Guest columnist
Arafat's potent use of symbols

By Jim Compton
Special to The Times

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Yasser Arafat's death should remind us not just of the tenacity of the Palestinian movement, but also of Arafat's masterful use of the media to manipulate world opinion, a lesson the Bush administration woefully misunderstands. Modern communications have deeply altered the game in the Mideast. Power that once came out of the end of a gun now comes from communications satellites.

Obituaries on Arafat have dwelled correctly on his squandered opportunities and his mixed legacy of achievement. There is no avoiding the violent paradoxes in the man, who apparently ordered the attack on the Munich Olympics and later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Arafat called then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat a "stooge" for dealing with Israel, even though Arafat was the direct beneficiary of the process that followed. Arafat endorsed Saddam Hussein's adventure in Kuwait, then joined in the Oslo peace accords. He repeatedly embraced violence while renouncing it.

But Arafat forced the question of Palestinian aspirations into world consciousness and onto the cover of Time magazine. He understood what the Bush administration ignores: that the assertion of military power in the Middle East often wins sympathy for the losers.

The central issue in Arab politics is the struggle to find political legitimacy, as the great Arab scholar Michael Hudson has written so well. Regimes are "legitimate" to the extent that their citizens see them as proper and deserving of support.

How are we seen? We may have toppled Saddam, and gained the undying gratitude of many Arab governments, but that's quite different from winning credibility with the "Arab street." If you doubt that, log on to the English Web site maintained by Al Jazeera television, where you can see how America is portrayed to hundreds of thousands of Arabs on an hourly basis. (There are an estimated 35 million Al Jazeera "households," but like CNN, actual viewership is probably in the hundreds of thousands at any time.)

Arafat understood that every image of a mosque under fire, or of an orphaned Arab child, or of Israelis firing on rock-throwing teenagers, poured gasoline on the already inflamed Arab view of the United States. He understood that soul-searching over the plight of the Palestinians was a potent force in European politics (Tony Blair called the plight the central obstacle to peace). And Arafat recognized that youngsters throwing rocks at Israeli tanks carried a subliminal David and Goliath message.

This dynamic is at work in our war in Iraq, as we seemingly seize every opportunity to destroy our once-admired position among the Arabs. The battle for Fallujah is the latest example. The Bush administration is not setting the stage for elections, but guaranteeing a new round of battles for Mosul, and Kirkuk, and cities beyond. There is no hope that they will be "subdued" in time for elections in January, or by January 2006.

I interviewed Arafat twice for NBC News during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and saw his flair for the dramatic gesture. A visit to Arafat always began with a group of Palestine Liberation Organization gunmen "escorting" us to his office in a madcap half-hour drive through Beirut neighborhoods in a pickup with an anti-aircraft gun on the back, all to "throw off the Israelis." It was pure theater.

Often, Arafat's interviews didn't make it onto our broadcast, simply because he said nothing new. Once I got a furious scolding from the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations: Why didn't NBC air the interview? They watched, and measured, every appearance and interview for its effect.

As I write this, NBC is broadcasting a report about a U.S. Marine allegedly shooting dead a wounded prisoner in a mosque. It took just minutes for Al Jazeera to pick up and rebroadcast the video, with the headline, "U.S. military has launched an investigation after video footage showed a Marine shooting a wounded and unarmed man in a mosque in the conflict-stricken city of Fallujah."

Those who follow Arab-American affairs know of the baleful condition of our information outreach to the Arab world. The Heritage Foundation has written that "Uncle Sam's global image is in serious trouble," pointing to the ruins of our "public diplomacy" in the Arab world.

The prestigious Djerijian report to the Congress on public diplomacy, "Changing Minds, Winning Peace," was a scathing indictment of how poorly we make our case to Arabs, saying we face "lethal threats to our interests and our safety. In this time of peril, public diplomacy's absurdly and dangerously underfunded." It continued, "If America does not define itself, the extremists will do it for us."

The flaw in that analysis, of course, is that there is no way to market a pointless war and a bankrupt strategy to the Arab world. Does anyone seriously believe democracy is about to burst forth in Iraq? It is a quagmire. We cannot spin or explain or otherwise justify a war that has no evident end or happy outcome.

Arafat's political successes were often based on the potent use of symbols to create political power. If his symbol was the checkered headscarf, it is a melancholy thing that ours is a photo from Abu Ghraib. We cannot ignore the symbols we are creating daily in Iraq, and how our action there has come to symbolize an America none of us intended to portray.

Seattle City Councilman Jim Compton was NBC News Middle East correspondent based in Cairo during the late '70s and early '80s.