Media War

To my mind, Robert Fisk has provided far and away the best reports on Iraq lately, and his piece today ‘This is the reality of war. We bomb. They suffer’ is no exception:

Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is “as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed” but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs—they were bound up with gauze—and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg… Seven other members of her family were wounded in the same cruise missile bombardment; the youngest, a one-year-old baby, was being breastfed by her mother at the time.

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So let’s forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the equally cheap moralising of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip around the Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital. For the reality of war is ultimately not about military victory and defeat, or the lies about “coalition forces” which our “embedded” journalists are now peddling about an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians. War, even when it has international legitimacy—which this war does not—is primarily about suffering.

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And all this, I asked myself yesterday, was all this for 11 September 2001? All this was to “strike back” at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil, Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali have nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with those crimes against humanity, any more than has the awful Saddam? Who decided, I wonder, that these children, these young women, should suffer for 11 September?

Wars repeat themselves. Always, when “we” come to visit those we have bombed, we have the same question. In Libya in 1986, I remember how American reporters would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been hit by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire? Again, in 1991, “we” asked the Iraqi wounded the same question. And yesterday, a doctor found himself asked by a British radio reporter—yes, you’ve guessed it—”Do you think, doctor, that some of these people could have been hit by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire?”

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What has been spared is not a gift to the Iraqi people: it is for the benefit of Iraq’s supposed new masters.

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Xenophon struck south of here, Alexander to the north. The Mongols sacked Baghdad. The caliphs came. And then the Ottomans and then the British. All departed. Now come the Americans. It’s not about legitimacy. It’s about something much more seductive, something Saddam himself understands all too well, a special kind of power, the same power that every conqueror of Iraq wished to demonstrate as he smashed his way into the land of this ancient civilisation.

Yesterday afternoon the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around the city of Baghdad in the hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke against computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after 3.20pm London time, followed by the utterly predictable sound of explosions.

Brilliant. Sadly the reporting elsewhere has been patchy at best, and thinly-veiled propaganda at worst (and that’s the British media — what I’ve seen of the US TV networks’ coverage made me want to puke). Channel 4 News is giving the broadest TV coverage, but could still do better (have to say I do rate Jon Snow, very sharp; always think of him cycling in to the studio with his great ties and bright socks). The ‘rolling news’ channels like BBC News 24 have mainly been a tedious and unchallenging mixture of clips of distant explosions and flames on unidentifiable targets, ‘embeded’ reporters presenters with Allied troops (Stockholm Syndrome anyone?), cool graphics and lame questioning of military spokesmen in Kuwait and Qatar (like the set—will General Franks be collecting an Oscar tonight for Best War is Sexy set costing over $200,000?). As Mark lawson writes in ‘Military mind games’:

The early days suggest that the British and American operations hope to address this stand-off between aggressive journalists and defensive politicians through an illusion of access. There are far more live pictures from the front than has been the case in any previous war: sometimes, the screen splits to take in feeds from Baghdad, Kuwait, northern Iraq and an aircraft carrier simultaneously.

Yet when asked to explain what is actually happening in these violently pretty pictures, politicians contemptously refuse to give “a running commentary”, while press secretaries hide behind the sandbags of “classified” information. This trick of appearing open while being closed is also seen in the military tactic of attaching reporters to army units. It looks fantastically democratic but even the most skilled journalists risk becoming, in the jargon, “clientised”: coming to share the fear, excitement and eventually triumphalism of the troops beside them. And if heaps of charred bodies should occur on either side, these “embedded” journalists will be kept well away from them.

And there’s a great Gulf Invasion Drinking Game waiting to be invented—every time you see a reporter broadcasting in a gas mask, take a swig; if he’s (and it’s always a he, as war tends to give us blokes hard-ons) standing next to/on a tank as well, take two swigs.

Robert Fisk has also written on the war of misinformation.

No sign of any of the less ‘fun’ sides of war though—y’know, like dead people and stuff—best not to put people off their tea, and certainly wouldn’t want to undermine our brave boys and girls… Still, the images are out there, if you look hard enough (if it wasn’t for the Web, I think I’d have forgotten that people actually get killed in wars).

