Posted on 05/07/2002 10:14:40 PM PDT by Mitchell
At 10 a.m. GMT on Wednesday, the plug was pulled on satellite broadcasts beamed in to a repressed country where the government restricts the free flow of information. Which country? No, not Canada -- where the regime already jams foreign satellite signals to prevent cultural pollution -- but Iraq.
Established last August, "Liberty TV" was financially administered by the U.S. State Department using funds authorized by Congress under the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, but owned and operated by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the umbrella group opposed to Saddam Hussein.
Employing 30 personnel, and costing about $200,000 per month (plus another $10,000 for transmission expenses), Liberty TV's primary mandate was to produce Arabic-language news bulletins, talk shows and documentaries and beam them to Iraqi satellite dishes. There were plans to produce incriminating footage of food queues, mass graves and military movements secretly shot by agents with Sony digital cameras.
The trouble is, nobody was paying the bills. After three warnings, Connection Broadcast and BT Broadcast -- the British companies which own the fibre-optic cables used to send content to the United States, where it is rebroadcast through the Loral-owned Telstar 12 satellite -- announced they were discontinuing service.
A Connection Broadcast spokesman said that had the State Department at least provided "the necessary [financial] guarantees", transmission would not have been terminated.
INC representatives blamed the State Department for the mix-up. "Although the U.S. Congress has appropriated funds for broadcasting to the Iraqi people, the State Department has not released any funds to Liberty TV since February", said Sharif Ali Bin Al-Hussein, a member of the group's Leadership Council.
In reply, Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, declared that "we anticipate providing additional funding as soon as grant negotiations are successfully concluded", and cited "ongoing problems" with the INC's "financial management practices".
A likely story. The denizens of Foggy Bottom, where the State Department is located, have heartily disliked the INC since the early 1990s and have a history of undercutting it. Occasionally, they just drag their feet and hopes to trip up the INC, such as the time earlier this year when they belatedly agreed to an INC-run radio-transmitter but specified that it should be built in Iran. It has long been the State Department's desire to mend fences with Tehran, despite Iran's fermentation of Islamist revolution, and dragooning the INC into acting as a midwife seemed a small price to pay. (The INC wanted to build it in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq).
At other times, the department cleverly casts aspersions on the INC's financial probity. In January, Boucher claimed a "lack of adequate accounting procedures" prevented further funding of the INC's Office for Mobilization and Co-ordination. The INC implemented virtually all of the State Department's recommendations, and hired a Department-approved accountant to audit the books, but not before the State Department had inflicted major image-damage.
Seemingly, it had never occurred to the experts at the State Department that, when it comes to auditing expenses associated with covert operations, providing the names of agents and sympathizers working in Arab countries and the locations of INC offices in various cities risks public exposure through the Freedom of Information Act. Regarding Liberty TV, did the State Department really have to sever funding for three months while negotiations over paperwork and record-keeping were held?
Though, as I wrote in a column a few weeks ago about Castro banning the sale of computers because he wants to stop people using e-mail to communicate with the outside world, we should not be too "sentimental" about the inevitably "liberating power of knowledge". Most Cubans, preferring the quiet life, rub along well enough with the Communist government, though those who dare raise their heads above the parapet will attract the attention of the secret police. Tyranny requires consent on the part of the tyrannized.
Thus, the mere fact that Iraqis receive (or should receive) television and radio broadcasts to counterbalance the regime-produced agitprop does not necessarily imply that they will rise up and tear down Saddam Hussein for the sake of democracy and free-markets. The cleansing of Iraq can only occur through external military means and internal rebellion.
But transmissions serve useful purposes, nevertheless. They intensely annoy the regime in question: If enough people tune in, Saddam would ban satellite dishes, even among his Ba'athist ruling elite; and according to Paul Goble of Radio Free Europe (which runs Radio Free Iraq), one way of measuring response is by counting the number of times Iraqi officials denounce the transmissions. More importantly, their existence demonstrates to the truly committed that someone, out here at least, supports them.
I took the Foreign Service exam back in 1961. Passed the written exam in Oke City and they flew me to St. Louis for the orals.
I damn near got into a fist fight with one of the interviewers over the proper response to Communist penetration of the Western Hemisphere -- in Cuba and Latin America.
As it turned out, events proved me right and his socialist butt wrong.
I wasn't accepted, of course. And I got back on the plane delighted that I'd "failed". It would have been a miserable experience dealing with the internal politics of the organization.
What in the world was it like? I just can't imagine what you mean!
And I would imagine that things are much worse in that respect now than they were back in 1961.
It sure looks that way. And the problem goes beyond the State Dept.
Rumsfeld is taking the lead in attacking this problem; he's been cleaning house in the Armed Forces, changing the people in the command positions (and, more to the point, changing the kind of person who is selected for a command position).
Thanks, I really was asking. The whole thing seems ridiculous to me. (Any organization that limits itself to one particular personality type is asking for real trouble in the long run.)
I've no doubt. The smarminess is on display every day, isn't it?
I don't believe it is so much an innate socialist bent, though. Instead, there seems to be an inherent bias in the Foreign Service against any kind of confrontation. And, thus, they are very uncomfortable with principles.
They take their role to be one of interpreting other societies to the U.S., rather than representing U.S. interests.
In their defense, though, this seems a normal human tendency. Public utility commissions, for example, tend to become the captives of the utilities, rather than representatives of the ratepayers. Advertising agency account executives become possessive of their client's interests, rather than their employer's interests. Et cetera.
I am so glad I never became a diplomat...
Yes, this is my impression as well. The Foreign Service seems to be, by its nature, populated by those who would elevate a "tactful" nonconfontational attitude from its proper position (as one possible approach, as well as a matter of etiquette), as if it were a major principle itself.
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