LOSING HEARTS AND MINDS IN IRAQ

Whit Mason

On 1st May 2003, President Bush declared victory in Iraq. As attacks against coalition forces increased over the following weeks, military spokesmen refused to acknowledge the reality of the indigenous insurgency, instead referring to the attackers as ‘Baathists’ or ‘foreign jihadists’. On 17 July, the Washington Post quoted General John P Abizaid acknowledging that his forces faced ‘a classic guerrilla-type’ conflict [3:361]. In November the US had approximately 130,000 troops in Iraq, costing the Pentagon $4 billion a month [ibid].

The Pentagon had received forewarnings from many quarters. The State Department-sponsored Future of Iraq Project had warned that the restoration of law and order would be a priority [2:282]. Its coordinator, Thomas Warrick, was ‘banned’ from the postwar occupation [2:286]. ‘Perhaps most striking of all, the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute anticipated such sources of turmoil in a well-researched, sobering analysis, Reconstructing Iraq, [that was] breathtaking in its prescience and in its detailed examination of the "real and serious" "possibility of the US winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq" [2:283].’

The cabal that determined US strategy in Iraq, the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, rejected such admonishment out of hand. ‘They had envisioned that once Saddam Hussein and a handful of his top aides were removed from power, the rest of the country would rise up in joy at Iraq’s liberation. Just as decapitation had been a central element in US military planning, so too had it been a key part of the strategy for postwar reconstruction. The aim was not to rebuild Iraq from the bottom up but to let Iraqis take over, once they were freed of the onus of Saddam Hussein and his top aides [3:360].’

This approach represented a radical departure from the strategy adopted in those paradigmatic transformational occupations, post-war Germany and Japan, as well as in some British colonies being prepared for independence in the teeth of violent struggles over the succession of power, most notably in Malaya. Sixty years ago, occupiers saw their task as first to extirpate noxious attitudes and institutions, and only then to build healthy ones in their place. Contemporary occupiers operate as if they need only create a rudimentary physical and administrative infrastructure – the social revolution necessary to transform a violent, authoritarian society into a democratic and pacific one will occur spontaneously.

As often happens in post-conflict environments, media mushroomed after coalition forces removed the regime of Saddam Hussein. More than 250 newspapers and magazines sprang up in the summer of 2003, of which an estimated 120 were still publishing in the autumn of 2004. The quality of reporting was ‘seriously insufficient’ and print runs small. In the broadcast sector, political parties and commercial interests applied for a huge number of licences, but it emerged that most projects existed only on paper and the actual number of TV and radio stations broadcasting remained modest. Almost all were affiliated with either political parties or religious groupings [1:7].

Members of the Media Development Team, funded by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and working under the auspices of the Coalition Provisional Authority, believed they had been tasked with creating a system to regulate this shambolic bazaar of media. The MDT had already drafted a plan to create a legal framework, a broadcasting architecture and self-regulatory and training initiatives, and to improve Iraq’s newsgathering infrastructure by creating a national news agency and eventually an indigenous production capacity [1:3]. At an early meeting in Baghdad, however, it emerged that CPA administrator Paul Bremer’s speechwriter and some other advisers had very different ideas. When MDT director Simon Haselock mentioned the word ‘regulation’, recalls Haselock, ‘you could hear a sharp intake of breath [interview with Simon Haselock, Pristina, 6 June 2005].’ Bremer’s men resisted the introduction of any regulations, even including broadcast licences, which are necessary to divide up the finite broadcast spectrum. Instead of a regulatory framework, the CPA should, as the speechwriter put it, ‘let a thousand flowers bloom [ibid].’

The CPA’s Office of Strategic Communications, better known as ‘Strat Comm’, which was supposed to be in charge of spinning the occupation, pushed virtually the opposite approach to media development: concentrating all resources in the Iraqi Media Network which it would fund and control. The IMN would replace the Ministry of Information run by Uday Hussein, and eventually be like the BBC – independent and publicly funded. Under the CPA, though, it cost $6 million a month – the most expensive USG media project ever. The new public broadcast service would replace 18 state TV stations, various radio stations and one national paper with a circulation of 60,000 with two radio stations, a newspaper and one national channel [4:282].

