© Copyright 2003 by Susan Shelley
The Meaning of
By Susan Shelley
Two days after the fall of Baghdad, CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan confessed in a New York Times editorial that he concealed knowledge of the vicious and brutal tactics of Saddam Hussein's regime in order to protect CNN's Baghdad bureau and the Iraqi employees on the bureau's staff. Now it can be told, he wrote, that an Iraqi cameraman was beaten and tortured with electricity in a basement for weeks, that a Kuwaiti woman who phoned CNN was beaten daily for months while her father was forced to watch, and that she was later returned to her family as a heap of bloody body parts stuffed in a plastic bag. Now it can be told, he wrote, how the regime kept its employees in line, that an aide to Saddam's son had his front teeth ripped out with pliers and a high official in the information ministry was missing all his fingernails. Now it can be told, he wrote, that CNN reporters were threatened, that Iraqi employees vanished, that whispered stories of unspeakable torture were punctuated by assassinations. CNN concealed all this for a dozen years. Does it matter? Does it matter if a respected news organization covers a dictator with deference and credulity, while covering the leaders of the free world with the open skepticism appropriate to a free press? We have just seen that it matters quite a lot. In the months leading up to the military action in Iraq, many people--some of them on the U.N. Security Council--said with a straight face that George W. Bush, not Saddam Hussein, represented the greater threat to the world. There was a serious debate, difficult to believe today, over whether the Iraqi people would rise up in support of the regime and curse the American invaders for generations to come. CNN has reporters in many places ruled by dictatorships, including Cuba. Will Eason Jordan someday confess to concealing similar coercion by the Castro regime? It will be too late for little Elian Gonzalez, ripped from freedom and thrown back to Cuba after months of TV coverage portraying Fidel Castro as a lovable uncle. Eason Jordan says he was just trying to protect his people, but it is not hard to imagine how fast CNN would abandon its Atlanta headquarters in disgust if the Georgia legislature passed a law condoning lynching. CNN stayed in Baghdad, protecting the regime by misrepresenting the truth. Why? The answer may lie in the belief that the United States is, in its own way, just as bad as the Baghdad regime. And that belief can only rest on the premise that freedom is not important, or not most important. After all, the United States is a free country in which some people have great wealth and others have nothing, and the government does not have the power to equalize the results of their efforts. It is the belief in equality at any cost that explains the sneering contempt for political leaders who refuse to support policies to redistribute wealth, like higher taxes on people who earn more money. It is the belief in equality at any cost that explains the willingness to overlook the brutality of totalitarian regimes. Say what you will about Saddam Hussein, he tortured the highest official and the lowest peasant with equal savagery. It is the passion for equality that leads otherwise intelligent people to dismiss freedom as something saccharine and fundamentally false, a hypocritical platitude that doesn't fool a sophisticated mind. This is dangerous nonsense. Enforced equality can only be maintained by a government of unlimited power. People who live under such governments have clung to rafts in shark-infested waters to get to freedom. They have toppled statues in Moscow and chipped the Berlin Wall apart with pick-axes. They have stared down tanks in Tiananmen Square. Now, thanks to an American president who did not listen to sneering sophisticates, they have set fire to portraits of Saddam Hussein.
April 14, 2003
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