Good Morning, Baghdad

You wake up in the morning and wander into the living room and search for the remote control. It is in its usual place -- stuck inexplicably between the cushions on the sofa. You turn on the television and stand there flipping from one channel to the other, looking for a news brief or something that will sum up what happened during the six hours that you were asleep. You finally settle on Julie Chen -- with her big hair, bright power suit, capped teeth and colorful talons -- blandly reading the news. It's CBS' The Early Show. Live from Fifth Avenue and now on my television screen right here in Baghdad.

Two years ago, much of the war in Iraq was all about bombarding us with smart bombs and high-tech missiles. Now there’s a different sort of war -- or perhaps it’s just another phase of the same war. Now we’re being assailed with American media. It’s everywhere, all at once.

The assault began with radio stations like Voice of America, which we could access even before the war. After the war, there were other radio stations -- the kind with mechanical voices that told us to put down our weapons and remain inside our homes, that fed us American news in an Iraqi dialect, and others that just played music.

Today, Iraqis with a satellite dish are constantly listening to American music and watching American sitcoms and movies. To be fair, it’s not just Iraq that is being targeted by this media offensive -- it’s the entire Middle East. And it’s all being done very cleverly.

Al-Hurra -- the purported "channel of freedom" and the American gift to the Arab world -- airs translated documentaries about certain historical events (American documentaries) or about movie stars (American stars) or vacation spots. Throughout the day, Arab anchors give viewers the latest news. It’s news about the Arab world with the American twist -- like watching Fox News in Arabic.

Our new “national” (Iraqi) channels are a joke. The most amusing, in a gruesome sort of way, is Al-Iraqiya. It’s said to be American sponsored, but the attitude is decidedly pro-Iran and anti-Sunni. In one of its programs, they parade "terrorists" on screen in an attempt to show us that our National Guard is not only good at raiding homes and harassing people in the streets, but also keeping us "safe." The funny thing about the terrorists is that the majority of them have Sunni names like Omar, Othman, etc. They admit on-air to doing things such as having sexual intercourse in mosques and raping women. The entire show is disgusting.

Iraqis, of course, don’t believe a word of it because the program is so blatantly obvious in in its attempt to support the American definition of a terrorist -- i.e. the Sunni Muslim fanatic -- that it is embarrassing. Couldn’t the PSYOPS people come up with anything more subtle?

Then you have the whole MBC collection of channels. MBC is actually financed by Saudi Arabia, but based in Dubai, as far as I know. They started out with the original MBC, which was a mainly Arabic channel that was harmless enough. It aired some talk shows, debates, and Egyptian movies, along with an occasional program on music or style.

Then we were introduced to MBC’s news channel, Al-Arabia, which is meant to be the Saudi antidote to Al-Jazeera. At the same time, the company also introduced MBC’s Channel 2, which only airs English movies and programs, from talk shows like Oprah to sitcoms such as Friends, Third Rock from the Sun, and Seinfeld. Then earlier this year, the MBC made a mystifying decision. They announced that Channel 2 was going to be made into a 24-hour movie channel which would air all sorts of movies -- old Clint Eastwood cowboy movies and newer movies like A Beautiful Mind, etc. The talk shows and sitcoms would be transferred to the new MBC Channel 4.