While I was out of town, Praktike posted his own first thoughts on Voices:
The book, I think, sits in an unusual spot by straddling the peer-review world of academia--wherein each term must be carefully defined and supported, cites are a must, and the evaluation of current events within the context of the literature are obligatory-- and the "public sphere" of Foreign Affairs and The National Interest, wherein the question that must always be answered is: what are the implications of X for US policy? The book's serious tone thus leaves little room, unfortunately, for Aardvarkian humor or extensive ruminations about the respective merits of various Lebanese pop tarts.
This is true... blogs are almost by definition more fun than scholarly work. Although I did manage to work a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer into my 2003 Foreign Affairs article, thanks to the eternal graciousness of the managing editor!
He goes on:
Hence, Lynch has based his analysis on hundreds of transcripts of the most important al-Jazeera talk shows as well as op-ed pieces in major Arab newspapers. For whatever reason, there is an unfortunate tendency among us in the West to discount Arab voices and project our own views upon Arabs. So throughout the book, Lynch scrupulously follows his own advice by treating Arab opinions with the seriousness they deserve.
That doesn't mean he views the new Arab public sphere uncritically. Lynch is wary about making uncaveated claims about the potential for satellite television to precipitate liberal reform, acknowledging the prevalence of illiberal voices and a tendency toward sensationalism, to say nothing of the daunting concrete limitations on the Arab media in effecting change in the real world. But Lynch stresses that the fact that dialogue and debate is taking place is itself "revolutionary." This position should be familiar to anyone who has followed Lynch's writing, either on the blog or in print.
And this:
So far, I've found the third chapter of the book to be the most interesting. Here Lynch focuses on the debate within the elite Arab print media over the first Gulf War and the subsequent UN sanctions regime against Iraq, which to my knowledge hasn't been told with this level of detail and with such a focus on Arab public opinion. While Arabs and Arab regimes disagreed about what to do about Saddam, a public consensus did develop concerning the plight of the Iraqi people, which eventually forced unelected leaders to at least nod in the direction of the so-called "Arab street."
Americans, I think, were largely ignorant of the genuine ferment that the coverage of suffering Iraqi children was causing in the Arab world and in the Arab street. The chapter strongly implies that the sanctions were not sustainable both because of the passions they were arousing in the region and because of the growing success of the Iraqi government in undermining them. Attempts by the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and the Iraqi exile opposition to persuade others that Saddam and not the UN and the United States were responsible for the plight of the Iraqi people were largely unsuccessful.
I don't want to quote any more of his preliminary review, since you should click the link and read it over there. More later.
Recent Comments