Why we’re still talking about Iraq

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At ‘Contentious Ground: The Middle East’ -- which promised to be one of the more volatile discussions at the Festival of Books this weekend -- the panelists seemed to want to talk about something else. Moderator Zachary Karabell introduced the session Sunday saying: ‘With so much going on in South America, Africa and all around the world, it’s funny that we still believe the Middle East is the only problem.’

And with that, they were off and running.

Amy Wilentz, former Jerusalem correspondent for ‘The New Yorker,’ agreed that five years in Iraq has inflated Americans’ perception of the entire region. ‘I can’t believe I’m back at this panel, five years later,’ she replied. But aside from slight tangents veering off to the religious right, activism and the current presidential elections, the panelists resisted temptation and focused on the core subject.

Reza Aslan, Middle East analyst for CBS News and author of ‘No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,’ called the Iraq situation ‘the worst foreign policy decision in United States history.’ Aslan continued to say there was little chance that the U.S. would get out of Iraq in the next 10 years. ‘We destroyed Iraq already,’ Aslan lamented. America’s policy decisions in the past five years have only ‘drowned out the complexities in the Muslim world.’

The stereotypical view of Muslims is the result of journalists’ inability to relate with foreign cultures, according to Chris Hedges, former New York Times foreign correspondent and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on global terrorism. ‘Journalists look around and see things that they can’t comprehend, and that is reported as incomprehensible,’ Hedges said.

Aslan agreed with Hedges, adding that he loathed what he called the media’s proliferation of ‘conflict journalism.’ ‘When you have a press that is completely reactive to conflict, the context is lost in [people’s] consciousness,’ he said.

Then Aslan talked stats. According to a recently released Gallup poll-turned-book called ‘Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think,’ 7% of all Muslims interviewed thought the attacks of 9/11 were justified. Out of that percentage, not one of them thought Islam was the justification. And Hedges, who has spent seven years covering the Middle East, living everywhere from Egypt to Iran, said he found it hard to believe that one-fifth of the world could be practicing a religion of hate.

The general consensus on the panel was that Islam has been used to cloak political disappointment. ‘Languages of religion are used to simplify politics,’ added Hedges.

Aslan said the United States faces a long future ahead if they continued to fight an amorphous enemy. ‘When you fight any insurgency, you’re simply fighting elusiveness,’ he said.

--Kristopher Fortin and Shazia Haq

(Photo: A U.S. soldier on patrol in Baghdad in February by Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty Images.)