• Victims of the Allied attacks on Basra (warning, graphic photos, including a child with half its fucking head missing. I won’t be forgetting this Blair.)
• A father and son after losing their home in Baghdad attacks. Hey, “it’s hammer time!”
• Allied troops standing over the bodies of 2 dead Iraqis, still clutching a white flag

BBC war veteran Tim Llewellyn has some interesting things to say about media coverage of the war:

Until almost the end of the war, in February 1991, the governments, with their emphasis on ’smart’ bombs but no pictures of the dead, broken, maimed and dying, presented a sanitised and deceitful display of precise and even merciful military might. To this day we do not know how many Iraqis were killed. The spinners convinced the British - as they are trying to do again - that this was a war against ‘the Iraqi leadership, not the Iraqi people’.

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Broadly, the last war was not reported properly until correspondents broke away from the minders and went alone to the battle lines…

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Many of these reporters - 30 from the BBC - are ‘embedded’ in military units. The Army thus controls what can be witnessed and transmitted. It brings intimate identification of journalist with commander and squaddie: ‘our’ media boys and girls alongside ‘our’ military boys and girls. It is worryingly cosy.

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Many correspondents and presenters are young and enthusiastic. A ‘good’ war is a leg up the career ladder. But what can they know of war and deception? How many of them know anything of the Middle East and Arab ways and aspirations? Informed explanations of why and how Arabs think and behave come well down producers’ lists of priorities when there is a mass of information from the West to contend with. The story of the Iraqi people is missing.

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Doubts remain. There is so much information and there are so many impressionable and competitive reporters under pressure to ‘produce’ that the truth is easily lost: fertile ground for Government twisters. TV studio explanations are vitiated by the careless use of pundits without proper labelling, gentlemen sleekly convincing in suits and ties, behind desks, in London and Washington, who turn out to be Israel lobbyists, right-wing hawks or otherwise interested parties.

Sadly, as a result of the “friendly fire” attack on their TV crew, ITN has already suspended roaming reporting by their journalists. Now we’re going to be even more reliant on reports from ‘embeded’ correspondents.

Richard Ingrams makes some good points on the media and politicians too:

Of all the many lies and contradictions that we have been expected to swallow during the last few months one of the most conspicuous must be the suggestion that the Prime Minister made a brilliantly persuasive and Churchillian speech in the House of Commons last week - despite the fact that it was shortly afterwards followed by the biggest ever backbench rebellion in the long history of Parliament.

Not for the first time in this current crisis will people have had the impression that they were being treated as if they were a bunch of idiots. Now Mr Blair is telling us that the time has come for everybody to rally behind our brave British troops.

What does this mean exactly? It means that the debate about the war, but especially the criticism of the Government and Mr Blair in person, should stop at once while we all wish Godspeed to our brave boys.

Ingrams also addresses BBC bias, citing the axing of a film comparing Iraq with Israel just minutes before it was due to air. The programme reported on concerns about “nuclear ambiguity” with regard to Israel and the policing of weapons of mass destruction, and claimed that the Israeli military used a new gas against Palestinians in Gaza in February 2001.

Not being idiots, [the British public] have grasped the simple facts that (a) America has a special relationship not with this country but with Israel, and that (b) different rules apply when Israel defies the United Nations or when America vetoes anti-Israel resolutions at the UN.

Some of these self-evident truths were due to be voiced on a BBC Correspondent programme due to be shown last Sunday at 7.15pm. This also made mention of Mordecai Vanunu, the nuclear technician who first told the world that Israel was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. He was kidnapped by the Israeli secret service, Mossad, and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment, several of them spent in solitary confinement in a cell measuring 9ft by 6ft.

When the advertised programme was rescheduled to the graveyard slot after Newsnight on Monday and replaced by a film about windmills starring Fred Dibnah there were over 2,000 complaints from the public criticising the decision. The BBC replied that the change had been made only because coverage of the Bush-Blair summit in the Azores had over-run. They, too, like Mr Blair, seem to think we are all a lot of idiots.

Still, if there’s one person who can be relied upon to do this war justice, it’s Steve Bell—here’s his take on Clare Short’s decision not to resign.

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