way) who come into Iraq via Syria and Iran to conduct their jihad against the western occupation troops there, and the Americans in particular. There could be as many as a thousand of these “terror tourists” in-country already, according to the estimates of Middle Eastern intelligence agencies, and their contribution is doing much to keep up the resistance to occupation forces in the face of waning resistance from Iraqi Baath party holdouts and uncertainty among radical Shiite groups in southern Iraq as to whether it would be a better idea to fight the occupiers or join them in the effort to rebuild the country.

And there is this further report in Die Welt about the first ministerial post in the transitional Iraqi government having been assigned. The winner is Adib el Dschadradschi (German spelling), of the Independent Democrat party, who was designated as Iraqi foreign minister. The Iraqi Governing Council is the authority behind this move, and Die Welt‘s report indicates that they’ve also already made their decisions on who is to occupy a further eleven of the twenty-five total ministerial posts they need to fill. Interestingly, the post of interior minister (i.e. controller of the national police) is said to be slated for a member of the Shiite “Dawa” party – a very influential Shiite political party, which for a while there was unsure whether it wouldn’t just be better to hold back and resist the Americans in their own jihad, rather than actually try to work with them to get the country back on its feet. And another important Shiite party, with particularly strong connections to Iran, the SCIRI, will be given the Science and Education ministry. Well, it is true that, on the basis of numbers, the Shiites constitute the majority of Iraq’s population.