Gold9472
06-28-2005, 06:21 PM
WORLD VIEWS: U.K. media keeps pressure on Bush; the hidden appeal of Iran's new hard-line leader; Egyptian spy show goes easy on 'peace-loving' Jews
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/06/28/worldviews.DTL
Edward M. Gomez, special to SF Gate
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
As President Bush gets ready to deliver another carefully stage-managed televised speech to the nation from an army base in North Carolina tonight, commentators and news analysts in the British press are cutting through the White House's rhetoric to ask, in language that often sounds much stronger than that of their counterparts in the United States, some hard questions about the Republicans' Iraq-war policy and the future of the post-Saddam crisis.
"U.S. public opinion on the Iraq war dips with every dead soldier and plummets at the first sniff of defeat," (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1515377,00.html) commentator Gary Younge writes in The Guardian. Citing a recent Gallup poll of Americans, Younge notes that "[m]ore than half [of those surveyed] believe the war has not made them safer, and 40 percent believe it has striking similarities to the experience in Vietnam." (A separate CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted June 16-19 shows that 59 percent of adult Americans nationwide are now opposed to the war. (PollingReport.com))
"The word 'quagmire' has returned to the debate ..." (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=649440) about Iraq, a news report in The Independent noted with alarm. It added, "More serious is a decline in public support for the war, which proved fatal to the Vietnam enterprise three decades ago."
An analysis in The Observer pointed out that Bush, who "is starting to sound desperate" (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1514898,00.html) as he "watches as support ebbs away," already "seems a lame duck." The British weekly warned that "[t]he talk in Washington is of the dreaded 'tipping point,'" that is, a crucial point at which "Iraq's insurgency deepens into uncontrollable crisis at the same time as American public opinion collapses. That could spell the unthinkable: American defeat."
It was the sober Times, however, that really lowered the boom, dismissing Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's recent feel-good pronouncements about what is obviously a fast-deteriorating situation as "weasel words on Iraq." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1669483,00.html)
Under that headline, the paper's editorial reaffirmed that "[t]he liberation of Iraq from the murderous dictatorship of Saddam Hussein" was a "good deed in a sorry world." But citing the "daily horrors" occurring in occupied Iraq today, it added that it has become indefensible "to argue," as Bush has done, "that every course [of action] that followed [since Saddam's ouster] has been right."
Citing its own ground-breaking reporting on the Downing Street Memo, The Times noted that Bush and Blair's governments "were less than frank with the people in the countdown to war." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1669483,00.html) At this point in the Iraq crisis, it proposed, "it is counterproductive to respond with Panglossian assurances that everything in Iraq is now for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The cameras and the documents may not show the whole picture, but they do not lie." (Times)
The generally centrist-to-conservative British daily even advised Bush to follow a page from Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's leadership playbook and level with the American people. Its editorial (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1669483,00.html) reminded the current U.S. president that in February 1942, FDR addressed his countrymen and said, "Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us."
However, as the latest polls indicate, many Americans have not bought the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld line on the war they started in Iraq, so Bush's team might not be able to obtain the "complete confidence" of many Americans now. In the president's speech tonight, The Guardian's Younge predicts (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1515377,00.html), Bush will tell his U.S. Army audience and his television viewers "that America needs 'resolve.'" For the White House right now, Younge added, "Iraq has become the latest faith-based initiative."
Now that Tehran mayor and former Iranian military officer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared the winner of the run-off election for Iran's presidency, close observers of the Islamic government in Tehran are anxious to find out just how soon and in what ways the ultraconservative politician will put his hard-line agenda into action. What can Iranians and the world expect of his governing style?
In the run-off vote, Ahmadinejad beat former president and "reform-minded cleric" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/26/wiran26.xml) Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as he has sometimes been described (Telegraph).
In the period leading up to Iran's just-ended, two-part election, however, Western news watchers were repeatedly told that Ahmadinejad had acted and would continue to act as a "hard-liner," but without much explanation of what his tough position stood in opposition to. The answer, apparently: Rafsanjani's increasingly unpopular excesses.
Egypt's Al-Gomhuria (http://www.algomhuria.net.eg/gazette/3/2.asp) explained that Ahmadinejad, promising to fight corruption in the government, "appealed so much to the disadvantaged class and the unemployed young people that they voted for him. In the run-up to the ballot, he pledged to redistribute Iran's fabulous oil wealth and to strike hard at graft."
