THE
INVASION OF IRAQ – AND HOW THE
MEDIA
WAR WAS WON AND LOST
Half
Truths And Media Spin: Whom Do You Believe?
David Robie is Senior Lecturer in Journalism
at the Auckland University of Technology and the Co-convenor of Pacific Media
Watch. Website: www.asiapac.org.fj Email: david.robie@aut.ac.nz This is based on a paper
presented at the Justified War? Seminar, at the University of
Auckland, on May 3, 2003. Reproduced with permission. The paper
incorporated several video clips and overhead transparencies, which obviously
cannot be reproduced here. Ed.
Recently
a revealing book was published in the United States and, as far as I know, it
was never reviewed, or barely mentioned, in the New Zealand media. But its
message was a salutary lesson for us here, half a globe away from the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Robert W McChesney and John Nichols have
argued for an honest debate over a total rethink of policy for media if it is
to continue to have an effective role in democracy, if it is to remain a
genuine Fourth Estate. Their book, entitled,
“Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media”,
presents a persuasive case for building a mass movement that seeks to replace their [corporate] media with a media that serves ordinary citizens — our media.1 According to McChesney and
Nichols, the Constitutional founders guaranteed freedom of the press because
they knew democracy needed “rich and diverse sources of information and ideas”.
2 Essentially, the authors were arguing that the multinational media
corporations were too powerful and should not be allowed to dictate to
governments the limits placed on competition in the broadcast and print media
sectors.
“People know the media are betraying their public trust. Whether it’s what’s on TV — the exploitation, the commercialism — or the news and public service programming that isn’t on the TV, people know that what they’re getting is not what they want or need”. 3
Elsewhere
in the book, Noam Chomsky reminds us about how Tom Paine two centuries ago
issued a call to “recover rights” that had been lost to “conquest and tyranny”,
thereby opening “a new era to the human race”. Chomsky renewed the challenge to
carry forward the endless struggle for freedom and justice. 4 Unfortunately few
seem to have heeded that challenge, least of all some 500 journalists who chose
to be “embedded’ with the military, or as most cynics describe it, in bed with
the military during (the March/April 2003) invasion of Iraq.
Some
2,000 journalists covered the war in an unprecedented voyeuristic view of a one
sided destruction of a nation in what was an illegal war. Some estimates put
the number of Australian journalists on the ground covering the war as high as
100, but certainly they were there in “larger numbers than in Korea, Vietnam,
the Indonesian confrontation and the First Gulf War”, all of which had
significant Australian military involvement 5 (if you think this is a high
number, the New York Times alone had
30 journalists in the field). 6
In
contrast, merely three journalists from New Zealand were covering the war, all
television reporters and all on the periphery, both geographically (well clear
of the battle zones) and in terms of coverage insights. Why did they bother?
The
target for this war was a Third World nation that had been inhumanely
impoverished and effectively disarmed by 12 years of sanctions. Under a tyrant,
yes, but Iraq had no chance against the might of the Anglo-American forces. The
propaganda myth of the “elite Republican Guard” forces evaporated soon enough.
This was a country with 1980s Soviet-era vintage equipment and virtually
defenceless against modern precision digital era armaments.
The
massive “more” of news coverage hardly equalled quality information, which was
lost in the “fog of war” 7, and raised alarming questions about media
credibility in a campaign of propaganda, lies, half-truth and spin. Of course,
this is nothing new; truth has always been the first casualty of war, and
author Philip Knightley 8 had already warned us about this some months before
the invasion began. But according to John Pilger:
“There
is something deeply corrupt consuming this craft of mine. It is not a recent
phenomenon; look back on the ‘coverage’ of the First World War by journalists
who were subsequently knighted for their services for the concealment of the
truth of that great slaughter.
“What
makes the difference today is the technology that produces an avalanche of
repetitive information, which in the United States has been the source of
arguably the most vociferous brainwashing in that country’s history.
“A
war that was hardly a war, that was so one-sided it ought to be despatched with
shame in the military annals, was reported like a Formula One race, as we
watched the home teams speed to the chequered flag in Baghdad’s Fardus Square, where
a statue of the dictator created and sustained by ‘us’ was pulled down in a
ceremony that was as close to fakery as you could get”. 9
And
Pilger is by no means alone in these views. Robert Fisk, the celebrated Independent specialist on Middle East affairs,
wrote a series of trenchant and contextual articles, many of them scathing
about aspects of media coverage — including one particularly memorable one
questioning whether US troops murdered three journalists during the fall of
Baghdad.10 But unfortunately not many of his best pieces were used in the New Zealand Herald in spite of the paper
being owned by Tony O’Reilly’s Independent
group. According to David Miller, a member of the Glasgow University Media
group and joint author of “Market Killing”, the invasion of Iraq was “the most
information controlled conflict of modern times” 11:
“Coverage
in the mainstream media is being manipulated as never before. The US is going
to unprecedented lengths to ensure that its spin is dominating media agendas across
the West. And it is expending massive resources in minimising critical coverage
around the world.