IMN went on air on 13 May. The CPA was immediately unhappy about its news programs’ criticisms of the occupation. Program planning was ‘a shambles’. Instead of fostering local production, it imported Arabic programs from Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and showed European and American movies from Uday Hussein’s personal collection [4:282-3]. A request for a $500 satellite dish to pull down Reuters’ feed was rejected as too expensive. The public saw it as nothing but a mouthpiece for the CPA, which regularly overrode decisions by IMN’s managing director [4:285].

A San Diego-based defence contractor, Science Applications International Corp – SAIC – was brought in to relaunch the stumbling public broadcaster. Overseen by DOD’s Office of Psychological Operations – with zero experience in media development – SAIC ‘charged the Pentagon $100 million in operating costs while it learned’ [4:286]. While it paid executives $273 an hour and security guards $1,000 a day, Iraqi reporters earned just $120 a month. Since this salary was not enough for decent clothes on screen, the reporters were granted a $150 clothing allowance – ‘but only for clothes above the waist’. Of the two thirds of households that did not have satellite dishes, 59% watched IMN but only for entertainment and sports, never for news. There were demonstrations in Najaf and Karbala to take it off air altogether [4:287].

After the New York ad agency J. Walter Thompson was brought in to rebrand the network (and paid $890,000 for its advice), IMN was relaunched as Al-Iraqiyah TV. ‘Al-Iraqiyah TV changed its programming so regularly – three times in a month – that it had no chance of shoring up any loyal viewership. Eight months after it had been established, it had successfully squandered millions of dollars forging an unshakeable reputation for tiresome propaganda, state-managed news and mediocre entertainment programs [4:288].’

‘A … Department of State poll a few months later suggested that about one in ten Iraqis now watched the IMN, compared with about two out of three who watched either Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya. The President of Internews Network, an international non-profit organisation that supports and develops open media worldwide, said he thought Al-Iraqiyah ‘the worst mess I have ever seen in my life’. Iraqis must have been puzzled at how America had managed to make such a dog’s breakfast out of something even a deranged sadist like Uday Hussein had managed to run relatively smoothly [4:289].’

In late 2003 the contract for running the IMN was retendered and awarded to the Harris Corporation, which manufactures broadcasting equipment, in partnership with the Lebanese Broadcasting Service. It was regarded as the ‘official’ state channel, and ‘most observers agree it to be unprofessional and weak’ and ‘stiff’ and ‘bland’ [1:5, 9]. Al Hurra Iraq, the other US Government initiative, was regarded as ‘a total failure in Iraq, barely registering a blip on any of the surveys conducted’ [1:6].

In awarding the contract, the CPA issued Order 66 establishing the IMN as Iraq’s public broadcasting service. ‘Since then there have been significant challenges in getting the Interim Iraqi Government to understand what is meant by a PBS and the crucial principle of independence from government. This has been further exacerbated by the IMN’s continued programming and management underachievement which has left it vulnerable to constant interference [1:12].’ Almost immediately after coming to power, the Interim Iraqi Government sought to annul both Orders 65 and 66, thereby disbanding the NCMC and the public broadcaster. ‘Their perception was that the country’s information system was failing to get their message across and that much of the media that the public now had access to was actively undermining them and encouraging the insurgency [1:13].’ Just as the Japanese government had imagined that the Supreme Commander Allied Powers’s assurances of media freedom did not end the ban on criticism of the emperor, ‘instinctively they were much more comfortable with a system which resembled the old Ministry of Information’ [ibid]. The interim government attempted to circumvent the CPA’s orders by creating a body to regulate the media and run the IMN. Called the Higher Media Commission, it was chaired by Ibrahim Janabi, a close supporter of the Prime Minister and reputedly a former agent of Saddam’s secret police. Though heavy pressure from the CPA persuaded the IIG to return to the original regulatory structure, its intervention ‘significantly held back the development and effectiveness of the original strategy’ [ibid].

While Strat Comm’s silver bullet continued to founder, indigenous media were continuing to surprise and offend the CPA by criticising the occupation – sometimes fiercely. Having created a licensing regime only slowly and reluctantly, and attached no substantive conditions, the CPA found itself with no tools with which to confront the rising tide of vitriol. To remedy this, Bremer and Strat Comm decided to promulgate Order 14, which allowed the Administrator to close media outlets that he accused of incitement to violence. Though used sparingly – it shut down two newspapers and one TV station – the regulation is ‘generally regarded as a blunt instrument’ [1:11].

