Hip, Hip, Al Hurra!

AMERICAN PUBLIC DIPLOMACY in the Middle East did not have a good week. An Arabic-speaking State Department official named Alberto Fernandez made news on October 21 when he spoke too candidly about U.S. missteps in Iraq on Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television channel based in Qatar. Not only was Fernandez obliged to eat his words, but the coverage of the episode in the U.S. media was incomplete and misleading. It's an all too familiar story to anyone engaged--as I am--in the business of attempting to communicate with Middle Eastern audiences via Arabic-language satellite TV.

What most media reports of the incident left out was that Al Jazeera had set Fernandez up. Fernandez went on the air immediately after a spokesman for Saddam Hussein's outlawed Baath party appeared under the pseudonym Abu Moham med. Al Jazeera provided Saddam's flack airtime to lay down a series of conditions that U.S. commanders would need to meet before Saddam's followers would consider negotiating over the withdrawal of U.S. troops--little matters like the reconstitution of Saddam's army, the scrapping of every law adopted since Saddam was removed from power, and the recognition of pro-Saddam insurgents as "the sole representatives of the Iraqi people."

After the Baathist was done, Fernandez came on, and the Al Jazeera host lobbed a series of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" questions at him, including whether America was ready to begin talks with the Baath party. To his credit, Fernandez dismissed the entire conversation as "farcical" and "very removed from reality." Later in the show, when describing the intense political debate over Iraq in our midterm elections, he went on to utter his too-honest-by-half words about the problems of U.S. policy.