Meanwhile in Iraq

What a nightmare.

From Juan Cole

Muhsin Abdel Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party (Muslim Brotherhood), is this month's president of the Interim Governing Council. He has weighed in on the need for the Fundamental Law now being drafted to govern Iraq until a new constitution can be written to reflect the Islamic character of Iraq. AP reports that although President Bush has said he was assured there would be freedom of religion in Iraq, in fact powerful members of the American-appointed IGC are striving to enshrine a conservative interpretation of Islamic law as the law of the land. That would detract from women's rights and the rights of religious minorities, inevitably.

I have no confidence whatsoever that Bush knows enough about the subject to understand what he was told, or to avoid being tricked by clever wording. Ahmad Chalabi's son is helping to draft the Fundamental Law, and AP quotes him as ready to throw in the towel and just give in to the shari'ah or the medieval jurisprudence of Islam.

And I take Juan Cole's articles to be the definitive word on assessments of Middle Eastern culture and politics, but I think he is making an assumption in this next post that may be unfounded.

You know, if you were an Arab intellectual in Cairo, Amman or even Baghdad, and you wanted to read a book that collected some central writings of Thomas Jefferson in Arabic, you almost certainly could not get hold of such a book. I repeat: The major classics of American thought either have not been translated into Arabic, or were published in tiny editions and are now impossible to find. I just checked. Bernard Mayo's Jefferson Himself appeared in Cairo in 1959 and 1960. Nobody now could find a copy, I am sure. I searched for the Federalist Papers in Arabic and got nothing. Abbas Mahmud al-`Aqqad's book on Benjamin Franklin was published in 1955, and appears to be the last word on the subject.

...Not only is American print culture largely unavailable in Arabic, but the media situation has gone downhill. The highly professional and provacative Arabic service of the Voice of America has been shut down. It has been replaced by Radio Sawa, a pet project of US radio mogul Norman Pattiz, which broadcasts Britney Spears and Arab pop to the young people but which has almost no intellectual content. There are short news headlines, AM radio style, that are given in language that is obviously and heavy-handedly biased toward the US and Israel. Most important Arab states, like Egypt, won't allow Radio Sawa to broadcast in their countries (it uses local FM frequencies). Pattiz is contemptuous of the old Voice of America operation because it was on shortwave and only reached 1% of Arab listeners. But there was no reason VOA couldn't have been broadcast on FM if the US had wanted that. Closing it down and replacing it with pablum and propaganda is no way to win a war of ideas.

My point is, I don't think it was ever intended that Iraqis should be educated about democracy - only that they should become consumers of American culture and products. It's not democracy we are trying to spread, it's consumerism - that mainstay of capitalism.