Tribune column, 11 April 2003
One of the most remarkable things about
this war has been that, despite the wall-to-wall television coverage, no one
who relied solely on the box would know what the hell is going on.
I’ve got a bog-standard cable-TV deal, but
even I’ve had five 24-hour news channels to choose from. There have been TV
journalists everywhere -- in Baghdad hotels before and after the Saddam regime
collapsed, “embedded” with British and American troops, interviewing key
figures in the every capital of the world, pontificating endlessly on air --
and dozens of discussions of the rights and wrongs, ins and outs, just about
everywhere you look. The conventional wisdom is that this been the TV war to
end TV wars.
But are we any the wiser? Not much. The
live TV pictures -- of British and American troops in action, of Iraqis
grieving their dead, of looters apparently running amok in Baghdad, of the
civilian wounded in hospital -- might be unprecedented. But they haven’t helped
anyone understand what's happened.
From the start, most of the important
military engagements took place off-camera. We saw US troops securing a bridge
across the Euphrates against small-arms fire, to take a typical example, but
nothing of the crucial and apparently vicious battle with the Republican Guard defending
Baghdad. We witnessed the Brits being feted in Basra, but there was barely a
hint of the battle that preceded the fall of the city.
How fierce have been the firefights that
have been routinely reported as such? Was there a wobble on the ground after
week one, when it appeared that the coalition forces were inadequate to the
task set them by George Bush and Tony Blair? What exactly by way of destruction
have the American and British militaries wreaked on the Iraqis? We don’t know –
or at least, we don’t know from TV.
From the Iraqi side, we got pictures of
wounded civilians and bombed markets – and, of course, the idiotic information
minister -- but no sense of the damage that the British and American
bombardment did to the Iraqi military or of how Iraqi troops faced the
overwhelming superior military might of the coalition forces.
Was there heroic resistance against
impossible odds by anti-imperialist patriots armed with nothing more than AK-47 rifles and the
odd 1957-vintage T-55 tank? Or did only nothing-to-lose Saddam diehards put up
a real fight, with conscripts forced into the US-UK firing line for fear of
being shot in the back for desertion by the secret police? Or both at different
times in different places? What is the true level of Iraqi casualties, civilian
and military? How did they die, lose their limbs, starve? Nothing we have seen
on TV has given us more than the vaguest clue.
Crucially, only rarely have we seen the
dead – as Peter Preston, former editor of the Guardian, noted in a column this
week. This most visible war has been a slaughter without visible corpses -- on
either side.
Since the collapse of the regime, the fog
has descended even more completely. The destruction of the Saddam statue
undoubtedly made great TV – but although the jubilation of the crowds at the
fall of the brutal kleptomaniac dictatorship was real, big questions remain
about how far that particular symbolic moment was staged for the cameras. After
that came the looting, which of course was not staged. But it remains unclear
from the TV coverage who has been looting what or why.
Have hospitals been attacked out of sheer
lumpen bloody-mindedness? Or because they were, until days ago, exclusively for
the use of the party elite? Is civil war in the offing? What the hell is the
coalition doing about creating a new Iraq? Or about aid?
The truth is that the breathlessly pacy
24-hour news TV coverage has systematically trivialised the war in Iraq. It has
set the news agenda relentlessly: very few newspapers and even fewer
broadcasters have dared do anything but follow its often dead-end leads.
Add the systematic lying by both sides in
the war (dutifully replicated by sections of both broadcast and print media),
the confusion of fact and rumour that is inevitable in wartime, and the
hysterical mood (now slowly subsiding) that took hold of both opponents and
supporters of the war in the British press – and it’s amazing that anyone has
got any sort of handle on the whole show.
That we have is down largely to old-fashioned
reporters, mainly press correspondents, who have shunned the temptations of
both propaganda and instant sensation to file stories based on what they’ve
witnessed for themselves. The journalistic heroes of the hour are not the TV
stars but the likes of James Meek and Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian and
Robert Fisk and Kim Sengupta of the Independent, who have churned out serious
analytical words day after day.
