Dickey on Jordanians' Reactions to the Iraq War

DATE March 28, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Christopher Dickey discusses issues pertaining to the
war in Iraq and various groups' perceptions of these issues
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Will we be safer after Saddam Hussein? What is the role of oil in this war?
How will the war affect the Middle East peace process? And why did France
take such a hard line against the United States? These are some of the
questions I discussed with Christopher Dickey. He's been Newsweek's Middle
East regional editor since 1993, and is also the magazine's Paris bureau
chief. His books include a memoir about his late father, the writer James
Dickey. We called Christopher Dickey in Jordan.

Christopher Dickey, you're speaking to us from Amman, Jordan. Why are you in
Jordan?

Mr. CHRISTOPHER DICKEY (Middle East Regional Editor/Paris Bureau Chief,
Newsweek; Author): Well, Jordan is a good listening post for what goes on in
Iraq, what goes on in Israel and the occupied territories and what goes on
sort of across the Arab world. It touches on lots of different countries and
lots of different issues. And I spent the first Gulf War here, and it was a
very good place to be. So I thought it would be a good place to be this time
around. And eventually I think we'll have a straight shot into Baghdad or the
siege of Baghdad from here.

GROSS: So can you give us an overview of what you are hearing in terms of
reaction to the war?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, I think the important thing for people in the United States
to understand is that this war has almost no credibility as far as the rest of
the world is concerned, certainly not the Arab world. I think that the media
coverage that people are seeing coming out of the United States on CNN and the
other networks and in the American press just doesn't fit with the perceptions
that exist here among Arabs, among Muslims and, in fact, among most Europeans.
And I think that that's going to lead to a greater and greater sort of
disconnect between the administration and the American public and this part of
the world. It could prove very dangerous and a real long-term liability.

GROSS: There's a lot of Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, about 400,000.
What's the reaction of the Iraqi refugees in Jordan?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, a lot of them are going back; not 400,000. There are about
350, 400,000 Iraqis who live here. They're not all refugees; a lot of them
are here because the economic opportunities are better. They're not here as
political refugees; some are. And I've been talking to a lot of them. Some 4
or 5,000 have gone back to Iraq since the beginning of the war. It's one of
the interesting things here. There's been no refugee flow out of Iraq
whatsoever. All the flow has been back into Iraq by people who want to go be
with their families, help defend their homes and, in some cases, many say they
want to go help defend Saddam Hussein.

GROSS: You're in Jordan. Do you think the king of Jordan is worried about
his future in the face of this war?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, absolutely. I mean, for the king of Jordan, who's very
quietly helping the United States, but extensively helping the United States
in this effort, for the Saudis, who are doing the same thing; virtually every
regime that is in any way connected with the United States. I think this is
not only an embarrassing but dangerous situation.

You have to remember that a couple of weeks ago nobody would have given a
plugged nickel for Saddam Hussein; people didn't support him, they didn't like
him. They saw the horrors that he represented. They didn't particularly like
the idea of this war; in fact, many were opposed to it. But they didn't like
him. Now, now he emerges as a kind of a hero--standing up to the United
States; holding fast against an American onslaught.

You know, this war has already gone on longer than the '67 War that Israel
fought against the whole Arab world, and it looks like it's going to go on for
many weeks more. And this is the superpower, the greatest power on Earth,
bringing an enormous amount of force to bear on a country of 24 million people
that has been under boycott and embargo for the last 12 years and has had its
army decimated in several wars. So to see the Iraqis standing up at this
point, to see Saddam standing up, is a source of inspiration and pride and
also growing anger in the Arab and Muslim world, and it is really not
improving the image of the USA in these parts.

GROSS: Even though Saddam Hussein is a dictator, a brutal dictator, a
sadistic dictator, and everybody knows that, and even though Saddam Hussein
isn't a pious Muslim, he is still being looked up to for standing up to the
United States?

Mr. DICKEY: Sure. Because the United States is the United States, and also
because this is an invasion. Nobody in this part of the world uses the word
`liberation.' You know, President Bush can repeat that again and again as
much as he wants, so can Tony Blair, but the fact is nobody believes it.
Everybody here sees this as an invasion and the beginning of an occupation of
a sovereign Arab state.