On the eve of the run-off vote, though, it was commentator Amir Taheri, writing in The Arab News (Saudi Arabia), who offered one of the most insightful analyses (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=65891&d=25&m=6&y=2005) of the distinctions between the two presidential candidates and of what might lie ahead for Iran if Ahmadinejad were to win, giving religious conservatives control of all branches of Iran's government.
The main difference (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=65891&d=25&m=6&y=2005) between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani (who is 22 years older than the new president), Taheri pointed out, "is that, with Ahmadinejad, you get what you see, while with Rafsanjani, you can never be sure." Thus, unlike Rafsanjani, who "says men and women are equal but does not believe it ...," Ahmadinejad "says they are unequal and believes what he says." Similarly, Taheri added, "Rafsanjani promises democracy but is remembered for eight years of despotism when he was last president. Ahmadinejad, however, states publicly that there can be no democracy in Islam and that the 'pure Islamic rule' he promises to establish would bear no relationship to the globally adopted, Western pluralist model." (Arab News)
Taheri noted, for example, that Rafsanjani, "a businessman, a mullah and a politician," "is reputedly the richest man in Iran, ... while Ahmadinejad is still paying [off a] mortgage on his modest home. During his two terms as president, Rafsanjani showed that he regarded corruption as the lubricant of an oppressive system." By contrast, as Tehran's mayor, Ahmadinejad had "purged the notoriously corrupt gang leaders" from City Hall. He has vowed, as president, "to clean the stables throughout the government" and, specifically, "to disband the 30 or so, often fictitious, companies set up by powerful [Muslim] mullahs to siphon off a good part of Iran's oil revenues."
In short, Ahmadinejad, who "fought in the eight-year war against Saddam Hussein in person while Rafsanjani was [620 miles] away in Tehran making speeches, ... "is a real "child of the [Islamic] Revolution" who "spent his formative years under [Ayotollah Khomeini's] regime." Rafsanjani's outlook was formed earlier, however, when he was "a successful contractor and pistachio merchant during the Shah's regime."
Taheri's analysis (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=65891&d=25&m=6&y=2005) helped explain why voters might find Ahmadinejad attractive and most likely reject Rafsanjani as a symbol of "big business, ... the top echelons of the civil service, much of it deeply corrupt, and the networks of influential mullahs [who are] engaged in business and politics." What Taheri did not predict was that the hard-line Tehran mayor would win.
In the Muslim-Arab television world, buzz is building around "Agent 1001," a new Egyptian miniseries that will be broadcast during the Ramadan holy season later this year. Still in production, the series has grabbed Arab media critics' attention not only on account of its big budget -- it's being filmed in Egypt, Cyprus and Italy -- but also because Egyptian producers haven't made a spy film in many years.
The Mideast spy caper (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/588664.html) begins right after Egypt's defeat by Israel in the 1967 war. (Ha'aretz) The story follows the journey of Musa (played by actor Mustafa Shaaban), a young Egyptian spy who makes his way into Israel with the help of a Greek woman (Lebanese television host Razan Moughrabi, doing an acting turn in front of the cameras). (Albawaba)
Musa's goal: to impersonate a young Jew from northern Egypt who had been planning to visit relatives in Israel but who actually has just died; his family members are unaware of his death, a situation that allows the Egyptian intelligence service to try to plant a spy across the border.
Egyptian media (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/588664.html) critics have called attention to the new television series' portrayals of certain Israeli characters, too. Among them are "[n]o longer [only] evil characters whose only goal is to harm Arabs, to occupy their land or to try to get their money, but good Jews as well," such as a "Jewish student who explains to Musa that she despises the extremist Jews and their acts against the Arabs." Other characters include "peace-loving Israelis who are opposed to Zionism ...." (Ha'aretz)
An actor who plays an Egyptian spy-agency official in the new series told the Cairo-based daily Al-Wafd that "Agent 1001" will "create a strong echo in the heart" of Egyptian viewers (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/588664.html), who are "always excited by a work that demonstrates power and strength, and emphasizes the Egyptian's loyalty when confronting the dangers threatening him or the country." Such dramas, he said, "are like military operations, and there is a constant need to present them, in order to emphasize the national roles carried out by people who are among the most loyal and noble of Egyptian citizens." (cited in Ha'aretz)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/06/28/worldviews.DTL
Edward M. Gomez, special to SF Gate
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
As President Bush gets ready to deliver another carefully stage-managed televised speech to the nation from an army base in North Carolina tonight, commentators and news analysts in the British press are cutting through the White House's rhetoric to ask, in language that often sounds much stronger than that of their counterparts in the United States, some hard questions about the Republicans' Iraq-war policy and the future of the post-Saddam crisis.
