Making The Conflict Seem Unreal
Richard Keeble
There was no Gulf war. The most powerful nation on earth (its military spending more than that of all other nations combined) confronted a rag-tag army of a country crippled by the 1991 conflict and over a decade of appalling sanctions. This was more rout: a series of massacres buried under the rhetoric of heroic, "precise" warfare.
The mainstream media's crucial role has been to manufacture the myth of warfare. Central to the myth is the rhetorical construction of a credible "enemy". Hence the media's constant stress, both in the lead up to the March 20 Baghdad bombing and during the massacres, on Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. At least that gave some justification for the massive build-up of US/UK forces. But these weapons have never been found: they exist rather in the realm of fiction, myth and rhetoric.
While Iraqi soldiers and conscripts have been deserting in droves or being slaughtered in their thousands, the mainstream media still promoted uncritically dire warnings by politicians and military leaders that "Saddam" (unpredictable and evil) would use chemical weapons. Television journalists even delivered some of their reports in gas masks dramatically highlighting the alleged dangers. But, as in 1991 when similar threats were stressed, there has not been the slightest sniff of a chemical weapons attack. Significantly chief UN inspector Hans Blix constantly predicted that Iraq would never dare to use chemical weapons (even if it possessed them). Yet his views were marginalised by the media intent on pursuing a different agenda.
Another important element in the manufacture of heroic warfare has been the demonisation of the Iraqi president. For, if the US-led forces were facing little opposition in battle, at least they could claim to be confronting "Saddam", that evil, global menace. Significantly, when Iraq was closely tied to the West during its 1980-1988 confrontation with Iran, the country was generally referred to as "Iraq" or "Baghdad" rather than "Saddam". Even the gassing of more than 5,000 Kurds at Halabja in March 1988 was not blamed on the barbarous personality of "Saddam" (rather the Iranians). Yet since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the Halabja atrocity has achieved iconic status as proof that "Saddam will even kill his own people".
Moreover, the endlessly repeated Hitler/Saddam analogy represents a highly selective use of history and pre-Cold War rhetoric to silence many other histories - in particular the imperial roles of the US and UK in the Middle East - and to promote the military option above the diplomatic one: after all, Hitler was only removed by force.
The Gulf war myth has such potency because it is based on widely held assumptions, beliefs and ideologies. There is no massive conspiracy to con the public (though because of the media's close ties to the intelligence services there are some conspiratorial elements). Rather, the construction of the myth emerges out of profound political, historical and cultural forces.
The traditional militarism of World War Two, when the mass of the the population participated in the war (generally seen as a fight for national survival) either as soldiers or civilians, threw up some serious democratic dilemmas for Western elites. Old elites were discredited by appeasement and collaboration with the Nazis. Progressive movements and trade union militancy flourished in Britain while mass employment encouraged the further emancipation of women. Later mass conscription in the US during the Vietnam war was also accompanied by substantial social dislocation with the emergence of student and black radicalism and urban riots.
Moreover, the shift to volunteer forces and the nuclear "deterrent" signalled in both the US and UK a growing separation of the state and military establishment from the public. The mainstream press, closely allied to the state, now serves to create the illusion of participatory democracy. Instead of mass active participation in wars, people are mobilised through their consumption of heavily censored media (much of the censorship being self-imposed by journalists) whose job is to manufacture the spectacle of warfare. People respond to the propaganda with a mixture of enthusiasm, contempt, apathy, scepticism and confusion. Yet most crucially media consumption and public opinion polling provide the illusion of participation just as satellite technology and (more recently) battlefield footage from journalists embedded with the military provide the illusion of "real live" coverage of the conflict.
The enormous political and economic power exerted by the military/industrial complexes in the US and UK means that militarism has become a core, defining reality for these societies. Warfare has become a technological imperative, providing the crucial testing ground for professional soldiers (desperate for a "piece of the action") and new weapons systems. With the demise of the Soviet Union, there have been no credible enemies for the world's sole superpower. And so they have had to be invented.
Britain's 1982 Falklands manufactured conflict against the suddenly demonised "Argies" was to set an important precedent for a series of military adventures by the US, culminating in the Gulf massacres of 1991. In 1983 US forces invaded Grenada in Operation Urgent Fury; in April 1986, 30 US Air Force and Navy bombers struck Tripoli and Benghazi in a raid codenamed El Dorado Canyon; and in December 1989, 24,000 US troops invaded Panama making it the largest US military operation since Vietnam. Each of these strikes bore the crucial hallmarks of a new kind of militarism.
