"America at a Crossroads" veers to the right
The highly touted PBS series on Islam and terrorism casts a cold eye on Bush's Iraq disaster -- but fails to examine Mideast history or America's failed policies in the region.
By Gary Kamiya
Read more: PBS, Middle East, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War
Photos: Brook Lapping Productions
Richard Perle in conversation with Stacy Bannerman, an author and an activist from Military Families Speak Out, an anti-Iraq war group, on the National Mall in Washington in May 2006.
April 17, 2007 | If anyone still believes that PBS has a left-wing bias, "America at a Crossroads," the $20 million, 12-hour series about Islam, terrorism and the post-9/11 world that kicked off Sunday night, should shut them up once and for all. "Crossroads" proves yet again that five years after the 9/11 attacks, the mainstream American media still can't bring itself to talk about the real causes of Arab and Muslim rage at the West.
"Crossroads" has its virtues, but it is fundamentally flawed. Several of its 11 independently produced films are excellent, one is positively brilliant, and most are worth watching. But few of the films break any new ground or represent an advance over the many excellent documentaries on the same subject made by Frontline, Wide Angle and P.O.V. That isn't the real problem, though. The real problem is "Crossroads'" almost complete failure to explore the history of the Middle East, the effect of Western policies on its people, and the political and historical grievances that are largely responsible for Muslim and Arab rage at the West.
Intellectually, historically and journalistically, this is inexcusable. It's outrageous to devote this much time and money to a subject and never deal directly with one of the central issues. It's as if someone made a 12-hour series about the Civil War and decided to omit slavery.
By ignoring the political issues that drive Muslim rage at the West, "Crossroads" by default supports the neoconservative analysis of Islam and the causes of Islamist terrorism. And this is far more insidious, and injurious to the full national debate that the series' producers claim they want. For "Crossroads" comes anointed as a kind of quasi-official statement about how Americans should think about 9/11, Islamist terrorism, and America's relations with the Arab/Muslim world. As a result, it has the potential to pass its intellectual blind spots on to the American people.
One episode, a virtual infomercial for Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative theorist and architect of the Iraq war, is so laughably biased -- and so unbalanced by any film giving equal time to a corresponding perspective on the left -- that it taints the entire series. Suffice it to say the Perle episode, which airs Tuesday night, is almost worth viewing just to see the opening, in which Perle pays specious karmic penance as he is confronted by angry antiwar protesters. In fact, the setup, like the entire film, is completely canned -- the filmmakers obviously made Perle do it to make him a more sympathetic figure. (If you think that Perle chose to leave his house in France to confront an antiwar demonstration while the cameras just happened to be rolling, I have one of his old Chalabi-for-President-of-Iraq stickers I'd like to sell you.)
The episode does fashion a fig leaf of journalistic integrity by showing Perle arguing with figures like Pat Buchanan and Richard Holbrooke. But this cannot overcome the fact that Perle gets to essentially narrate the film and gets the last word. Nor does it make up for disingenuous statements that go unchallenged. Perle tells a war protester that he never heard the administration saying that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11, when he knows full well that Dick Cheney, his soul mate on all things war-on-terror-related, has constantly implied that very thing.
Perle takes the high road throughout, claiming that if JFK were alive he'd be fighting the same noble, all-American fight to spread freedom and piously proclaiming that he's a Democrat and simply motivated by the do-gooder desire to spread freedom. We see him driving through Afghanistan, smiling smarmily and waxing poetic about how much he loves the Afghan people and how wonderful it is that Afghan women have more freedom now.
You would never know, listening to this grandfatherly figure, that he is a radical ideologue who, in the whack-job book he wrote with David Frum absurdly titled "An End to Evil," advocated attacking North Korea, argued that the Palestinians should not get a state of their own, and maintained that we should be ready to invade Iran and Syria. Nor would you know that he ardently subscribes to the beliefs of the Israeli right wing. Along with other prominent neocons, Perle wrote a notorious 1996 policy paper for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that advocated, among other things, "rolling back" Syria, smashing the Palestinians into submission and toppling Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with (here the neocon drugs really kicked in) a Hashemite king. In their wisdom, the producers of "Crossroads" decided that viewers did not need to know any of these minor details.
Why did this embarrassing film make the cut? In the eyes of our media gatekeepers, taking their cue from Congress and their equally cowed or ignorant media brethren, even a discredited right-wing thinker like Perle is ready for prime time, while a left-wing thinker like Robert Fisk is not. After all, Perle's ideas are enshrined in the White House, while Fisk is a dangerous bomb-thrower whose opinions about the Middle East are too uncomfortable to be given wide circulation. Forget the fact that Perle and Bush's lovely little war has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, or that Fisk, who actually knows something about the Middle East, has been proven right time and again. The media bureaucracy plods dutifully on, playing by the same old rules.
Series host Robert MacNeil, presumably trying to justify the Perle film, told Current magazine, "By the time ["Crossroads"] gets to Perle, you have a very negative view of what's happening in Iraq." Never mind that "Crossroads" might have presented a negative view of what's happening in Iraq because that's the truth about what's happening in Iraq. If the series has been so unforgivably biased to the left as to show Bush's Iraq adventure in a negative light, its creators must immediately run a love letter to some neocon from the American Enterprise Institute. After all, we've had no opportunity to hear neocon ideas except on every network, every cable channel, the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, Fox News, all the major newsweeklies, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, Slate and just about every other media outlet. This intolerable censorship of failed right-wing ideas must cease!