The CPA’s most controversial application of Order 14 was the closure of Al-Hawza, the newspaper controlled by Shiite firebrand Muqtada Al-Sadr. Many blame this closure for the Al-Sadr-led insurgency that erupted immediately afterward. In April 2004, Muqtada al-Sadr, the son of a revered Ayatollah, began calling on his poor Shiite supporters – the ‘Mahdi army’ – to rebel against the occupation. ‘I and my followers of the believers have come under attack from the occupiers … Be on the utmost readiness, and strike them where you meet them.’ The attack to which al-Sadr referred was the CPA’s closure on 28 March of al-Sadr’s newspaper, Al-Hawza, for 60 days. The CPA charged the weekly with spreading false allegations and inciting Iraqis to violence. One article had accused Bremer of deliberately starving the Iraqi people. Another charged Americans with firing rockets at a mosque [2:230-1].

The situation was framed by two comments quoted by media law doyenne Monroe Price: ‘"If the Americans truly believe in freedom they wouldn’t close our paper," Sheikh Raith Kadami al-Saidi, a supporter of Sadr, asserted. "We believe in freedom of press," replied coalition spokesman Dan Senor. "But if we let [Al Hawza] go unchecked, people will die. Certain rhetoric is designed to provoke violence, and we won’t tolerate it [5:x]."’

Haselock argues: ‘The most egregious element of Order 14 is its lack of due process, placing all power in the hands of the CPA Administrator and thus, by implication after the handover in June 2004, in the hands of the Interim Prime Minister [1:11].’

The attitude of Bush’s inner circle towards Arab opinion reflected its view of the world as being sharply divided between those who could not be persuaded to support American goals and those who did not need to be. The Pentagon’s plans for interacting with Arab media during the invasion of Iraq set the tone for the occupation that followed: parsimonious in substantive areas and profligate with cosmetics, unidirectional, prone to hypocritical flights of high dudgeon and incorrigibly off-key.

‘Intermittent reports arrived of unarmed Iraqis being shot dead by edgy American soldiers at checkpoints, demonstrations or during house searches, and there was criticism throughout the Arab media that the Americans, short of linguists and ignorant about local customs and Islam, were proving culturally insensitive. House searches and the treatment of Muslim women were of particular concern [4:281].’ According to 94 per cent, Baghdad was more dangerous than it had been before the invasion [2:25-6].

To the criticism of US troops for allowing looting across Iraq, ‘Rumsfeld replied in his famously cavalier manner, "Stuff happens … Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things [4:282]."’

Senior Americans officials did occasionally try to reach out, but when their overtures did not deliver the expected results, they were furious. The mutual antipathy between American officials and the Arab media was well developed by the time Bush declared the war over.

Before the invasion, the US military promised six ‘embed’ slots to the popular Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, but four of these were with units in Bahrain and Kuwait from which the network was banned. One wonders why they could not have figured this out beforehand. Reporter Amr al-Kahky and a cameraman were embedded with the Marines, who immediately told them that they considered Al-Jazeera ‘an enemy news station’ and ‘all its staff as a threat’. Members of anti-Saddam Free Iraqi Forces travelling with the Marines accused the pair of being operatives for the regime and threatened to kill them. An Al-Arabiya crew was embedded with the 101^st Airborne but the commander made it impossible to report and the crew left, only to be captured by Iraqi tribesmen and held for a week [4:256].

On 8 April, during the last days of the war, an Al-Jazeera crew was on the roof of their bureau in central Baghdad, preparing a live shot about the arrival of the Americans. The US A10 ‘tank killer’ fired two missiles, hitting the pavement in front of the building and a generator. Correspondent Tareq Ayyoub was critically injured by shrapnel and died after being rushed to hospital. On 24 February, Al-Jazeera’s managing director had sent the bureau’s map coordinates to the Assistant Secretary of Defense – the exact coordinates the missiles hit. Tank fire later killed a Spaniard and a Ukrainian in the Palestine Hotel nearby. The US claimed to be returning fire. Reporters sans Frontières and the Committee for the Protection of Journalists both asked the Pentagon for the results of a promised investigation into the attack on Al-Jazeera. The CPJ found that no investigation was ever launched [4:265-70].