And I'll tell you, it's more nuanced than that, too. I mean, what you hear
again and again from Iraqis, who can obviously speak more freely here than
they can in Iraq and many of whom are deeply opposed to Saddam, is, `Look, we
couldn't get rid of Saddam, but we're glad the Americans are getting rid of
Saddam because we know then we can get rid of the Americans'; not that they'll
leave, but the Americans are a lot easier to terrorize and a lot easier to
eliminate and a lot easier to get rid of than Saddam Hussein. So none of that
bodes particularly well for administration policy or for the future of the
United States in this region.

GROSS: My guest is Christopher Dickey. He is the Paris bureau chief and
Middle East editor for Newsweek. He's speaking to us from Amman, Jordan.

The Bush administration indicated that they thought that when the US military
came into Iraq the military would be greeted as liberators. That has not
visibly turned out to be the case. Why do you think people haven't been
running out in Iraq and greeting the tanks and greeting the soldiers as
liberators?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, I think you have to step back, for starters, and sort of
understand that people like Kanan Makiya and Ahmed Chalabi, these sort of
leading exiles, people that certainly the Pentagon listen to--or the civilians
in the Pentagon listen to very closely, have been preaching the same line for
years, and that line is: `The Iraqi people hate Saddam Hussein, they detest
Saddam Hussein, and therefore they will love the Americans when they arrive.'
Well, it is true that the Iraqi people do detest Saddam Hussein, but they do
not love the Americans, and that is a huge miscalculation.

Now in terms of what's actually happening on the ground, Saddam has been very,
very smart in the way he distributed his thugs throughout the country. And
instead of concentrating all his sort of ability to intimidate in Baghdad the
way he used to do, what he's done is to take Saddam's Fedayeen and some
members of the Republican Guard and the Special Guard and spread them around
the country so that their presence is felt in every sort of medium-sized city
and even small towns in Iraq. And people are afraid of Saddam and afraid of
these people, and fear is a motivating factor with them.

I don't think it's the only factor, but it certainly is important that
Saddam's ability to terrorize his population has a kind of mythical aspect to
it. It's built into the population. You could almost say it's genetic after
35 years of Ba'ath Party rule with Saddam either in the background or at the
head of the government. And people are not going to believe that Saddam is
not in power or not able to retaliate against them until they know he's dead;
I mean really dead. If they could dip their hands in his blood, maybe they
would be convinced, and that would be the kind of thing that certainly has
happened in Iraq before.

GROSS: The Bush administration has given two main reasons for the war; one is
to liberate the Iraqi people, and the other is to find the weapons of mass
destruction and do away with them. You have a column on the Newsweek Web site
suggesting that we might not necessarily be safer after Saddam Hussein. And
this is something you've been picking up from intelligence experts is that
there might be individual operatives who will have access to weapons of mass
destruction.

Mr. DICKEY: Sure.

GROSS: What kind of scenarios have you been hearing are possible?

Mr. DICKEY: Sure.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. DICKEY: Look, Terry, this is a really tightly controlled regime where all
the scientists were under the fist, if you will, of Saddam and his security
apparatus. And they're very smart people. They were able, very nearly, to
create an atomic bomb; they created very sophisticated chemical and biological
weapons programs. And they have expertise that is marketable in a world where
proliferation is rampant around the globe.

Now does it seem likely--I mean, this is the position of many in the
intelligence business. It doesn't seem likely to them that all those
scientists are going to be rounded up effectively by this invasion. Many of
them will have left the country already; many of them will leave during the
course of the fighting, one way or another; many of them will stay, but will
not be identified. It's very, very hard to track down the specific identities
of people in Iraq. And as a result, as they have the chance to go their own
way, they will go into a market or into a marketplace for weapons of mass
destruction that's already very, very well-developed, except they'll be
free-lancers; very hard to trace, very hard to control and very, very
dangerous. This is what we saw with the breakup of the Soviet Union, this is
what we saw with the demise of several regimes in Eastern Europe, and this is
what many in the intelligence field think we will see with Iraq.

So, no, it probably will not make this world a safer place; no.

GROSS: I want to quote something that you wrote recently in Newsweek. You
wrote, you know, Iraq is not just another dictatorship; it's one of the last
truly totalitarian states in the tradition of Germany under Hitler or the
Soviet Union under Stalin. And you say, `When whole countries are run like
prisons, the population tends to act the way inmates do in an uprising.
They're less interested in liberation at first than in settling scores,
slaughtering their guards and each other. When totalitarianism ended in
Yugoslavia, the country crumbled into bloody pieces.'