- They were all quickie attacks. The Libya bombings lasted just 11 minutes. All the others were over within days.
- They were all largely risk-free and fought from the air. All resulted in appalling civilian casualties. Yet the propaganda - in Orwellian style - claimed the raids were for essentially peaceful purposes. Casualty figures were covered up and the military hardware was constantly represented as 'precise', 'surgical' and 'modern' and 'clean'.
- Media and military strategies were closely integrated. With journalists denied access to planes, the massacres were hidden behind the military's media manipulation and misinformation.
- The massive displays of US force bore little relation to the threats posed. For instance, on the Grenada invasion media commentator Gary Wills argued: "The war was won because it could not be lost - the American invaders had a ten-to-one superiority over the defenders and all of the air and artillery weapons used."
- The threats posed to US/Western interests were either grossly exaggerated or non-existent.
- All the leaders of the 'enemy' states were demonised in the propaganda.
- And all the invasions were celebrated in ecstatic language throughout the mainstream media. Administration lies were rarely challenged just as the global protests against the actions were rarely reported.
The French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard controversially argued there was no Gulf war in 1991. He was right. Then, as during the current crisis, there was no credible enemy: war was more a manufactured media spectacle. The Iraqi army was constantly represented in the mainstream media in the run-up to the conflict as 1 million-strong, the fourth largest army in the world, battle-hardened after their eight-year war with Iraq. When in January and February 1991, Iraqi soldiers and conscripts were succumbing to one slaughter after another, Fleet Street predicted the biggest ground battle since World War Two. Images of enormous Iraqi defensive structures with massive berms and a highly sophisticated system of underground trenches filled the media. In the end, there was nothing more than a walkover: a barbaric slaughter.
Colin Powell, in his account of the conflict, estimated that 250,000 Iraqi soldiers had been eliminated. In contrast, out of 353 "allied" deaths, only 46 were killed in combat. And of those 24 (52 per cent) were caused by so-called "friendly fire" (military jargon that has slipped so effortlessly into the lexicon of contemporary warfare). Similarly, during these latest massacres, there have been relatively few US/UK deaths compared to the countless Iraqi military and civilian casualties. And as so many journalists have found out, the US army has often proved the greatest threat rather than any incoming Iraqi firepower.
Since 1991, with the US/UK military/industrial complex increasingly out of control and desperate in its search for enemies, manufactured, "quickie" wars have been fought in Iraq (1998 and 2003), Serbia (1999) and Afghanistan (2001). Many of the aspects of new militarism have been evident. But the most strikingly different feature of the current crisis has been the presence of embedded journalists reporting from the frontlines: such a contrast with the 1991 conflict when the pools were used by the military to keep reporters away from the action. The US military obviously believed it was impossible to keep journalists (equipped with state-of-the-art laptops and satphones) away from the action. Better then to embed a favoured group of US and UK mainstream journalists with the troops. They could then be relied upon to adopt the military agenda largely uncritically - and marginalise the massive, global opposition to the US/UK invasion. There were clear risks involved. But with another quickie "war" (excellent for primetime TV) likely against an enemy crucially lacking any air defence the risks were worth taking.
This has been the most fictional and unreal of all conflicts. War, after all, has never been declared; no enemy is visible to declare a ceasefire; the central cause of the conflict (Saddam's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction) is still not discovered; US/UK military leaders still celebrate the precision of their weapons in the face of massive Iraqi casualties just as the Iraqi information minister surreally pronounced victory right up until the fall of Baghdad. Thus the toppling of Saddam's statue is beamed on television channels across the globe and The Times can celebrate on its front page "Victory in the 21-day war". In this era of manufactured "warfare" the symbolic, the mythical and the fictional inevitably take precedence over the real.
This article was first published in the Lincolnshire Echo on 19 April, 2003
* Richard Keeble is professor of journalism at Lincoln university and the author of "Secret state, silent press" (John Libbey 1997), a study of the press coverage of the 1991 Gulf conflict. He started in journalism on the Nottingham Guardian Journal in 1970 and moved to Cambridge Evening News as a subeditor in 1974. From there he joined The Teacher, the weekly newspaper of the NUT, where he was editor, until entering academe in 1984 as the director of the internalism journalism MA programme at City University, London. After running the BA Journalism and a Social Science programmes there for a number of years, he has just taken up the post of professor of journalism at Lincoln University. His other publications include "The newspapers handbook" (Routledge 2001 third edition) and "Ethics for Journalists" (Routledge 2001). He remains committed to radical left-wing politics, trade unionism and the peace movement.