"U.S. public opinion on the Iraq war dips with every dead soldier and plummets at the first sniff of defeat," (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1515377,00.html) commentator Gary Younge writes in The Guardian. Citing a recent Gallup poll of Americans, Younge notes that "[m]ore than half [of those surveyed] believe the war has not made them safer, and 40 percent believe it has striking similarities to the experience in Vietnam." (A separate CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted June 16-19 shows that 59 percent of adult Americans nationwide are now opposed to the war. (PollingReport.com))
"The word 'quagmire' has returned to the debate ..." (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=649440) about Iraq, a news report in The Independent noted with alarm. It added, "More serious is a decline in public support for the war, which proved fatal to the Vietnam enterprise three decades ago."
An analysis in The Observer pointed out that Bush, who "is starting to sound desperate" (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1514898,00.html) as he "watches as support ebbs away," already "seems a lame duck." The British weekly warned that "[t]he talk in Washington is of the dreaded 'tipping point,'" that is, a crucial point at which "Iraq's insurgency deepens into uncontrollable crisis at the same time as American public opinion collapses. That could spell the unthinkable: American defeat."
It was the sober Times, however, that really lowered the boom, dismissing Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's recent feel-good pronouncements about what is obviously a fast-deteriorating situation as "weasel words on Iraq." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1669483,00.html)
Under that headline, the paper's editorial reaffirmed that "[t]he liberation of Iraq from the murderous dictatorship of Saddam Hussein" was a "good deed in a sorry world." But citing the "daily horrors" occurring in occupied Iraq today, it added that it has become indefensible "to argue," as Bush has done, "that every course [of action] that followed [since Saddam's ouster] has been right."
Citing its own ground-breaking reporting on the Downing Street Memo, The Times noted that Bush and Blair's governments "were less than frank with the people in the countdown to war." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1669483,00.html) At this point in the Iraq crisis, it proposed, "it is counterproductive to respond with Panglossian assurances that everything in Iraq is now for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The cameras and the documents may not show the whole picture, but they do not lie." (Times)
The generally centrist-to-conservative British daily even advised Bush to follow a page from Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's leadership playbook and level with the American people. Its editorial (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1669483,00.html) reminded the current U.S. president that in February 1942, FDR addressed his countrymen and said, "Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us."
However, as the latest polls indicate, many Americans have not bought the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld line on the war they started in Iraq, so Bush's team might not be able to obtain the "complete confidence" of many Americans now. In the president's speech tonight, The Guardian's Younge predicts (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1515377,00.html), Bush will tell his U.S. Army audience and his television viewers "that America needs 'resolve.'" For the White House right now, Younge added, "Iraq has become the latest faith-based initiative."
Now that Tehran mayor and former Iranian military officer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared the winner of the run-off election for Iran's presidency, close observers of the Islamic government in Tehran are anxious to find out just how soon and in what ways the ultraconservative politician will put his hard-line agenda into action. What can Iranians and the world expect of his governing style?
In the run-off vote, Ahmadinejad beat former president and "reform-minded cleric" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/26/wiran26.xml) Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as he has sometimes been described (Telegraph).
In the period leading up to Iran's just-ended, two-part election, however, Western news watchers were repeatedly told that Ahmadinejad had acted and would continue to act as a "hard-liner," but without much explanation of what his tough position stood in opposition to. The answer, apparently: Rafsanjani's increasingly unpopular excesses.
Egypt's Al-Gomhuria (http://www.algomhuria.net.eg/gazette/3/2.asp) explained that Ahmadinejad, promising to fight corruption in the government, "appealed so much to the disadvantaged class and the unemployed young people that they voted for him. In the run-up to the ballot, he pledged to redistribute Iran's fabulous oil wealth and to strike hard at graft."