What are some of your concerns about Iraq after the war?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, just that. I think that the United States will have a
terribly difficult role trying to keep Iraq together, and frankly I don't
think it will be able to do it. They centrifugal forces inside Iraq--not just
among the Kurds, the Sunni and the Shia, which now everybody in America is
probably familiar with, but within these different communities, Shia against
Shia, Sunni against Sunni, tribe against tribe, Kurdish against Kurdish--all
these are intensely felt feuds that are briefly united either by the terrorism
of Saddam and his iron control over the country or temporarily united in
opposition to Saddam. But when it comes to converting that into a single
policy that works, that functions, that is even remotely democratic, the
chances are very, very slim indeed, and the commitment required of the
colonial power that would try and institute that democracy is a very long-term
commitment. Nobody thinks that the United States really will commit itself to
five, 10, 15, 20 years of occupying Iraq. And if it does, it's going to find
itself at war with the rest of the region and much of the rest of the world.

GROSS: My guest is Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Middle East regional editor
and Paris bureau chief. He's talking to us from Amman, Jordan. More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Christopher Dickey. He's
joining us from Amman, Jordan. He's the Paris bureau chief and Middle East
editor for Newsweek.

One of the issues you've been writing about is big oil. You know, a lot of
people are wondering: `Does this war have anything to do with oil? And if
so, how does oil come into play?' In an article you wrote, you said that big
oil wants to regain influence over the Middle East oil fields, oil fields from
which Western companies were expelled four decades ago.

What do you think are the hopes of big oil now?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, I think they vary. I think, first of all, that the idea
that Iraq is suddenly going to become our Saudi Arabia, a sort of wholly owned
oil subsidiary of the United States that can counteract the other forces in
the global oil market, is deeply misleading. And I think people who look at
that as a positive thing should rethink what they're doing.

I think as far as the oil companies are concerned, clearly, they see a chance
to get in on the ground floor in an enormous market, particularly with what
are called production-sharing agreements, something that's very rare in the
Middle East and in the really big oil-producing states, but which has come to
be sort of accepted practice among the more corrupt and backward nations of
Africa and, to some extent, in Latin America.

Production-sharing agreements essentially mean that the people who develop the
field, the companies who develop the field are able to book the proven
reserves of these oil fields as assets on their bottom line, and it increases
their stock price, makes them much more valuable companies, guarantees their
supply of oil to the market and so on. But it's always been viewed as a
tremendous infringement of sovereignty in this part of the world. And
certainly since the great wave of nationalization in the 1970s, that sort of
thing has been absolutely unacceptable.

So we'll see if the oil companies are willing or able, rather, to get that
kind of deal with whoever they have to deal with in Iraq. But then the
question comes: Who are they going to deal with in Iraq? Are they going to
be dealing with the occupation government? With Iraqis appointed as
administrators and bureaucrats by Tommy Franks and his assistants? Is that a
credible contract with no independent constitution, no independent laws?

Right now the only company--the American company--not the only one, but the
American company that is making a huge amount of money out of this war already
and will be making even more is Halliburton and its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown
& Root, which, of course, was formerly run by Dick Cheney.

GROSS: So how are Halliburton and Kellogg Brown & Root making money from the
war?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, they've already gotten initial contracts to put out the
fires in southern Iraq, and they are first in line to get the contracts to
rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq's oil industry. Now those contracts
probably will be signed by some kind of client-Iraqi government under the
military administration. But they don't require the kinds of investments that
development of the big oil fields do, because to develop the big oil fields
you're talking many tens of billions of dollars, and to do that I think even
Exxon and some of the other big oil companies are going to be reticent to go
in unless they have a much clearer legal framework than they are likely to
have for another two or three years at the soonest.

GROSS: And is the fact that the vice president, Dick Cheney, used to be the
CEO of Halliburton and Halliburton is getting huge contracts as a result of
the war in Iraq--is that something that's being talked about in Jordan or in
other Arab countries or, you know, in the media there?

Mr. DICKEY: Oh, absolutely. It's being talked about all the time. The
minute that these initial contracts, which are not, you know, enormous
contracts--but the first contract showing that Halliburton has got its foot in
the door--the minute those were initialed and the word went out, it was all
over the Arab press, because it just convinces everybody that this is a grab
for oil by a bunch of very cynical people in the American administration.

