The New Dragomans

At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was pressing need for increased diplomatic contact between the European Great Powers and the Devine Porte, the principal court of the Ottoman Sultan so named for the gates of the Topkapi Palace which served as the main entrance. There were a number of reasons. Constantinople controlled the Bosporus and with it access and egress between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, one of the world’s most important trade routes and a critical factor in The Great Game, the maneuvering for empire between England and Russia. Ottomans also ruled the Holy Land and a large Christian population, all matters of growing interest to the Great Powers.
There was a problem. Hardly anyone outside the Ottoman Empire spoke Turkish. Inside the empire only a few Greeks spoke French, the diplomatic language of the day. Enter the office of official interpreter, the Dragoman. With virtually no one to challenge his version of what had been said or written the Dragoman became quite powerful and was not above shading correspondence in his own intrigue. Something like that seems to have happened in Iraq, not so much in official channels but in the vital sphere of media control and its impact on public perception. It is at least a partial explanation for the dreadful quality of reporting coming from there. I’ll make my case.
Every American President has his problems with the press but not since Lyndon Johnson have we seen an adversarial relationship quite so intense as the open warfare being waged by the present press corps. In Iraq it has the effect that many of the journalists there refuse to accept any official version of events unless it is critical of administration policy or can be interpreted as failure. Opportunities for independent assessment are quite limited. Reporters are all but under house arrest in their Baghdad hotels, unable to venture out for fear of kidnapping and assassination. A few embed themselves with American troops but to many of their peers this irreparably taints the product. So they turn to the one available alternative. They use Iraqi stringers. Apparently it hasn’t occurred to them to ask why Iraqis are safer than they are. Nor do they seem to question whether reports from stringers are more reliable than official accounts or the reporting from their embedded counterparts. This puts the stringer in a powerful position, able to influence public perceptions in ways that may or may not fairly reflect reality. Who knows what their true motives might be, or where their true loyalties might lie. I’m sure they have built trusting relationships with their employers but since many of us don’t trust the main stream media in the first place we have even less reason to trust the stringer.
The new Dragomans don’t wield the influence of their predecessors, largely because they control only one of several information sources. From the beginning returning service men and women have brought back an image at stark odds from the one being presented on television and the front pages. Still, they have had their effect. They have found willing listeners in the media. The message of failure and doom has been unrelenting for three years now and public support for operations in Iraq is at low ebb. But they haven’t been able to change the facts on the ground and they haven’t been able to affect American policy. They can deny the progress of the last three years but if it continues Iraq will emerge as a peaceful stable place and that will be a good thing.