The war in Iraq hasn't been easy for nonparticipants such as Japan to sort out. The most obvious villains were also technically the victims, and the perpetrators of hostilities have looked like invaders one minute, liberators the next. Perceptions and judgments could, and still do, shift like the wind. But there is one group -- besides Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his cohort -- that seems to have met everyone's definition of villainy. And that's the independent Arab television network al-Jazeera.

Isn't there something wrong with this picture? Shouldn't the fact that everyone has a problem with al-Jazeera give us pause? Perhaps the fact that a news outlet offends all parties means that it is in the pocket of none. Just because the war is to all intents and purposes over doesn't mean that this is a dead issue. It will be important in the coming weeks and months to develop an accurate assessment of al-Jazeera, which is based in and partially funded by Qatar, because it is by far the most popular media voice in the Arab world and will have a critical role in shaping Arab responses to the new regime in Iraq.

Here's how al-Jazeera has been perceived lately. Most recently, the network has drawn fire from coalition officials for having shown video clips of U.S. and British prisoners of war in the first week of the war; earlier, Western media critics had repeatedly lambasted it for broadcasting Osama bin Laden's messages after Sept. 11, 2001. It has also been criticized in the United States for its "lurid sensationalism" and "no-holds-barred debates" (one is forced to wonder what kind of debates these critics would prefer -- muzzled ones?) and for showing the news "through an anti-American lens." Given the routine denunciations, it is not surprising that Arabs have reacted cynically to the U.S. claim that the bombing of al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau last Tuesday, in which a reporter died, was accidental.