“[The]
US and UK governments have shown themselves adept at learning media management
lessons from successive conflicts. In both Suez (1956) and most importantly
Vietnam, the UK and US governments came to believe that propaganda was the key
to winning wars. In the Suez debacle General Sir Charles Keighley concluded in
an internal British government report in 1957 that the “over-riding lesson” was
that “world opinion is now the absolute principle of war”. 12
The
lessons of the Vietnam conflict were put into practice in the Falklands War in
1982. The 29 journalists covering that war were put in an earlier – more
tightly controlled - version of “embedding” with the naval forces and there
were no independent reporters. A dual system of censorship operated in the war
on Iraq. Curiously, while the Arabic media were routinely portrayed as biased
or censored, the bias and manipulation of the Anglo-American media was rarely
acknowledged in Western countries — certainly not in NZ television and print
reports.
The
bias and editorialising of much of the NZ media coverage, relying heavily as it
did on news sources, satellite feeds and wire agencies from Anglo-American
protagonists, was quite significant. More than 1,000 peace protesters marched
on Television New Zealand and the New
Zealand Herald offices in Auckland on 12 April 2003 to express their
displeasure. While One News acknowledged
the demonstration in a brief news report that night, the Herald ignored the protesters. In a letter delivered to Ian Fraser,
chief executive of TVNZ, a State-owned company operating two free-to-air
channels, the protesters claimed its news service had become a “mouthpiece and
visual portal for an unrelenting stream of bald US/UK propaganda and blatant
lies. TVNZ has simply set aside the fact that the US invasion is illegal,
immoral and unsanctioned and has portrayed it over the past three weeks as a
‘war of liberation’, undertaken on behalf of the Iraqi people with barely a nod
towards the great mass of humanity - and a clear majority of New Zealanders -
who oppose this organised aggression against the people of Iraq”. 13
The
rare exceptions included the Listener,
particularly with editorials by editor Finlay Macdonald and analysis of the war
by Gordon Campbell, and Scoop www.scoop.co.nz, which pursued a fiercely
independent line and posted images of the Anglo-American POWs in defiance of an
American directive to media. US authorities happily violated the Geneva
Convention when taking Afghani captives in shackles to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
where they are far removed from constitutional protections, and were happy for
TV networks to show pictures of surrendering Iraqi soldiers.
Why
is it that when journalists who generally respect the ethical norms of balance,
fairness and impartiality during “normal times” are happy to jump on the
bandwagon of jingoism and suspend their critical faculties during war? And New
Zealand, unlike Australia, was not even at war. Rarely did we get reports of
the “other side” of the story – reports from Arabic satellite channels such as
al-Jazeera, the independent academic analysis, or even insightful reporting on
the Iraqi community in New Zealand.
Direct Attacks On Journalists
Measuring
the war reportage of the New Zealand — and much of the Western media — against
their role in democratic society to provide the public with an informed basis
on which to exercise their democratic rights to lobby, then the media “failed
spectacularly to do its job”, according to independent Scoop Website editor,
Alastair Thompson. Not only did the media have to deal with censorship, says
Thompson, but it also had to combat what he calls “information warfare”. 14
“This information war was conducted on numerous fronts.
Among the techniques used have been direct attacks on journalists, deliberate
misinformation – i.e. lies, obstruction, legal threats and intimidation, linguistic sophistry, staged media
events, planted information, forgery, and even Cointelpro* type slander attacks
on commentators and opposition figures”. 15
(*Cointelpro. Covert
counterintelligence operations conducted against a wide range of US activists
by Intelligence and police agencies over several decades. The outcomes have
included murders and lengthy prison terms. Ed.)
