Propaganda Wars
Richard Keeble
Since the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the massive, over-resourced military/industrial complexes of the US and UK have been desperately searching for enemies. Weaponry needs to be tested, troops want "a piece of the action" - and new states have to be targeted for attack or invasion. However, credible enemies are hard to find. And so they have had to be invented. As a result, the propaganda wars fought by the US/UK mainstream media have become an increasingly vital ingredient of military strategy - with major wars being conducted largely as media spectacles against manufactured enemies, their leaders demonised, their strength grossly exaggerated.
The current conflict in Iraq is thus best seen as another manufactured war with the mainstream broadcast and print media playing a crucial role in the construction of the illusion of warfare. Yet the media do not function as part of a massive conspiracy. Rather, the war myth is the result of profound geostrategic, ideological, social, political and economic factors.
Most of the US/UK's important military activity is covert, away from prying TV cameras and the public's gaze. But today, following the recent slaughters in Serbia and Afghanistan, another "big", spectacular conflict is in full flow as US/UK imperial ambitions spiral out of control. So, as the world's largest military power confronts an army of a country crippled by over a decade of sanctions and crucially lacking any protection from the air, most of the mainstream media, to create the illusion of credible warfare, are left highlighting "Saddam's" alleged weapons of mass destruction (never discovered by the UN inspectors), his alleged threat to use chemical weapons - and the "heroic" resolve of the invading forces. Significantly, when 14 old and rusty Iraqi tanks were destroyed by the Desert Rats on 27 March this was celebrated as "the largest British tank battle since World War Two". But this was hardly a battle since there was no credible threat: it was a rout.
Back in 1991, the US desperately needed to fight a "big" war to help "kick the Vietnam syndrome", to legitimise the enormous military budget and to reinforce the power of the military/industrial/intelligence elite. And this "war" had to be seen: hence the significance of the tightly controlled television images of the conflict. In the end there was nothing more than a series of massacres: a barbaric slaughter buried beneath the fiction of heroic warfare. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported in his autobiography that 250,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict - compared to just 150 in the US-led forces (most of them through "friendly fire").
Today the most obvious contrasts with the 1991 coverage arise from the access to the frontlines for the 600 US and 128 UK journalists "embedded" with the troops and the round-the-clock television coverage. Constantly repeated - and tightly controlled - battlefield images of US/UK forces in action feature as never before on TV while seemingly endless speculation and analysis by military commentators only serve to crowd out the views of the massive global opposition to the US/UK aggression. Horrific images of the dead and wounded shown by the Arabic TV network al-Jazeera are clearly not being allowed to disturb the sanitised representation of the conflict for British viewers.
Not surprisingly, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, was quick to praise the "embeds": "The imagery they broadcast is at least partially responsibile for the public's change of mood with the majority of people now saying they back the coalition." And those distant shots from an eerily static camera of huge mushroom clouds foreover erupting over Baghdad following yet another night-time aerial bombardment - without any accompanying expressions of outrage - only seem to acclimatise the viewer to the everyday ordinariness of the horror.
In contrast, during the first Gulf conflict, the pools were used to keep journalists huddled in packs in Saudi Arabia away from the frontlines. Reporters such as Robert Fisk of the Independent and Peter Sharp of ITN, who dared to operate away from the pools, were intimidated by both the military and some of their journalist colleagues. Most of the crucial military action in 1991 came from the air and since journalists had no access to fighter jets the conflict (paradoxically, given the massive media coverage) was kept largely secret.
For the current invasion of Iraq, the US/UK military realised that a repeat of the 1991 media controls was never feasible since the Middle East has been swarming with thousands of journalists (many of them equipped with state-of-the-art laptops and satphones) for months. In any case, military censorship regimes (whether keeping journalists away from the frontlines or, as currently, "embedding" many of them with the troops) always serve essentially symbolic purposes - expressing the arbitrary power of the army over the conduct and representation of war. For their part, mainstream journalists, influenced by professional norms and conventional news values, can usually be relied upon to apply self censorship and reproduce dominant perspectives.
Another important aspect of the manufactured war has been the stress on "precise" weaponry. This has been a feature of the media coverage of all the US military interventions of recent years (Grenada 1983; Libya 1986, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991 and 1998, Serbia 1999 and Afghanistan 2001). Yet in all of these attacks there were few casualties among the US-led forces while the enormous numbers slaughtered, traumatised and left jobless on the other side were covered up.
In the lead-up to the conflict there was a significant break in Fleet Street's pro-war consensus - with the Independents, Mirrors and Guardian all coming out against the US/UK rush to military action. Yet all the mainstream print and broadcast media just before the bombing of Baghdad on 20 March were happy to highlight Pentagon leaks that suggested 3,000 missiles and precision-guided bombs would be dropped on Iraq in an early "shock and awe" campaign.
As the US/UK tanks headed for Baghdad, countless unnamed Iraqi troops and conscripts were massacred away from the television cameras. Yet when civilian homes are shown destroyed the propaganda can always resolve the contradictions: such tragedies are "inevitable" in warfare, or they are the fault of "Saddam" or simply "mistakes" - blips in an otherwise smoothly-running military operation rather than moral outrages.
Take for instance, the coverage of the bombing of the Baghdad market of 26 March. How many were killed? "At least 14" say the media. But they remain anonymous: the dehumanied "targets" of US/UK aggression or "collateral damage" according to Ross Benson's callous militaryspeak in the Mail. We can expect no profiles of the Iraqi dead or their grieving families.
Richard Keeble is professor of journalism at Lincoln University. His books include Secret State, Silent Press (John Libbey, 1997), a study of the US/UK press coverage of the 1991 Gulf conflict. A shorter version of this article was published in The Independent on Sunday on 30 March, 2003.