On the eve of the run-off vote, though, it was commentator Amir Taheri, writing in The Arab News (Saudi Arabia), who offered one of the most insightful analyses (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=65891&d=25&m=6&y=2005) of the distinctions between the two presidential candidates and of what might lie ahead for Iran if Ahmadinejad were to win, giving religious conservatives control of all branches of Iran's government.
The main difference (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=65891&d=25&m=6&y=2005) between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani (who is 22 years older than the new president), Taheri pointed out, "is that, with Ahmadinejad, you get what you see, while with Rafsanjani, you can never be sure." Thus, unlike Rafsanjani, who "says men and women are equal but does not believe it ...," Ahmadinejad "says they are unequal and believes what he says." Similarly, Taheri added, "Rafsanjani promises democracy but is remembered for eight years of despotism when he was last president. Ahmadinejad, however, states publicly that there can be no democracy in Islam and that the 'pure Islamic rule' he promises to establish would bear no relationship to the globally adopted, Western pluralist model." (Arab News)
Taheri noted, for example, that Rafsanjani, "a businessman, a mullah and a politician," "is reputedly the richest man in Iran, ... while Ahmadinejad is still paying [off a] mortgage on his modest home. During his two terms as president, Rafsanjani showed that he regarded corruption as the lubricant of an oppressive system." By contrast, as Tehran's mayor, Ahmadinejad had "purged the notoriously corrupt gang leaders" from City Hall. He has vowed, as president, "to clean the stables throughout the government" and, specifically, "to disband the 30 or so, often fictitious, companies set up by powerful [Muslim] mullahs to siphon off a good part of Iran's oil revenues."
In short, Ahmadinejad, who "fought in the eight-year war against Saddam Hussein in person while Rafsanjani was [620 miles] away in Tehran making speeches, ... "is a real "child of the [Islamic] Revolution" who "spent his formative years under [Ayotollah Khomeini's] regime." Rafsanjani's outlook was formed earlier, however, when he was "a successful contractor and pistachio merchant during the Shah's regime."
Taheri's analysis (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=65891&d=25&m=6&y=2005) helped explain why voters might find Ahmadinejad attractive and most likely reject Rafsanjani as a symbol of "big business, ... the top echelons of the civil service, much of it deeply corrupt, and the networks of influential mullahs [who are] engaged in business and politics." What Taheri did not predict was that the hard-line Tehran mayor would win.
In the Muslim-Arab television world, buzz is building around "Agent 1001," a new Egyptian miniseries that will be broadcast during the Ramadan holy season later this year. Still in production, the series has grabbed Arab media critics' attention not only on account of its big budget -- it's being filmed in Egypt, Cyprus and Italy -- but also because Egyptian producers haven't made a spy film in many years.
The Mideast spy caper (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/588664.html) begins right after Egypt's defeat by Israel in the 1967 war. (Ha'aretz) The story follows the journey of Musa (played by actor Mustafa Shaaban), a young Egyptian spy who makes his way into Israel with the help of a Greek woman (Lebanese television host Razan Moughrabi, doing an acting turn in front of the cameras). (Albawaba)
Musa's goal: to impersonate a young Jew from northern Egypt who had been planning to visit relatives in Israel but who actually has just died; his family members are unaware of his death, a situation that allows the Egyptian intelligence service to try to plant a spy across the border.
Egyptian media (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/588664.html) critics have called attention to the new television series' portrayals of certain Israeli characters, too. Among them are "[n]o longer [only] evil characters whose only goal is to harm Arabs, to occupy their land or to try to get their money, but good Jews as well," such as a "Jewish student who explains to Musa that she despises the extremist Jews and their acts against the Arabs." Other characters include "peace-loving Israelis who are opposed to Zionism ...." (Ha'aretz)
An actor who plays an Egyptian spy-agency official in the new series told the Cairo-based daily Al-Wafd that "Agent 1001" will "create a strong echo in the heart" of Egyptian viewers (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/588664.html), who are "always excited by a work that demonstrates power and strength, and emphasizes the Egyptian's loyalty when confronting the dangers threatening him or the country." Such dramas, he said, "are like military operations, and there is a constant need to present them, in order to emphasize the national roles carried out by people who are among the most loyal and noble of Egyptian citizens." (cited in Ha'aretz)