At
the time of the shelling of the Palestine Hotel (Baghdad, 8/4/03) – and let’s
be frank, it was well-known that this hotel was where most foreign journalists
were based – General Buford Blount of the Third Infantry Division claimed that
sniper fire had been directed at the tank. He added that the fire ended “after
the tank had fired” at the hotel. Not only did journalists at the hotel confirm
there was no sniper fire, veteran Middle East specialist Robert Fisk actually
witnessed the shelling. He recalled in an article questioning whether the US
troops murdered two journalists in the shelling:
“There
was no sniper fire – nor any rocket-propelled grenade fire, as the American
officer claimed – at the time. French television footage of the tank, running
for minutes before the attack, shows the same thing, The soundtrack – until the
blinding, repulsive golden flash from the tank barrel – is silent”. 16
This
attack on journalists at the Reuters office followed less than three hours
after an American aircraft fired a single missile at the Qatar-based al-Jazeera
office and killed reporter Tareq Ayoub. The missile was apparently fired at the
exact coordinates supplied by al-Jazeera’s managing director, Mohamed Jassem
al-Ali, to the US Defense Department, warning that civilian journalists were
working in the building. The US military also attacked the al-Jazeera office in
Kabul in the invasion of Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. The Paris-based
media freedom group Reporters Sans Frontières condemned the Baghdad killings.
The New York advocacy group Committee to Protect Journalists issued a media
advisory headed: “Is killing part of the Pentagon press policy?” It stated:
“On
April 8 … US military forces launched what appeared to be deliberate attacks on
independent journalists covering the war, killing three and injuring four
others. In one incident, a US tank fired an explosive shell at the Palestine
Hotel, where most non-embedded international reporters in Baghdad are based.
Two journalists, Taras Protsyuk of the British news agency Reuters and Jose
Couso of the Spanish network Telecino, were killed; three other journalists
were injured. The tank, which was parked nearby, appeared to carefully select
its target, according to journalists in the hotel, raising and aiming its gun
turret some two minutes before firing a single shell”.
Robert
Fisk says the Americans were “outraged at al-Jazeera’s coverage of the civilian
victims of US bombing raids”. They were equally unhappy with some of the
reportage from journalists at the Palestine Hotel, free from the
self-censorship straitjacket of being “embedded” with the military. Fisk added:
“A
Ukrainian, a Spaniard, an Arab. They all died within hours of each other. I
suspect they were killed because the US – someone in the Pentagon – decided to
try to ‘close down’ the press. Of course, American journalists are not
investigating this. They should – because they will be next”.
The Toppled Statue Episode – A Stage-Managed Farce?
Gagging
the critics — an age-old tactic. But let us return to John Pilger’s earlier
reference to the statue propaganda, the truth about this fraudulent incident
needs to be exposed. The US was desperate to have a symbolic “liberation” style
image to project the people of Iraq, especially as these images had eluded them
in Basra as defenders of the regime fought on desperately against great odds.
Thus the iconic images of Saddam’s statue being toppled in (central Baghdad’s)
Fardus Square on April 9 and being “beaten” with sandals by a “jubilant crowd
greeting liberation” in reality were nothing like what was framed on TV and in
the newspapers. I watched BBC World
in the lead-up to the toppling.
The
square was largely empty except for three strategically positioned US Abrams tanks
and an armoured personnel carrier plus a small paltry crowd of 100 or so, many
of them apparently journalists. A BBC
World news presenter kept asking, “Where is everybody?” There were
apparently more journalists there than Iraqis and they appeared to be waiting
for an event that some had possibly been tipped off about in advance. The
statue was unlikely to have been pulled down without US help, which the
American soldiers were quick to exploit — even momentarily wrapping the Stars
and Stripes around Saddam’s head. An
IndyMedia Website presented photos and evidence that some of the crowd were
from US-backed Ahmed Chalabi’s Free Iraqi Forces militia.17
It is
incidents such as this that have tarnished the credibility of US news sources.
What has happened to the Fourth Estate ethic? Certainly, it seemed to have lost
its edge compared with the new Arabic media such as al-Jazeera, el-Manar TV and
Abu Dhabi TV. “For many years Western media had represented the best option for
Arab viewers,” wrote Kaled Ezeelarab. “It had gained a reputation of being
motivated solely by professional incentives, first and foremost seeking the
truth.” 18 But now the sophistication and professionalism of the Arab stations
have challenged Western dominance.
For
Stephan Richter of The Globalist,
part of the problem is the “follow the herd” or the pack mentality. Many
journalists are afraid to step outside consensus reporting: “As long as they
don’t stick their necks out, these people believe, nobody can berate them for
getting out of line”. 19 A similar
problem is that the same pack dynamic also works in reverse – making the whole
US media business, especially in print and cable news reporting, highly
pro-cyclical. To follow the war and the reconstruction with any real
understanding, we need to refer to both the Arab (such as al-Jazeera in
English, english.aljazeera.net) and Western news sources – and read between the
lines. But most importantly, we need to browse independent and insightful
Websites.
