Although the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) was established only in 1985, by the time the Bush administration came to office in January 1989 it had become the non-governmental organization with the greatest influence over US Middle East policy. WINEP built its success on ample funding; an extensive network of relations with the media, policymakers and academics; and dogged focus on its central policy objective — keeping the strategic relationship with Israel at the center of US Middle East policy, a goal that resonates with the anti-Arab and Islamophobic premises of the conventional wisdom on Middle East affairs.
Network researchers who book “experts” say they look for someone who can “give good bite.” Two of the most conspicuous prime-time sound bite experts during the war against Iraq were Anthony Cordesman and Fouad Ajami. These sketches were prepared by Sandrine Bretonniere.
Anthony Cordesman: “We Must Strike Again”
Anthony Cordesman was ABC’s Gulf war “military expert,” and appeared on other networks as well. At the height of the war, he was the analyst who showed up most often as a network news source — 11 times in 14 days (Extra!, May 1991). Another survey ranked him the most quoted “expert,” with 56 appearances. (Steele, “Enlisting Experts”).
Television
ABC
Capital Cities bought ABC, with its 230 affiliated stations, for $3.4 billion in 1986. Also owns: 8 TV stations; 9 dailies, 74 weeklies (Kansas City Star); radio networks with 3,000 affiliated stations; 21 radio stations; a cable programming company; some 60 publications (Women’s Wear Daily, Compute!, Modern Photography). The largest shareholder is Omaha investor Warren Buffett.
CBS
Laurence Tisch, owner of Loews Hotel chain (and active in pro-Israel fundraising), bought a controlling share in 1986. Henry Kissinger is a CBS board member. Also owns: 7 TV stations; 21 radio stations; two radio networks.
NBC
me•di•a pl. of medium 2. an intervening thing through which a force acts or an effect is produced 3. any means, agency or instrument; specif., a means of communication that reaches the general public and carries advertising.
—Webster’s New World Dictionary
“Propaganda to Journalism” was the New York Times headline on a year-end story about mass media in former Socialist countries, without the slightest self-consciousness about how US coverage of events like the Somalia intervention exemplifies “journalism to propaganda.” Perhaps there have been equally bizarre landings in the history of the US Marines — Beirut, for instance, in July 1958, when they splashed onto a beach full of sunbathers and Coca-Cola vendors. In this latest patriotic spectacle, troops landed in camouflage uniforms and greased faces, only to find their high-tech night vision goggles rendered useless, even hazardous, by the glare of the television camera lights.
Fred Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen, 1967-1987 (Cambridge, 1990).
F. Robert Hunter, The Palestinian Uprising: A War by Other Means (I. B. Tauris, 1991).
Joost Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 1991).
Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (Columbia, 1991).
Kevin Dwyer, Arab Voices: The Human Rights Debate in the Middle East (Routledge, 1991).
Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics (Westview, 1991).
The Islamist government in Sudan recently celebrated the third anniversary of the military coup that brought it to power by building a huge public park south of the Khartoum airport, featuring hundreds of hurriedly transplanted trees, bushes and flowers. The impressive determination and efficiency the project commanded seemed calculated to prove to Khartoum’s masses that this is a can-do government.
On September 13, 1991, after nearly 17 years in the prisons of His Majesty Hassan II, Moroccan activist Abraham Serfaty was released and expelled to France. This was not, to be sure, out of human rights considerations, or a measure of royal clemency: According to the Ministry of the Interior, an “in-depth” — if belated — examination of Serfaty’s legal status had revealed that he was not entitled to Moroccan citizenship. His father had lived in Brazil for 17 years before returning to Morocco in 1923, three years before Serfaty himself was born. He was thus expelled as a “veritable impostor.”
With this issue we return to the question of the prospects for democratic forces in the Middle East, and the role of religiously based political movements there. These essays and interviews share a resolutely secularist perspective, a conviction that the construction of a just and viable social order requires a political practice that values tolerance and diversity. This perspective respects the genuine religiosity of many Middle Eastern societies, but the authors firmly critique the authoritarian component of the leading Islamist trends in Egypt, Algeria, Sudan and Palestine, and the varying degrees of complicity of the states (and Palestinian political organizations) in furthering the growth of these movements, by their combination of encouragement, neglect and repression.
Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Faber and Faber, 1991).
This is a rich and profoundly satisfying book, the high-water mark of Albert Hourani’s long and influential career as a writer and teacher. Hourani’s gifts as a teacher, and the care and affection he has devoted to his students, are legendary. He has shaped the perceptions and interpretations of the history of the modern Middle East of several generations of students from a wide variety of backgrounds, both in Britain and in the United States.
Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (California, 1990).
The era of the nation-state has increasingly put into question pastoral nomadism as a way of life and as a distinctive cultural identity. In Saudi Arabia, Bedouin pastoralists have become ranchers who transport their herds to pasture in Toyota pickups. Jordanian Bedouin preserve their identity by soldiering for the Hashemite monarchy. The Bedouin may be central to the nationalist ideologies of states like Libya, but the free herders and warriors of the desert, always something of an idealization, belong to an ever more remote mythical past.