I don't think it is, but that's the way it looks to the people out here; and
in fact, it's the way it looks to an awful lot of Europeans, as well.

GROSS: Shortly before the war started, like a few weeks before the war,
President Bush said that he wanted to table the Middle East road map until
after the resolution of Iraq. But much more shortly before the war, just a
couple of days or so before the war started, he said that he was willing to go
forward with the Middle East road map, apparently at the insistence of Tony
Blair. How do you think President Bush's willingness to go forward now with
the Middle East road map is playing in the Middle East to Israelis and to
Palestinians?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, I don't think that President Bush really has any
credibility in the peace process whatsoever. I think Prime Minister Sharon in
Israel sees Bush as the best friend he's ever had, and he says as much all the
time. And if that's the case, it's hard to believe that he really expects
Bush to put a lot of pressure on him to shut down the illegal settlements in
the occupied territories and withdraw, which is really what the road map says.

In fact, I was just going over the road map in considerable detail earlier
today, and it is certainly the most progressive plan for peace in the Middle
East and, in many ways, the most practical that's ever existed. But the Bush
administration has allowed the Israeli government to stall and to stall and to
stall some more; and, of course, part and parcel of this is the Bush
administration's own reluctance to address any of these issues seriously until
after the 2004 elections. You'll notice that it's a three-year horizon, which
takes us conveniently to 2005 before any really tough decisions have to be
made. And so as a result, I just think there's no confidence.

But even as bad as the situation is, the Arab governments and the new
Palestinian government that's taking shape are trying to work within this
framework and within this plan, and some good things are already coming out of
it, not least of which is that new Palestinian government. Arafat is rapidly
being shouldered aside in a way that would have been inconceivable a couple of
years ago, and that is probably to the good over the long run.

GROSS: What are some of the things within the Middle East road map that make
you think it's one of the more--What was the word you used to describe it?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, it's one of the most progressive and ambitious in terms of
the creation of a Palestinian state, a viable Palestinian state, which is
something that the Bush administration has said it supports again and again
and again in really unequivocal terms. Now the problem is implementation;
that's where the devil is in these details.

But on paper, even before the road map, the Bush administration goes much,
much further than any previous administration in saying that it supports a
viable Palestinian state; not Palestinian self-determination, not an entity,
not a something or other, but a viable Palestinian state living side by side
in peace with Israel. And the road map embraces that idea and advances it
along the lines, not only of UN resolutions, but of other international tacks,
including the Arab resolution that came out of the Beirut summit almost a year
ago that promises peace for the whole Arab world if Israel will embrace a
two-state solution that, in fact, includes withdrawal from virtually all of
the territories occupied in 1967.

GROSS: Christopher Dickey, speaking to us from Amman, Jordan. We'll continue
the interview in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross and this is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, we continue our conversation with Christopher Dickey,
Middle East regional editor for Newsweek. And linguist Geoff Nunberg has been
thinking about why journalists and politicians can't seem to agree on the
pronunciation of countries like Iraq (pronounced ih-RAK) or Iraq (pronounced
EYE-rak) and Qatar (KOT-tahr)--or is it Qatar (pronounced GUT-ur)?

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Christopher Dickey.
He's been Newsweek's Middle East regional editor since 1993. He's also the
magazine's Paris bureau chief. Let's get back to the interview we recorded
with him from Amman, Jordan. When we left off, we were talking about how the
war may affect the Middle East road map to peace.

What are your impressions of the new Palestinian prime minister?

Mr. DICKEY: Abu Mazen is a very colorless character in a field of very
colorful ones. He has been the steady player. He's the man that people trust
when they talk to him. Arafat has occasionally had the good sense to send Abu
Mazen out to negotiate with Israelis and others when serious work needed to be
done. So he's certainly a well-known quantity. He was involved with the Oslo
talks and so on. And I think there's a general feeling among many Israelis,
and certainly among the Europeans and the Americans directly concerned with
the peace process, that he's a man they can deal with.

Now whether he has the charisma to pull the Palestinian people behind him and
to win support among the Palestinian masses, if you will, and the Arab masses,
because no Palestinian issue is strictly limited to the Palestinians, that's
another question. But we'll see. At least he's somebody you can talk to and
have a sensible conversation. Any of us who've ever interviewed Arafat know
that it's the most futile exercise in circular debate imaginable. And I think
people are just fed up, and anybody who wants to move ahead would rather have
the straight-talking Abu Mazen than the endlessly deceptive Arafat.