The US had its own complaints against Al-Jazeera for airing pictures of dead Americans and Britons, some of whom appeared to have been executed with shots to the back of the head. ‘After an early battle at Nasariya, Al-Jazeera broadcast a 30-second video of exuberant Iraqis celebrating over the corpses of two dead British soldiers. Their bloodied bodies, still in desert uniform, lay on their backs in a dusty road, next to what appeared to be an overturned British Army Land Rover.’ The British and the Americans were furious. Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers claimed that showing the pictures violated the Geneva Convention (Article 13 – ‘prisoners of war must at all times be protected against insults and public curiosity’) [4:248-9].

In November 2003, Rumsfeld accused Al-Jazeera of being ‘just violently anti-coalition’. Three days later, twenty Iraqi police raided Al-Arabiya’s Baghdad bureau, seized equipment and shut it down [4:320]. Around the same time, American soldiers arrested Al-Jazeera cameraman Salah Hassan after a roadside bomb attack and accused him of having had advance knowledge of the attack. After being held in different locations for several days, Hassan wound up in Abu Ghraib. The guards stripped him naked and addressed him as ‘Jazeera’, ‘boy’ or ‘bitch’. They then tortured him and forced him to wear a red jumpsuit covered in someone else’s fresh vomit. He was then interrogated by two American civilians [4:321]. Hassan was held for over a month before being dumped on the edge of Baghdad [4:322]. By April 2004, 21 Al-Jazeera journalists had been held and released by American troops in Iraq [4:323].

Those who have worked under the occupation in Iraq disagree about whether such occurrences happened by design or because of what one former official calls a ‘vortex of incompetence’ [interview with Simon Haselock, Pristina, 6 June 2005]. What seems clear is that the Arab media and Arab opinion more broadly was never accorded much importance. This much, at least, can be inferred from the staffing of the press offices.

According to a senior USAID official who spent a year in Iraq, Strat Comm was run by Republican political campaign officials with no background in Iraq and almost no language support. He said:

‘The press officer in one key location in south central Iraq was a woman in her twenties who had never travelled and had got the job by working on President Bush’s re-election campaign in Texas. The leadership of Strat Comm changed three times in a single year. There was little communication between Strat Comm and the CPA’s "spokesperson", Dan Senor, who was purely tactical and reactive. Strat Comm didn’t attend Office of Policy Planning and Analysis meetings and there was no link between Strat Comm and the overall CPA planning process. There was a minimal budget for production and dissemination of materials, and the CPA relied on hand delivery of posters and other informational materials. The military – especially the British – pushed for greater attention to strategic communications, but the second tier leadership of the CPA focused instead on "technical" issues – eg, electricity, rising violence, oil industry rehabilitation, infrastructure security, and relations with the Governing Council [interview with USAID official, 12 July 2005].’

USAID – the agency responsible for distributing most of the US’s billions in reconstruction and aid – had a single spokesman with no local support staff. The agency did not regard this as an undue inconvenience since the spokesman was tasked only with communicating with Western, primarily American, media. In other words, the agency handling the vast majority of the billions being spent on reconstruction in Iraq would be working to convince Americans that the occupation was going well and to re-elect the president who had initiated it. As the insurgency continued to take the lives of Iraqis, Americans and their coalition partners, no one from USAID would even attempt to make the case to Iraqis [interview with Ellen Yount, Washington, 5 October 2003]. Little wonder, then, that a Gallup Poll found that only 5 per cent of Iraqis thought the US had invaded ‘to help the Iraqi people’ and only 1 per cent thought it was to establish democracy. Nearly half thought it was to ‘rob Iraq’s oil’. As noted above, 94 per cent believed Baghdad was more dangerous than it had been before the invasion [2:25-6].