Adam
Porter highlights how the embedded style of media reality show glossed over the
civilian casualties and played up the image of a “clean” war. 20 He cited the
uncritical and defensive news presentation by BBC networks after the US Third
Regiment killed seven women and children on the night of March 31 as they
approached a checkpoint on a bridge near the southern Iraqi city of Karbala.
Initial reports claimed that a warning shot had been fired and the women had
kept coming towards the checkpoint.
They
“just kept coming, just kept coming” (BBC
10 O’Clock News/Sky TV News/BBC News 24).
What
could anyone do? They “failed to stop?” (BBC
Radio 5 Live).
Everyone
“feels sorry” for the Third Infantry soldiers being put in that position (Major
David Holly, BBC Radio 5 Live).
The
“soldiers were right to shoot” and should be “given (the backing” of
Washington. And the tactics were a direct result of the Iraqi military (BBC Radio 5 Live).
The
“soldiers were right to defend themselves” (BBC
Radio 4).
Was
the “just kept coming” phrase from Central Command? Until the following
morning, the massacre was presented as a “tragedy” with the Iraqi women having
contributed, perhaps unwittingly, to their deaths. However, the Washington Post reported the officer in
command who ordered the warning shot — but that never came. Commenting on
similar incidents, John Pilger wrote:
“Imagine
the terror of a mother, cowering with her children on the road as the ‘softly
spoken 21-year-olds’ decide whether to kill them, or kill the old man failing
to stop his car? The children are clearly ‘scouts’; the old man is, well, who
knows and who cares?” 21
The
killing-the-chick-who-got-in-the-way mentality was another manifestation of the
“collateral damage” to use an obscene military term. 22 Another obscene term is
“degrading the enemy”, which means bomb hell out of “them” while you have total
air supremacy and kill as many of “them” as possible (David then showed the famous clip, from TVNZ, of US aircraft bombing
their own forces in northern Iraq, on April 6, 2003, as an example of the many
times when US troops “degraded” their own forces or allies. Ed.).
Although
“major combat operations” have officially ceased 23, the information war goes
on. No one will really know what happened in this war until the Western media
does its job and asks the right questions. Now that the New Zealand media has
“turned off” Iraq after the end of the reality show, it will be even more
difficult to get answers. Some of these questions are:
· Why hasn’t the media investigated the alleged role of US
troops in the apparent policy of encouraging or even organising looting in the
days after the fall of Baghdad? While a company of soldiers guarded the Oil
Ministry alone, the National Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the National
Archives and various ministries and hospitals were looted and, in some cases,
torched. And to make it worse, there is evidence that suggests much of the
looting was organised and the rise of the “Arab street” was projected as a
cover-up for this.
According
to an Arabic-speaking PhD scholar from Sweden who was a human shield during the
war, he personally watched US soldiers shoot security guards on an
administrative building in Haifa Avenue on April 8. He recalled:
“I
was just 300 metres away when the guards were murdered. Then they shot the
building entrance to pieces, and their Arabic translators in the tanks told
people to run for grabs inside the building. Rumours spread rapidly and the
house was cleaned out. Moments later tanks broke down the doors to the Justice
Department, residing in the neighbouring building, and looting was carried on
there.
“(Interviewer): Do you mean to say that it was the US
troops that initiated the looting?
“Absolutely.
The lack of scenes of joy had the US forces in need of images of Iraqis who
[had] in
different
ways demonstrated their disgust with Saddam’s regime. 24
· Who ordered these “scorched earth” tactics and why?
· What happened to the “20,000 strong, well-equipped
elite” Special Republican Guards who were supposed to defend Baghdad? To where
did they vanish?
· What happened to the long-promised fedayeen urban
guerrilla war, a la the Battle of Mogadishu *? Basra was far smaller and
relatively lightly defended, and it took three weeks to subdue the city. *This refers to the urban guerilla warfare
that drove the Americans out of the capital of Somalia during their illfated
early 1990s intervention in that country. This has recently been given the
Hollywood treatment in the movie “Black Hawk Down”. Ed.
· Why were none of the bridges leading into Baghdad
destroyed – an effective military tactic for defending a city?
· Why did the entire Iraqi Cabinet manage to escape
apparently overnight on April 8? This was the night of the alleged bombing in
the Mansur district when 14 civilians were killed. A BBC team later reported
that the actual meeting place allegedly used by Saddam was unscathed.
· What happened to the infrastructure of the regime – the
bulk of the estimated 500,000 elite?