GROSS: One of the big controversies surrounding how to go about dealing with
Saddam Hussein has been this: Should Middle East peace be dealt with first,
and then would it be a lot easier to deal with Saddam Hussein, or should
Saddam Hussein be dealt with first, and then would it be a lot easier to deal
with peace in the Middle East? Why are these two issues so interconnected?

Mr. DICKEY: I think you have to understand everything within the general
concept of the humiliation of the Arabs. Arabs and Muslims generally, but
certainly Arabs around the world, feel a collective sense of humiliation
because of their history over the last couple of hundred years, first at the
hands of the Ottomans and later after all the betrayals by the colonial powers
in the wake of World War I and then the successive defeats at the hands of
Israel and, also, the oppression and humiliation at the hands of their own
leaders.

And there's also a sense in the Islamic world of--there's this very strong
sense of justice. In Europe, when they do polls in the Muslim community in
Europe and then outside the Muslim community, and say, `What does Islam mean
to you?' non-Muslims tend to say `terrorism' or `fanaticism' or we use words
like that. Muslims tend to say `justice.' There's a sense of fairness and
equity in Islam that's very important. And the sense that the creation of
Israel in the '30s and '40s and then, of course, the war for independence was
profoundly unjust is just deeply, deeply rooted in Arab and Muslim society.

What people see now is that this one government, as brutal and sluggish as it
is, but the one government that's stood up to the United States and stands up
to the United States is now the object of a full-scale invasion. And, you
know, you can't walk down the street here and talk to anybody who doesn't draw
some sort of parallel with Iraq, who doesn't sort of say, `Look, you invade
Iraq to get rid of weapons of mass destruction, and yet nobody wants to talk
about the weapons of mass destruction in Israel. You invade Iraq because it
doesn't abide by UN resolutions, and nobody wants to talk about Israel
ignoring UN resolutions.' These are the kinds of parallels that are made
again and again and again in the Arab world.

Are they just arguments? I don't think so, but that's maybe the subject for
another day. What they are is they're convincing to Arabs and they're
convincing to Muslims. And that's something that has to be dealt with as a
matter of public diplomacy and of fundamental policy by any American
administration. And this administration, while it has paid lip service to
these notions and even on paper taken a very ambitious and forward-looking
position, has been unwilling to do anything to implement these policies in
concrete terms. And that's why there's such a deep, deep, really, a
fundamental mistrust of Washington.

GROSS: Because within the Arab world perceptions of the war in Iraq are tied
to their perceptions of the Middle East, is the war in Iraq helping to fuel
anti-Semitism?

Mr. DICKEY: I don't think anti-Semitism could get a whole lot worse in the
Middle East than it already is in the Arab and Muslim world.

GROSS: Oh, oh. Isn't that good news?

Mr. DICKEY: I think perhaps it is helping to fuel some anti-Semitism in
Europe, not only among the Muslim community but among many Europeans who feel
that this is a policy being driven by Israel for Israel--or more to the point,
driven by the Likud Party for the Likud Party's vision of the world and that
it is extremely dangerous.

I was at the protest rallies in February in Britain, when there were more than
a million people in the streets of London protesting against what was then
oncoming war, and I can tell you it was a sea of Palestinian flags. And a lot
of those Palestinian flag-wavers were not Arab and were hostile to Israel.
And it was sometimes hard to see where hostility to Israel and Zionism ended
and hostility to Jews began. It's not a happy situation, and I think it's
going to get a lot worse.

I think it's probably fortunate that even though Israel is killing sometimes
six to 10 Palestinians a day and the world doesn't seem to be paying a lot of
attention to it, many people thought that Sharon's actions would be even more
dramatic once the war began against Saddam. And he seems to have acted with,
by his standards, some restraint. But if you start to see really major
incursions by Israel into the Palestinian territories, even more extensive
than you've seen already, I think you're going to see a huge amount of anger
not only in the Muslim world, but in Europe.

GROSS: So if I understand you correctly, you're saying that anti-Sharon
sentiment is getting generalized more and more into anti-Semitism.

Mr. DICKEY: Well, I think there's that risk, yes. I mean, I think that, you
know, people shade these things very quickly on every side of any debate. I
mean, for instance, until very, very recently, it was very little
anti-American sentiment as such, that is sentiment against Americans, in
France. There was a huge hostility to the policies of the Bush
administration. In America, you know, anti-Chirac sentiment instantly became
anti-French sentiment. People stopped drinking French wine, which has
absolutely nothing to do with Chirac's policy on this war.