Even when the CPA did make an effort to reach out, managerial incompetence assured it would fail. On 15 November, the CPA and the Governing Council it had appointed signed an agreement providing for an accelerated process for transferring sovereignty. Bremer had originally foreseen the CPA remaining in charge until a constitution had been drafted and elections held, which might take 18 months or more. Mounting violence, pressure from British PM Tony Blair and the public’s dissatisfaction with the Governing Council and the CPA had made this timetable unacceptably long. Senator Chuck Hagel, the second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said: ‘We so underestimated and underplanned and underthought about a post-Saddam Iraq that we’ve been woefully unprepared. Now we have a security problem. We have a reality problem. And we have a governance problem … and time is not on our side’ [2:287].

Under the agreement, sovereignty would be transferred to an Iraqi government on 30 June 2004, until which time Iraq would be governed by an interim constitution [2:25-7].This controversial document, which came to be called the Transitional Administrative Law or TAL, was drafted without broad consultation and signed by the unelected Governing Council. Garnering support for this contentious and manifestly undemocratic charter became the priority for the CPA’s Governance Section [2:181-3].

As UNMIK had done in Kosovo, in Iraq the CPA now organised lectures, dialogues, and town hall meetings to explain the document and the principles of democracy that it embodied, as well as the remaining steps in the transition process. And, as in Kosovo, though billed as dialogues, ‘it was not really dialogue that we were interested in, since the document was now completed and could not be amended. What we wanted for the TAL was understanding and support, or at least acceptance.’

We had just completed the first milestone on the path of political transition in Iraq – the interim constitution – and now we had to figure out a way to sell it to the Iraqi people. Lectures, dialogues and town hall meetings were being arranged around the country to explain the provisions of the TAL, the basic principles of democracy they embodied, and the remaining steps of the transition program. These were billed as dialogues and discussions, but it was not really dialogue that we were interested in, since the document was now completed and could not be amended. What we wanted for the TAL was understanding and support, or at least acceptance. Iraqis, I would soon vividly discover, wanted very much to learn about the document and discuss it – not simply to accept it and praise it but to dissect it, question it, debate it and curse it [2:181-2].

As CPA officials encountered scepticism about the non-inclusive process by which the TAL had been drafted, a simple brochure apparently produced by people close to the most influential Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Sistani, began to circulate. The crudely produced pamphlet, entitled What do you know about the TAL?, raised a number of issues that most Iraqis found troubling. It argued that the TAL’s power sharing provisions effectively promoted sectarianism. It focused especially on the fact that it reflected the designs of the occupying power, not Iraqis [2:183].

A senior USAID official who worked in Iraq argues that rather than formulating the TAL to help in the broader campaign to win hearts and minds, the CPA had to apply its limited powers of persuasion to trying to build support for the law, which turned out to be a tough sell [interview with USAID official, 12 July 2005]. The CPA produced at least one million copies of a pamphlet explaining the TAL [2:188].USAID contracted Research Triangle Associates to hire, train and deploy 550 Iraqi facilitators to lead discussions about the principles, institutions and practices of democracy ‘and related CPA policies and initiatives’. These discussions would culminate in national ‘agenda conferences’ organised on the basis of occupational or personal traits (such as women and farmers) [2:189].The campaign would also feature public service announcements, some of them recorded by Bremer himself; televised town hall meetings; television and radio talk shows; and advertisements in Arabic and Kurdish in a variety of media. The flagship of the campaign would be pairs of television ads running in three successive waves.

The CPA contracted a London-based advertising agency, Bell Pottinger, to produce the ads in collaboration with Dubai-based Bates Pangult. ‘The TAL ads were imaginative, moving and technically sophisticated. There was only one problem: as with so much of what Strat Comm did, the campaign came too late [2:190].’ The Bell Pottinger team only arrived in Baghdad on 3 March and aired the first ad on 2 April, ‘an impressive feat given the time constraints, and the logistical and security obstacles the team members encountered (which required production to be done outside the country)’ [2:191].But by this time, anti-TAL brochures had been flooding the country for weeks [2:190]. Within days of launching the CPA’s campaign, insurgencies exploded across the Sunni centre and the Shiite south, and the campaign had to be temporarily suspended [ibid].