· What has happened to Saddam Hussein, given that he was a target of the invasion?
Many
rumours have been fuelled by a Lebanese newspaper report 25 outlining how the
US Central Intelligence Agency allegedly infiltrated the human shields in
Baghdad to pinpoint targets, the Republican Guard commanders were bribed with
safe passage in return for their surrender, independent media were to be
intimidated and “corralled” – hence the attack on the Reuters and al-Jazeera
offices – and Saddam and his entourage were spirited to Mecca. Or is Saddam
still in Iraq and planning for guerrilla war? 26
· And where is the “smoking gun” – the alleged weapons of
mass destruction (WMD)? Did the weapons exist when the war began? Probably not.
But undoubtedly they will be “found”, just as a number of journalists have
found nice, clean and conveniently incriminating “smear” files on people such
as Scottish supporter of Iraq, the British Labour MP George Galloway, among the
ashes of ruined ministries. A media manipulator’s dream.
· Why have the New Zealand media been so quick to publish
the smear allegations against Galloway and not publish his response, such as
was published in The Independent? 27
Finally,
when are the media going to provide some serious answers, or even pose the
questions? And where is the likelihood of the democracy that was this war’s
supposed objective. The Anglo-American forces easily won the war – as if that
was ever in doubt – but it is hard to see them winning the peace. Sooner or
later the guerilla war will begin * with Iraq perhaps becoming another
Palestine or Lebanon, or alternatively an Islamist state like Iran. But to keep
informed, don’t count too much on the corporate media. * Since this was written, the guerilla war in Iraq has well and truly begun, with US troops
being killed, wounded and ambushed daily. Ed.
1
McChesney, Robert W, and John Nichols; “Our
Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media”. Seven
Stories Press, New York, 2002.
2
Nader, Ralph. (2002). “In an honest Debate”. In McChesney, Robert W, and John
Nichols (pp 12-14), ibid.
3
Ibid.
4 Chomsky, Noam. (2002). “Renewing Tom Paine’s Challenge”. In McChesney, Robert W, and John Nichols. (pp15-23), ibid.
5
Tidey, John. (2003, April). “Australian newspapers send their best people”, PANPA Bulletin, p5.
6
Ibid.
7
Sirri, Odai. (16/4/03). “Did the media get blinded by the “fog of war”?”,
al-Jazeera.
8
Knightley, Philip (2002). “The First Casualty” (2nd Ed).
9
Pilger, John. (25/4/03). “Something deeply corrupt is consuming journalism”. Hidden Agendas www.john.pilger.com
10
Fisk, Robert. (26/4/03). “Did the US murder these journalists?”, Independent www.news.independent.co.uk
11
Miller, David. (16/4/03). “War journalism is guided by military precision”,
al-Jazeera.net english.aljazeera.net
12 Ibid.
13
“[NZ] Iraq war demonstrators protest over ‘media bias’” (12/4/03). Pacific Media Watch.
14 Thompson, Alastair. (29/4/03).
“The role of the media in the Second Gulf War”. An address by the Scoop editor,
at St Andrews-on-the-Terrace, Wellington. Published on Scoop:
www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0304/S00223.htm
15
Ibid.
16
Fisk, Robert . (26/4/03). “Did the US murder these journalists?”, Independent.
17
Unsigned (10/4/03). “Staged “liberation” media event?” DC Indy Media dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=63743&group=webcast
18
Ezzelarab, Kaled. (22/4/03). “Western media no longer the best”. Islam Online www.gvnews.net/html/DailyNews/alert4146.html
19 Richter,
Stephan. (14/4/03). “The US media and global respect”. GlobalVision/The Globalist.
www.gvnews.net/html/DailyNews/alert4062.html
20
Porter, Adam (16/4/03). “Glossing civilian casualties”. Al Jazeera.net
english.aljazeera.net
21
Pilger, John (2003), op. cit.
22
“Collateral damage: Al Sahaf unleashed. (16/4/03). al-Jazeera
23
“All over bar the shouting”. (3/5/03). Weekend
Herald, citing Reuters, AP.
24 Rothenborg, Ole. (11/4/03). “US forces encourage looting”. Dagens Nyeter, translated article posted on Information Clearing House: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2914.htm
25
Thompson, op. cit.
26
Escobar, Pepe (25/4/03). “The Roving Eye: The Baghdad deal”. Asia Times Online www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED25Ak04.html
27 Galloway,
George (24/4/03). “I’m a victim of the war against the Iraqi people”. The Independent.
argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=399799