Mission Al Jazeera

Military Review, March-April, 2008 by George Ridge

MISSION AL JAZEERA, Josh Rushing, with Sean Elder, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, 233 pages, $24.95.

"It's almost impossible to overestimate the impact Al Jazeera has had on the Arab world," notes Josh Rushing, who resigned from the Marine Corps in 2006 to accept a correspondent's post with the Arab network. On that point, I don't think even Al Jazeera's detractors could argue with Rushing. As a television network, Al Jazeera has enormous credibility in the Arab world, the Muslim world. and indeed the developing world.

Perhaps no player enmeshed in the current firestorm of debate about Qatar's upstart TV network--a global competitor within a decade of its inception--is better situated to write this book. Rushing, the Washington correspondent for the English-language Al Jazeera International, considers himself a truth-seeker, a patriotic American; and first, last, and always a Marine (recruited to the Corps, incidentally. by an Egyptian-American sergeant).

Rushing's book is neither strident nor timid as he pursues his various aims:

* A history and assessment of Al Jazeera with comparisons to Rushing's previous employer, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) headquarters located in Qatar. (Coincidentally, the emir of Qatar founded Al Jazeera in 1996 from the remnants of the short-lived Arabic version of BBC. That same year, he built the largest airfield in the Middle East and invited the United States to use it "indefinitely.")

* A defense of Al Jazeera as an Arab voice penetrating Mideast worlds previously closed to anything but official pronouncements and thought dictated by state religion.

* A somewhat low-key defense, but earning names, of the agonizing decision that led him from "behind the wire" as a Marine spokesman for CENTCOM into his current role across town.

The last of these make for perhaps the book's most compelling reading At CENTCOM, the military spokespersons were overseen by a highly partisan Republican operative dispatched from the White House. According to Rushing, "Political issues trumped military interests every time" and personnel literally "found new ways to say nothing."

At the time, Rushing was bothered by the use of the military to sell the politics of the invasion and spin the ensuing chaos in Iraq. Now, however, he declares, "I am ... less conflicted by the information CENTCOM media center did not put out than I am about some of the information that we did. I was not asked to lie ... But between truth and falsehood exists a vast grey area, and considering the spin CENTCOM was releasing, we were deep in the grey area." His political boss, he says, consistently corrected his use of the word "spin," urging instead that the term should be "context."

Ultimately, Rushing came to the difficult conclusion that he had to leave the Marine Corps after he was censured for appearing (briefly) in the documentary "Control Room"--an appearance he was ordered to make. He remarks ruefully that he witnessed what often happens when wars go on longer than expected: the military begins turning against the media.

As for the film itself, "the filmmakers made me appear like someone who, while never giving up what he believed in, really did want to understand the other side. I like to think it's an accurate portrayal," he says. Rushing contends that the United States missed an opportunity by not using his appearance as a voice of understanding to counterbalance the brutish Abu Ghraib pictures that exploded at about the same time. And he believes the U.S. continues to miss the same boat in its failure to use Al Jazeera as a vehicle to get the American message into the Arab and Muslim world.

Appearing across America "in an attempt," as he puts it, "to overcome the U.S. misperception that (Al Jazeera) represents the ultimate in terrorist television." Rushing says he quickly learned that in the estimation of U.S. cable bosses, "Americans just don't care about international news ... (preferring instead) 24 hours of NASCAR, seven days a week."

Rushing admits that he was sickened when Al Jazeera showed footage of dead Americans, but he counters obliquely that his network will continue to be less interested in the sanitized pictures of the U.S. Air Force launching "smart" bombs--highlighted endlessly on U.S. television--than in showing the carnage where they land. He also points out that Al Jazeera was the first Arab network to invite Israeli officials to appear, and the first medium in history to give a voice to Arab women.

U.S. criticism of Al Jazeera and Josh Rushing will doubtlessly continue well past the life of this book, but the author has perhaps opened the door to discussion. The voice that so inflamed the brass in "Control Room" has now been heard in appearances at West Point and the Army Command and General Staff College (where the book is on sale), in classes at the armed forces Defense Information School, before a blue-ribbon audience of Air Force generals, and on Israeli television--where Al Jazeera has replaced BBC.