# Posted 3:10 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

QUICK, COVER YOUR ASSES! If you read Saturday's papers, you probably thought that the failure of Shi'ite leaders to endorse the new Iraqi constitution was a sign of bad things to come. After all, the NYT reported that

The delay represented a major embarrassment for the American officials here, who had guided the negotiations on the constitution and helped break numerous deadlocks. L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator, was supposed to appear at the ceremony and the sign the completed constitution.

Television cameras from around the world stood arrayed around an empty stage. Dozens of Iraqis who had gathered for the ceremony got up and left.

The WaPo reported that

The Shiites' refusal to sign was regarded by some council officials as a stark indication of the deep divisions that exist between rival religious and ethnic groups, suggesting that a consensus on the interim constitution reached earlier this week may not have been as solid as U.S. and Iraqi officials had claimed.

But now the Shi'ites have withdrawn their demands and the constitution should be approved tomorrow. So, did the NYT report today that Friday's "major embarrassment" didn't materialize? Or that Paul Bremer has been successful in encouraging Iraqis to work together? And what about the WaPo? Did it report that the Shi'ites' compromise is an indication of how ethnic and religious divisions may not be as profound as originally thought?

Since those were all rhetorical questions, I won't bother telling you the answers. The fact is that professional journalists have a remarkable habit of overlooking their own short-sightedness. Unsurprisingly, the same correspondents at the Times (Dexter Filkins) and the Post (Rajiv Chandrasekaran) covered both the Shi'ite walkout on Friday and the Shi'ite compromise earlier today. Their coverage demonstrates how committed both men are (subconscioulsy, I think ) to telling the story of how America is going to fail in Iraq. Of course, it's hard to tell a consistent story when the facts keep getting in the way.

Consider the Times' and the Post's respective interpretation of Ayatollah Sistani's role in this affair. Initially, Filkins reported that

The delay demonstrated anew the political power of Ayatollah Sistani, the country's most powerful religious leader. Despite repeated avowals that he would remain above the push and pull of politics, and that he would keep Islam separate from the state, he has repeatedly shown his willingness to involve himself in political debates.

Taken unawares by the Shi'ites' compromise, Filkins now writes that

The change of heart by the Shiite leaders appears to represent a retreat by Ayatollah Sistani, who touched off the impasse last week by expressing his concerns to the Shiite leaders.

Until Sunday, the ayatollah had all but dictated to American officials the terms of such important political questions as elections.

Filkins wants us to believe that suddenly, on Sunday, Sistani decided to stop bossing the Americans around. Yet this change was apparently too subtle for Chandrasekaran to note, since he's still reporting that

The Shiites' initial refusal to sign provided a clear demonstration of the political influence of Sistani and other top clerics.

Now, as I said above, I don't think that any of this WaPo/NYT spin is conscious. We're simply dealing with reporters who think in terms of deadlines and put together a story each day that makes sense of the known facts. Such reporters have little incentive to go over the previous day's dispatch to see how it looks in hindsight. After all, they're not bloggers. If Filkins messes up, Chandrasekaran won't mention it in his article. And neither one will have an inbox full of criticism if today's dispatch abandons the insights of yesterday.

But it isn't only deadline pressure and the absence of peer review that is responsible for what's going on here. If that were the case, coverage of Iraq wouldn't be so uniformly negative. Rather, there is a basic narrative of failure in the reporters' heads that transforms deadline pressure and the absence of peer review into a conveyor belt for the reproduction of their profession's conventional wisdom.

Six months ago, Josh Marshall wrote that

There's a basic principle in scientific theory: an hypothesis, to be a real hypothesis, must be capable of disproof. In other words, for an hypothesis to be a valid basis for research, there must be some data which, if found to be true, would prove the hypothesis was false. Otherwise, there's no way to test it.

Now, foreign policy is no science. But some looser version of this principle must apply here as well. To be a policy, as opposed to a theological position, there must be some potential results that would show the policy was not working. The proponents of the policy should be able to say ahead of time that if this or that result happens, the policy has failed...

Marshall intended his comments as criticism of those naive Iraq hawks (specifically myself and Ralph Peters) who insisted that every suicide attack was a sign of the insurgents' desperation. While I don't think Josh was being fair to us naive optimists, his comments about falsifiability do explain a lot about why Dexter Filkins, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and the rest of the Iraq press corps almost never recognize the shortcomings of their own work. On those days when bad news comes out of Iraq, e.g. Friday, they describe it as evidence that Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket. When there's good news, e.g. today, they put their failure narrative aside for the moment. Thus, it's very hard to change the coloration of the news that's coming out of Iraq.

In the long term, correspondents sometimes begin to recognize what's going on. Certain facts are simply too hard to ignore. When American tanks rolled toward Baghdad, the media stopped reporting that the invasion had become a quagmire. Of course, there is no clear geography of success or failure when it comes to nation-building. If history is a guide, the first big positive story to come out of Iraq will be the elections held in late 2004 or early 2005. Often, the first election held after the fall of a dictatorship provokes a dramatic response in terms of both turnout and popular enthusiasm. Examples of that trend include El Salvador, Cambodia and South Africa.

Of course, what all of us would most like to see is a peaceful transfer of power from one elected Iraqi government to another. That is the most reliable indication that democratic norms are taking root. But in nation that is almost 2/3 Shi'ite, the opposition may not win a national election for quite a while. In fact, that sort of stability wouldn't be surprising. The first West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, held office for 14 years. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party was at the helm for even longer. Which means that in Iraq, we will have to look at the quality of everyday life to figure out whether or not it is a democracy.

There won't be a happy ending to the story in Iraq because there won't be an ending at all. But we can make sense of what's going on if we pay close enough attention.

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