And I think, you know, when you've got emotions running high, it's very easy
to see that there's going to be a tendency for anti-Sharon, anti-Likud policy
positions to very quickly shade over into anti-Israeli positions and then,
because Jewish communities are generally very supportive of Israel, into
anti-Jewish positions. But is that anti-Semitism in the classical sense?
Perhaps not, but it's ugly nonetheless.

GROSS: My guest is Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Middle East regional editor
and Paris bureau chief. He's talking to us from Amman, Jordan. More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Yesterday at the UN, France's foreign minister Dominique de Villepin
said that these times call for a renewed close and trusting relationship
between his country and the US. But France not only continues to disagree
with the Bush administration about the war, France wants the UN to play a
large role in running post-war Iraq, a plan that the Bush administration
remains opposed to.

Let's get back to our interview with Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Paris
bureau chief and Middle East regional editor. I asked him about how the rift
between France and the US grew so big.

What was at stake for France when it took such a strong stand against the war
in the Security Council?

Mr. DICKEY: France's position has to be understood in a couple of different
lights. First of all, the position taken by Chirac at the Security Council
and in his general discourse on this war is a position that is not difficult
to justify unless you're in the United States. It's a position that's
congruent with the vast majority of opinion, not only in France, but all over
Europe, including in Britain and in Italy and in Spain, where the governments
are backing US policy. So in that sense, he took a righteous position in line
with public opinion and public sentiment.

But it's possible to take a righteous position sometimes for the wrong reasons
or for reasons that are not absolutely made clear to the public. And I think
that there's very little question that Chirac and especially his foreign
minister, Dominique de Villepin, have a vision of France as standing up
independently of the United States as being if not a superpower, at least the
other power and that they saw this as an opportunity to assert their position
in those fora where they still have some importance, including the European
Union and the United Nations Security Council. And that's what they did.

I mean, one cannot talk to the French on background for any length of time
without coming away with a sense that there was a bit of an ambush there in
the Security Council in January, that they mistrusted the motives of the Bush
administration, to be sure, but that they decided for their own Gaullist
reasons, as well as for broader questions of statesmanship and policy, that
they would ambush Colin Powell in the Security Council and start a drive to
stop the war. And that's what they did. And they saw no reason to back away
from that position and still see no reason to back away from that position.

But there are many in France, even Gaullists and conservatives, who wonder why
Chirac has taken the kind of lead in this that he has taken, and they tend to
blame de Villepin, who is a wonderfully attractive, suave, debonair speaker,
but is also something of a Catholic sort of Joan of Arc, Napoleonic, Gaullist
ideologue. And I think he's understood in those terms in France. So I think
that some of this may shake out domestically in France over the next few
months.

But the basic position of the opposition to the United States is one in which,
remember, the Russians joined and so did many little countries, who were under
enormous pressure from Washington and to whom enormous promises were made by
Washington. And they still decided not to go against their popular sentiment
and not to go against what they thought was the right thing to do.

GROSS: You know, I want to pick up something you wrote in one of your pieces
about President Bush's speeches. He refers to his faith a lot in speeches.
He refers to God. And you say that those religious references probably sound
really different in Europe than they do in the United States. What have you
been picking up on about how they sound in Europe?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, they sound like the words of a religious fanatic to
Europeans. European governments, by and large, do not go around citing God
as their authority to act. And no European politician, even among the
Christian democrats, comes out and talks about how he prays for guidance and
how he thinks God is on his side, which is the implication of much that
President Bush says. And now whether President Bush himself feels that way or
whether he's just expressing a kind, you know, deeply felt American piety is
another question. But the question of how it sounds to Europeans is it sounds
like the president is, really, almost as dangerous a fundamentalist as some
Islamists. And that's an analogy that is often spoken of rather casually,
rather too casually, but it's something you hear a lot of in Europe, and it's
also something you hear in the Middle East.

Remember, too, that in the Middle East people react instantly to the notion of
a crusade and that a president, once he speaks certain words, cannot retract
them. Nobody in the United States probably remembers that President Bush
spoke of a crusade in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, and those who
do remember it probably think he just didn't consider the word very carefully.
But it has never been forgotten in the Middle East. It's never been forgotten
in the Muslim world. And this war in Iraq fits directly into the context of a
crusade, as far as most of the people out here are concerned.

