JONATHAN FORMAN; THE CONTINUIN VOGUE CONTROVERSY OVER ASMA ASSAD PUFF PIECE SEE NOTE PLEASE
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313035/desert-rose-affair-returns-jonathan-foreman
ANNA WINTOUR, LATELY THE STAR OF AN AD FOR OBAMA IS MOST AT FAULT….SHE IS EDITOR IN CHIEF….SEE HER COO FOR OBAMA:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/06/04/anna_wintour_obama_ad_vogue_editor_makes_fundraising_pitch_for_president.html
Early in 2011 the Vogue writer Joan Juliet Buck took a lot of stick for a profile she wrote of the glamorous wife of the Syria’s dictator Bashir Assad. As you might expect of such a piece, “A Rose in the Desert” focused on Mrs. Assad’s good looks, elegant wardrobe, and charitable hobbies, rather than the Assad regime’s harsh way with dissidents or its equally wholehearted hospitality to terrorists.
One critic rather hyperbolically likened Ms. Buck to a journalist going to Berlin in the mid-1930s to fawn over Eva Braun. It was not fair because at the time of the interview and even at the time it was published, Mr. Assad himself had not yet ordered the gunning down of unarmed protesters. It was not yet obvious that Bashir had inherited the ruthlessness of his father, a man who had deliberately slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians.
On the other hand it was fairly well known that, under Bashir’s rule, Syria sent hundreds of “volunteers” to back up the Saddam Hussein regime when the Coalition invaded from Kuwait. It was better known that Bashir provided both a sanctuary and logistical support to Islamist and Baathist Iraqi insurgents attacking U.S. forces and the new Iraqi government for several years after Saddam’s fall. These insurgents were responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians as well as hundreds of Coalition troops.
(Of course, for some Americans on the left, sending militants to kill American troops or elected officials of the post-Saddam government would not be seen as particularly blameworthy. The same goes for Syria’s notorious sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas.)
It certainly has been no secret that Bashir’s intelligence agents punished Lebanese attempts to evict Syrian occupation by arranging the assassinations of Lebanese journalists, democracy activists, and even Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.
But both Ms. Buck and Vogue’s editors could and should be forgiven for their apparent ignorance of the Damascus regime’s misdeeds or the vicious nature of the Syrian regime. They are in the business of fashion and glamour — and there is always glamour to be found around men and women of absolute power.
Indeed throughout the 20th century (and before), intellectuals with much greater political experience and mental firepower than Vogue’s editors and writers found themselves dazzled and entranced by dictators ranging from Mussolini to Castro.
Moreover and more important, the more serious news-oriented sections of Western media — as well as the likes of Al Jazeera — had long underplayed or ignored the nastier aspects of the Syrian regime. The British media in particular seem to have had a soft spot for Assad’s Syria.
Over the last decade, every major British paper published articles extolling Syria’s attractiveness and benevolence while mocking or condemning American hostility to the regime. For the kind of British reporter who takes pride in vacationing in places eschewed by fearful or ignorant Americans, Syria has a particularly strong appeal. British orientalists like Barnaby Rogerson and William Dalrymple have celebrated Syria’s supposed ethnic and religious tolerance and relative secularism, despite the fact that the latter was cemented by murderous repression of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This affection for Syria under the Assad regime on the part of people who claim to be experts on the Levant is partly a matter of the country’s very real charms for the foreign visitor. Syria boasts magnificent monuments, relatively unspoiled cities, superb food, and a culture with a deserved reputation for hospitality. For the breed of British writer whose politics are founded on aesthetics, a delicious coffee served by a handsome and friendly waiter in a charming café in a beautiful quarter in Damascus is all the proof one needs that Syria is a free and happy country, perfectly content to live under the benign rule of the Assads.
And as so many travel articles have pointed out, Syria is — or rather was — safe and hassle-free for the kind of adventurous tourist who chose to go there. This is, of course, thanks to the omnipresence of state security forces; ruthlessly efficient police states are generally very secure places.
It was simply unlucky timing that Ms. Buck’s piece came out just as Egypt and Tunisia were going up in flames and Arab dictators were becoming distinctly unfashionable.
And it is worth remembering that until late that spring, many well-informed people believed that Syria would never suffer the same kind of upheaval. It helped that Al Jazeera for a long time declined to cover the dissidence and incipient rebellion in Syria as it had done so enthusiastically in Tunisia and Morocco — presumably because its Arab-nationalist executives approved of Syria’s intransigent approach to Israel and disliked the opposite stance of the Tunisian and Moroccan leaders.
Only a couple of months before Syria started to go up in flames, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States with excellent connections in the Middle East assured me that Bashar Assad was actually very popular in Syria, and it was only pro-American regimes that were beset by popular anger.
After a lot of furious denunciation on the Internet (though little or none in places like the New York Times), it dawned on Vogue’s editors that the piece was unfortunately timed and more than a little embarrassing. They quietly removed the piece from Vogue.com. (It can be found here on a pro-Assad site.)
Now, more than a year later, the author of the piece, former French Vogue editor, Joan Juliet Buck has written in Newsweek a kind of apology for the piece in which she held up the stylish Mrs. Assad as not just “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,” but as a reformer like her husband, working to get Syrian youth to engage in “active citizenship.”
The original article was most likely the first and only time that Ms. Buck — who considers herself a progressive — had ever written a piece celebrating a distinctly unprogressive dictatorship. She says now that she was duped by Mrs. Assad, that she had long wanted to see the ruins in Palmyra (which, as some have pointed out, is perfectly easy to get to without a presidential interview), and that she could not have known when she landed on December 12 that the Arab Spring was imminent. So far, fair enough — though a more politically astute and curious reporter might have done her homework and checked out reports on the regime by human-rights organizations, and taken note of the regime’s record of sponsoring terrorist violence.
But it turns out that she handed in the piece on January 14 — after the Arab Spring was well under way and President Ben Ali of Tunisia had already fled his country. At that point you would expect that either she or her editors might think twice about publishing such an article. They did not. Indeed, even after things got much worse during the next month, Vogue still did not pull it — to the discredit of editor Anna Wintour rather than Ms. Buck.
Perhaps the strangest thing is that the one person involved in the story who absolutely should have known better has endured absolutely no criticism at all. He is the celebrated war photographer James Nachtwey, who took the pictures that accompanied the piece. Nachtwey, as was made clear in the 2001 documentary film War Photographer (which followed him to Bosnia and the West Bank), has always presented himself as a chronicler and defender of the underdog. Unlike Buck and Wintour, he cannot claim ignorance as an excuse. For him to go along with and indeed play a role in the celebration of the Assads was surely an act of pure cynicism and greed. Buck may have been taken for a fool and Wintour may have acted like an airhead, but neither but neither was knowingly prostituting their talents to glamorize a killer.
— Jonathan Foreman has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India for National Review and other publications.
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