By S. Abdallah Schleifer

S. Abdallah Schleifer with filmmaker Jehane Nujaim in Doha. Photo: Hani Salama.

Doha: There are more important TV news broadcasters based in the Dubai/Abu Dhabi sector of my quick Gulf tour (Al Arabiya, Abu Dhabi TV, Dubai Business Channel, MBC News) than in Qatar but the dynamic is all here in that curious triangle of Al Jazeera, the Coalition Central Command headquarters (Centcom), and the dozens of TV newsmen covering the daily Centcom briefings. It was Jehane Nujaim, the amazing Egyptian-American documentary film maker, whose first venture "Startup.com" was such an extraordinary success (go to Google and read the glowing reviews in New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Vogue, Rolling Stones, and the Director's Guild award she received) who called my attention to that curious dynamic or field of force when I had suggested she might leave Doha and also visit Al Arabiya in Dubai and nearby Abu Dhabi TV. She had come out to the region right after Startup.com had premiered in Spain to do something about this war and above all about the coverage, sensing as did the New Yorker and so many other publications that this war was as much about television and its role in reporting on war and making war, as it was about weapons of mass destruction, taking care of unfinished business (the 1991 betrayal of a popular Iraqi uprising), ending an oppressive regime, making a grab for Iraqi oil, or serving Sharon's interests, or any combination of the above, depending on your political persuasion.

What makes the Doha field of force even more pronounced is the curious contrast to the mood, outside this Electronic Triangle, in those parts of the Gulf, including Doha, where I touched down. So much of the population of Dubai, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi is expatriate-and a high percentage of that non-Arab, largely Indian subcontinent and British-that the war seems to be barely of concern out on the streets. None of that Cairo, or even more so, Amman street tension, as if everyone is waiting for the next demonstration and conceivable riot and unrest. If there is a concern outside of the Electronic Triangle it is about commercial implications-less travel, empty hotels except for the local expatriate special weekend trade at the more spectacular seaside/poolside hotels. This is particularly the case in Dubai where the non-Arab expatriate population is almost overwhelming. Yet within the force field-with the foreign correspondents at Centcom, at Al Jazeera (and by metaphorical extension, in the news centers at Al Arabiya in Dubai and ADTV in Abu Dhabi), the mood is adrenalin-enhanced war fever.

It's the first week of the war and everything about it seems exaggerated; not just what sounds like claims of captured southern cities in which resistance continued for days afterwards-later a very sympathetic military spokesman explained that what I took for exaggeration had to do with nomenclature: that "secured" didn't mean "safe" (see Interview with Lieut. Rushing) but even the earliest descriptions coming out of Centcom's briefing room reeked of exaggeration. The only exception was the briefing room itself-the Hollywood set supposedly designed in the states and flown in at high cost-which was smart, effective, and functional but didn't seem as far over the top as had been reported.

It was as if this war was being fought in a vacuum without any sense of context or history. That was understandable when it came from the Iraqis: they had every reason to exaggerate the impact of the bombings, and the access they provided for shots of terribly burned or maimed children were accompanied by claims that the Coalition was intentionally targeting civilians. Understandable-they were after all doing all that they could do to stoke the fire of an all pervasive anger in the Arab world and in the West among anti-war elements in the hope that such anger would translate into an unrest, or even civic uprisings, that would some how buy the Baathist regime a ceasefire and a reprieve.

And while the Coalition spokesmen here soldiered on, denying quite reasonably that anyone was intentionally targeting civilians, the images continued to fuel a fire that could only have been doused in part by a brave Arab intellectual ready to stand up and tell the inflamed millions watching Arab satellite television and national television in countries like Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt that this was all crass manipulation of the unintended and remarkably limited tragedy of war. That in fact this war would go down in history as the one in which the number of civilian deaths and wounded in relation to ordinance-bombs and missiles with measurable destructive capacity-was the lowest; that when Western powers wanted to target civilians, they had been able to wipe out in one day with less ordinance than was dropped on Baghdad in the most extraordinarily selective manner (underscored by incredulous reports by the press in Baghdad of how normal life went on and on) 50,000 German civilians at Dresden or 100,000 Japanese civilians fire-bombed to death in one raid against Tokyo. An Arab intellectual to stand up before the cameras of Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Abu Dhabi, and Al Hayat/LBC-the big four of serious Arabic broadcasting-and declare that if the Coalition were intentionally targeting civilians they could have leveled most of Baghdad in one night.

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