GROSS: Christopher Dickey, you're speaking to us from Amman, Jordan. Do you
have any intentions of going into Iraq?

Mr. DICKEY: Well, my intention originally in coming here was precisely to go
into Iraq, but two things intervened. First of all, the Jordanians just won't
let us go across the border. But the other thing that happened is that there
was very quickly an understanding after the first three or four days of
fighting that the approach of going in as a unilateral reporter, not embedded,
not very closely associated with allied troops and not in under the authority
of the Information Ministry in Baghdad, but just as an independent operator,
was just too dangerous. Too many people got killed too quickly. Too many
people nearly got killed, including a close friend of mine, Scott Johnson of
Newsweek, who really came within fractions of an inch of dying.

And so there was a general feeling after that that it was not a good idea to
go running around in Iraqi territory unless you basically were on one side or
the other, which is a great shame. I mean, I think most of us who've covered
wars for the last 20 years have been in situations where we were literally
able to cover both sides. It was very high risk, but it was possible. Now it
seems not to be possible.

GROSS: Here in the United States there's 24-hour news coverage of the war in
Iraq, and a lot of people are leaving that on, in the background at least,
nearly all the time. And I'm wondering, in Jordan, where you are now, is
there, like, extensive media coverage like that on? Are people transfixed by
it? Is it occupying attention? And is there the same amount of
moment-to-moment concern about it as there is here? And you're a lot
physically closer to the war than we are here in the United States.

Mr. DICKEY: Well, I don't think anybody here looks at it in quite the same
way, but they certainly look at it all the time. For people in this part of
the world, this is not a video game. I think the overall impression of an
awful lot of the coverage in the United States is that somehow it is. Whether
you're watching tank cameras or you're watching all those animated
presentations of helicopters and artillery pieces and missiles and bombs,
there is an overall impression between the graphics and the satellite phone
imagery and not to mention the sort of aerial bombardment pictures, where you
sort of see this silent flash of light, that it's all somehow a video game.
And people here don't watch it that way.

But the more important thing to know is that very much unlike the last Gulf
War, everybody here can have, if they want, access to CNN and to the other
Western media, but they can also get access to all the Arab satellite
stations, of which there are many and which are presenting a very, very
different picture of this war, including a lot more extensive briefings by the
Iraqis and infinitely more substantial coverage of the victims of the war. So
there is this sense that you get, flipping back and forth between the Arab
stations and the British or American stations, of this kind of massive
aphasia, where things are just wildly out of sync. And ironically we're in a
position these days--I never thought this would happen--where the briefings
being given by the Iraqis are more credible on many counts than the briefings
being given by the British and American briefers in Qatar.

GROSS: In what way?

Mr. DICKEY: You know, early on, the first week of the war, you had a
situation where the British were saying and the Americans were saying Umm Qasr
has been taken. This tiny little dump of a port in southern Iraq had been
taken. And day after day it was clear that it had not been taken and that the
pockets of resistance were, in fact, enough to stop the American control of
Umm Qasr. The embedded American reporters, for security reasons, can't say
what the location is where they're reporting, but the Iraqis do say what the
location is where the American troops are, and it tends to be much more
accurate and on the money, as it were, than what we're hearing from the
Americans.

You would have expected--I mean, if you covered the Arab world for any length
of time, you know, one gets used to these wildly inflated numbers of, you
know, `We're burning all the American tanks on every front. Thousands of
Americans killed.' We're not getting that from the Iraqis this time. We have
this odd situation where, you know, the Iraqis are giving what appear to be
relatively realistic numbers about their own casualties, at least civilian
casualties, and about the advances of the American and British troops.

GROSS: Christopher Dickey. He's Newsweek's Middle East regional editor and
Paris bureau chief. He spoke to us from Amman, Jordan.

Coming up, is it Qatar (pronounced kaTAR), Qatar (pronounced KAtar) or Qatar
(pronounced gutter)? Our linguist Geoff Nunberg has been listening to
journalists and politicians. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Analysis: Pronunciation of foreign countries by American
journalists
TERRY GROSS, host:

The war in Iraq has journalists and politicians struggling to pronounce a new
set of place names and even disagreeing over the pronunciation of familiar
ones. Our linguist Geoff Nunberg points out that what they come up with is
sometimes a sign of something else.