By the 28 June handover, 300,000 or more Iraqis had taken part in ‘democracy dialogues’ and training sessions [2:287]. Despite this quantitatively substantial effort, Diamond argues: ‘We never listened carefully to the Iraqi people, or to the figures in the country that they respected. We never won their trust and confidence … Against the advice of most people who knew Iraq well (including the politicians in exile with whom we had been working), and flying in the face of a proud and defiant national history that we barely studied, we established ourselves as an occupying power in every respect and so ensured that we would face a dedicated, violent resistance – without enough troops to cope [2:290].’

As former CENTCOM commander, General Anthony Zinni, USMC (rtd), said: ‘Our whole public relations effort out there has been a disaster [6:8].’

According to a senior USAID official involved with civil society development in south central Iraq, the occupation’s shortcomings derived from three related sources. First, Bush’s cabal misunderstood the nature of Iraqi society and mistakenly believed that ‘decapitation’ of Saddam and his henchmen would leave behind intact state structures and a cooperative population. Second, there was a conceptual failure to recognise the applicability of lessons learned from previous occupations and counterinsurgency scenarios, as detailed in the Army War College’s Reconstructing Iraq. Third, the occupation unfolded as a series of ad hoc responses to specific problems, undermining implementation of deliberate strategies even where they did exist [interview with USAID official, 12 July 2005].

‘The United States has played its secondary part clumsily and sometimes even destructively,’ editorialised the New York Times, ‘by encouraging the temporary sidelining of Sunni negotiators and by seeming to put arbitrary deadlines ahead of the family and property rights of Iraqi women. But only Iraqis can produce a document that will give them a constitutional democracy rather than a civil war. The real message from this week’s deliberations is that they have seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to do so [‘The Fragments of Iraq’, New York Times editorial, 27 August 2005]. Even the editors of the Times, who are harshly critical of the neocon zealots who have driven the occupation, express mild surprise that decades of autocracy and years of insurgency did not prepare the diverse peoples of Iraq to spontaneously grasp the opportunity to create a viable democracy that the occupation supposedly represents. Such faith in the natural pluralist, pragmatic and democratic impulses of oppressed peoples is fatally misplaced. Nation-building efforts, in Iraq and elsewhere, will be doomed to failure as long as their architects proceed on the basis of complete ignorance of the toxic contamination of their building sites. Equally, they will be doomed by assumptions that opposition is by definition impervious to rational argument.

Instead, nation-building should proceed on the assumption that most people who have been oppressed and traumatised have not somehow developed an instinctive attachment to western-style democracy in response, but that they are capable of developing such a sensibility. Civic-mindedness, grounded in the rational expectation that abiding by democratic principles will serve one’s larger interests, is the indispensable foundation of functional democracies. Fostering such sensibilities requires an approach grounded in the understanding that attitudes reflect experience, and that changing attitudes therefore requires a civic education strategy that makes sense of the nation-building and democratisation process, as well as an environment that resonates with the nation-builders’ rhetoric.

Whit Mason has spent the past fifteen years working in journalism, public diplomacy and media reform in societies experiencing political and social upheaval. He founded The Siberian Review in 1991, edited the Vladivostok News, worked as a staff writer for Asiaweek magazine in Hong Kong and reported for CBS News from Sarajevo and Seoul. From 1998 to 2001 he was based in Istanbul as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, writing about the nexus between religion and politics in the region and teaching a course on the media and international politics at Fatih University (Istanbul). He worked for the UN Mission in Kosovo as a speechwriter and public diplomacy adviser. In 2004 Whit was Azerbaijan country director for Internews, a media development NGO. He has written speeches delivered to many of the world's most important political institutions, and articles and Op-Eds for the world's leading publications.

References

1 Albany Associates, 2005, An Assessment of the Current State of the Media in Iraq, Plymouth (UK): Albany Associates

2 Diamond, Larry, 2005, Squandered Victory, New York: Times Books

3 Mann, James, 2004, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, New York: Viking

4 Miles, Hugh, 2005, Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World, London: Abacus

5 Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research, 2004, Media Developments Special Issue: Closure of Al Hawza: http://www.stanhopecentre.org/imdn/alhawza.htm

6 Tatham, Lieutenant Commander Steve,RN, ‘Losing the Battle for Arab Hearts and Minds’, TBS 14, Spring 2005: http://www.tbsjournal.com/tatham.html