The most powerful country in the world has an obligation to understand its profound influence on others so it can take control and shape its policies more responsibly and effectively, Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner ’76 of The New York Times said on Tuesday night at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house.
In a wide-ranging discussion of current events and journalistic challenges in the post-9/11 world, Bronner provided analysis of the war in Iraq, the historic sources of political Islamism, and the tension between the public’s right to know and the need for some secrecy in an age of insecurity.
“The impact we have on the rest of the world is huge,” Bronner said. “If we don’t shape our impact on others, if we don’t pay mind to how our enormous wealth affects the rest of the world, it will come back to haunt us.”
In his 26 years as a journalist, Bronner has served as a foreign correspondent in Europe and Jerusalem and as a domestic correspondent on education and legal affairs. He joined The New York Times from The Boston Globe in 1997, and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, worked in an investigative unit focusing on the new threat of terrorism. In his view, American journalism has to effectively communicate to its audience the deep historical dimensions of contemporary affairs, particularly with regard to the Arab and Muslim world.
“The first and most important thing to understand is that for hundreds of years, while the West was lying in its own slop, Islam was the flower of civilization in the 11th and 12th centuries,” Bronner said. “Muslims live today with a loss of prestige and power our children may know if India and China continue to rise.”
Since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Bronner explained, Arabs have lived in polities with their origins in the colonial wishes of the British and French.
“Osama bin Laden said in a video that the Muslims have endured 80 years of humiliation,” he said. “Many were thinking, ‘Well, what happened 80 years ago?’ After World War I, when Europeans carved up the Middle East, the British and French weren’t working to create a viable civilization, but to rule. The way they did that was to embed ethnic conflicts within—choose an ethnic group and give [it] power.”
The deep-seated spark of sectarian conflict in Iraq has revived itself in full flame today, where Shiites and Sunnis are battling each other on the streets. The security problem is so aggravated that the four Times correspondents there are often stuck in the newspaper’s compound, which lies outside of the U.S. government’s Green Zone.
“By far the most difficult story we cover is Iraq,” Bronner said. “It’s absolutely impossible for us to cover the place.”
Only after consulting the security adviser do correspondents venture out for interviews or reporting, and only with two cars of armed security guards. Despite the challenges, reporters make it out of the compound nearly every day.
“We’ve never had to do that before,” he said. “Any time a foreigner is seen talking to someone, that person could become a target. But we don’t question the need to cover [Iraq].”
When the correspondents are out reporting in the field in Iraq, however, they do not shy away from danger. Bronner mentioned C.J. Chivers, the Times correspondent in Moscow who is now in Iraq, as writing in the tradition of the great war reporters.
In a recent article that was brought up, Chivers detailed his experience being with a U.S. patrol when a sniper shot a soldier. The picture his photographer took of the bloodied American was on the front page of the Nov. 4 issue.
Although he is sympathetic to the goal of spreading democracy to regions historically lacking free governments, Bronner said that the Bush administration has unlocked broad anti-West, Islamist forces that have taken it by surprise.
“The Bush administration’s underlying goal of creating a stable democracy in the Arab heartlands is feeling further and further away,” he said. “We cannot be against the principle of spreading democracy, we must all share that goal, but the question is whether the Bush administration is going about it in an intelligent way.”
He pointed to a critique by Francis Fukuyama, a self-professed former neoconservative who argues in his recent book, “America at the Crossroads,” that neoconservatives in the Bush administration have forgotten their original philosophical opposition to top-down social engineering, particularly in Iraq.
“Islamism is a byproduct of modernization and so the idea that you can just modernize [in Iraq] and get rid of it is misguided,” Bronner said, adding that the slow and non-confrontational development of democratic institutions was a far more tenable strategy for democracy promotion.
There has been fallout from the Bush administration’s push for democracy in the Middle East, Bronner said. He explained that the election of Hamas to power, the repression of democratic elements in Egypt, and the radicalization of Muslim youths in Europe have in some ways been sparked by American policies in the region.
“How is Israel supposed to negotiate with Hamas, which by definition is committed to its destruction?” he asked, although he also criticized Israeli policies over the past 30 years.
The domestic result of these unintended consequences, he said, has been to launch a debate on the right between neoconservatives and realists, who resist the inclusion of idealism in U.S. foreign policy.
“Whether you favor a neo-con or realist position, it seems like we need a realistic one,” Bronner said.
In addition to his commentary on contemporary events, Bronner also touched on journalistic practices and issues at The New York Times in recent years. Citing the fact that The Times had only one correspondent in the Muslim world prior to 9/11, he explained that journalism has undergone significant changes in the past six years.
At heart, however, remains the conflict between informing the public and respecting legitimate national security concerns.
“The prejudice is to publish,” Bronner said. “The more we know, the safer our democracy is. Of course, the administration has certain needs for secrecy, too.”
The NSA wiretapping story is a prime example of how journalism has grappled with this issue. In 2004, before the November elections, The Times learned that the Bush administration might have been intercepting phone calls made by Americans without warrants. Bronner explained that Bill Keller, the newspaper’s executive editor, was initially dubious as to the reliability of the primary source. After communication with the Oval Office, Keller decided to hold the story.
In a year’s time, however, more reporting had been done and Keller revisited the story. On the verge of the article’s publication, Keller and Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher, were called into the Oval Office.
“Bush said (A), it wasn’t true and, (B), that it would help terrorism and the blood of Americans will be on your hands,” Bronner said.
Keller, Bronner said, had by this time become “a little less convinced” of the administration’s position in general. The story was printed to great controversy, he noted, with many people accusing The Times of treason.
Avoiding partisanship and allegations of bias is another mainstay commitment of the newspaper, a basic principle that has taken on another dimension in the post-9/11 world.
“I have been at a front page meeting where the managing editor has said, ‘Too many stories [from the main desks] for the front page are against Bush. We can’t run this, can we find another mix?’” Bronner said. “It’s not that she’s trying to help Bush, it’s that she’s trying to avoid the appearance of [bias].”
Regardless of which party is in power, he said, The New York Times is fundamentally concerned with questioning authority.
“We’re not sitting around trying to be partisan,” Bronner said. “Mostly, we’re mistrustful of anyone who has a solution.”
Leave a Reply