GEOFF NUNBERG (Linguist, Stanford University): For a lot of its critics, the
administration's miscalculations in its Mideast policy are summed up in a
single pronunciation: Iraq. In The New York Times a couple of days ago,
Nicholas Kristof wrote that, `Arabs flinch each time American officials
torture pronunciations of the names of Iraqi cities and, worse, the country
itself.' But if people in Amman, Cairo and Riyadh are flinching as they watch
the TV news nowadays, I doubt if it has much to do with the way American
politicians and journalists are struggling with the intricacies of Arabic
phonology. No more than the current wave of anti-French feeling owes anything
to Jacques Chirac's pronunciation of our president's first name as George
(using French pronunciation).

Anyway, however hard Americans try to approximate the pronunciations of Arabic
names, what comes out of our mouths is going to be pretty remote from the real
thing to Arabiers(ph). If you are really going to get the name of the country
right, you'd say something like Iraq, with that guttural K that doesn't have
any English equivalent. And you'd start it with an I and an H-like sound
that's pronounced even farther back in the throat. I've had two Arabic
linguists trying to give me tutelage in that sound, but I'm not to the point
of being able to reproduce it on the radio. Baghdad, Karbala, Basra--that's
what Arabic speakers tell me, but it's a fool's errand for Americans to try to
do those names justice.

The prudent course is to make a yeoman effort at approximating foreign names
with the limited phonetic resources that English makes available. Going
further than that is almost always a sign of dubious ulterior motives. There
are those Spanish pronunciations that are supposed to show solidarity with the
locals, like Nicaragua and Colombia, or there are the spretsutor(ph)
pronunciations of the classical music announcers, who linger on the double T
of Pavarotti and the T-H sound of Placido Domingo.

And then there are the trench coat pronunciations that you hear from
journalists who want to intimate that they've been on the ground for a long
time. I think of the way Daniel Schorr used to talk about Mikhail Gorbachev,
with the easy familiarity of an old Kremlin hand. There's a hint of this in
the way journalists have taken up saying Qatar (pronounced gutter) for the
country that the uninitiated refer to as Qatar (pronounced kaTAR). Actually
it isn't at all clear that the locals would recognize the journalists' Qatar
(pronounced gutter) as a version of what they pronounce as something like
Qatar. But then these attempts at phonetic correctness are really intended
for domestic consumption.

And there's a domestic flavor to those criticisms of the pronunciation Iraq,
too. A lot of people see it as a symptom of redneck ignorance. Columnists
have suggested that it's somehow tied to Americans' general fuzziness about
geographical detail and our insensitivity to the complexities of world
politics. But the idea that Iraq is incorrect is mostly a sign of our own
linguistic prejudices. The pronunciation really has two things working
against it. The first syllable fits in with that pattern of saying certain
foreign words with a long vowel, not just Iraq and Iran, but words like Arab
and Italian, pronunciations that educated people tend to associate with
blue-state yahoos.

And then there's the flat fronted vowel of the second syllable, raq
(pronounced rack) instead of raq (pronounced rock). That runs afoul of the
principle that the letter A in foreign names should always be pronounced as
`ah.' That has become an article of faith among well-traveled Americans to
the point where the time-honored English name Milan has been replaced by the
pretentious, parvenus Milan and Milano.

Hearing people ridicule ordinary Americans who say Iraq can be like listening
to American expatriates sneering at the tourists in line at the Louvre or the
Colosseum. But it's something else again when you hear that Iraq
pronunciation coming from administration officials who don't come by it
natively. In their mouth, it sounds a faux Bubba note, as if to tweak all
those facetious internationalists: `We can go it alone phonetically, too.'
It's gotten to the point where you can tell people's position on the role the
UN should play in the reconstruction of Iraq just by listening to the way they
say the name.

For the time being, Iraq would seem to be the more judicious pronunciation, at
least until we're certain that when the dust clears, we won't need any help in
writing the gazetteers for this part of the world. But I'm not really
bothered hearing journalists and politicians make a hash out of those other
exotic Arabic place names. I've been listening occasionally to French news
broadcasts over the Internet, and their announcers do a much better job with
Arabic names than ours do, no doubt because the French have a couple of
hundred years of being embedded in the Arabic-speaking world. It's an
impressive phonetic accomplishment, but not an enviable one.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist at Stanford University and the author of
the book "The Way We Talk Now."

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.