Friday 11 April 2003

NO CORPSES VISIBLE


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.