It’s easy enough to identify this composite description, right? Our recent wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, as portrayed perhaps in the Arab press and on Arab websites. As it happens, actually not. With the exception of the material on bombs, which comes from Steve Coll’s book
Ghost Wars
, and on the beheading of hostages, which comes from an Amnesty International report, all of the above is taken from either the statements of U.S. officials or coverage in either the
Washington Post
or the
New York Times
of the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, fostered, armed, and funded to the tune of billions of dollars by the Central Intelligence Agency with the help of the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services.
Well, then try this one:
Thousands of troops of the occupying power make a second, carefully planned “
brutal
advance” into a large city to root out Islamic “rebels.”
The first attack on the city failed, though it all but destroyed neighborhoods in a “
ferocious
bombardment.” The soldiers advance behind “
relentless
air and artillery strikes.” This second attempt to take the city, the capital of a “rebellious province,” defended by a determined “rebel force” of perhaps five hundred to three thousand, succeeds, though the fighting never quite ends. The result? A “razed” city, “where virtually every building has been bombed, burned, shelled beyond recognition or simply obliterated by war”; a place where occupying “soldiers fire at anything that moves” and their checkpoints are surrounded by “endless ruins of former homes and gutted, upended automobiles.” The city has been reduced to “rubble” and, for the survivors, “rebel” fighters and civilians alike, it and surrounding areas are now a “killing field.” The city lacks electricity, water, or much in the way of food, and yet the rebels hold out in its ruins, and though amusements are few, “on one occasion, a…singer came and gave an impromptu guitar concert of patriotic and folk tunes [for them].”
In the carnage involved in the taking of the city, the resistance showed great fortitude. “‘See you in paradise,’ [one] volunteer said. ‘God is great.’” Hair-raising news reports from the occupied city and from refugee camps describe the “traumatized” and maimed. (“Here in the remains of Hospital Number Nine—[the city’s] only hospital with electricity—she sees a ceaseless stream of mangled bodies, victims of gunfire and shellings”); press reports also acknowledge the distance between official promises of reconstruction and life in the gutted but still resistant city, suggesting “the contrast between the symbolic peace and security declared by [occupation] officials and the city’s mine-ridden, bullet-flying reality.” Headlines don’t hesitate to highlight claims made by those who fled and survived—“Refugees Describe Atrocities by Occupation Troops”—and reports bluntly use the label given the acts of the occupiers by human rights organizations—“war crimes.” Such organizations are quoted to devastating effect on the subject. The rebels may be called “bandits” by the occupiers, but it’s clear in news reports that they are the ones to be admired.
No question of the sources here at least. Obviously the above is a composite account of the 2004 American assault on the Sunni city of Falluja taken from Arab press reports or sympathetic Arab websites. As it happens, if you believed that, you’d be zero for two. In fact, all of the above is taken from contemporary accounts of the January 2000 Russian
assault on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, that appeared in the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, or the
Boston Globe
.
How to Spot a Terrorist
I put together these descriptions from American reports on the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, written in the midst of the Cold War, and on the second battle for Grozny ten years after the Cold War ended, because both seemed to have certain eerie similarities to events in Iraq after Baghdad fell to American troops in March 2003, though obviously neither presents an exact analogy. Both earlier moments of reportage do, however, highlight certain limitations in our press coverage of the war in Iraq (and also Afghanistan).
After all, in the case of Afghanistan in the 1980s, there was also a fractured and fractious rebellion against an invading imperial superpower intent on controlling the country and setting up its own regime in the capital. The anti-Soviet rebellion was (like the present one in Iraq) conducted in part by Islamic rebels, many of whom were extremist Sunni jihadists (and some of whose names, from Osama bin Laden to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, remain significant today). The Afghan guerrilla war was backed by that other superpower, the United States, for a decade through its spy agency, the CIA, which promoted methods that, in the Iraq context, would be called “terrorism.”
In the case of the Russian assault on Grozny, the capital of the breakaway region of Chechnya, you also have an imperial power, if no longer exactly a superpower, intent on wresting a city—and a “safe haven”—from a fractious, largely Islamist insurgency and ready to make an example of a major city to do so. The Russian rubblizing of Grozny may have been more extreme than the American destruction of Falluja (or so it seems), but the events remain comparable. In the case of Grozny, the U.S. government did not actively back the rebels as they had in Afghanistan, but the Bush administration, made up of former Cold Warriors who had imbibed the idea of “rolling back” the Soviet Union in their younger years, was certainly sympathetic to the rebels.
What, then, are some of the key differences I noticed in reading through examples of this reportage and comparing it to the products of
our present embedded state? Let me list four differences—and suggest a question: To what degree are American reporters as a group destined to follow, with only modest variation, the paths opened for them by our government’s positions on its wars of choice?
Language
: Those in rebellion in Iraq today are, according to our military, “anti-Iraqi forces” (a phrase that, in quotes, often makes it into news pieces and is just about never commented upon by reporters). Other terms, most of them also first issuing from the mouths of U.S. officials, have been “dead-enders,” “bitter enders,” “Baathist remnants,” “terrorists,” and most regularly (and neutrally), “insurgents” who are fighting in an “insurgency”—but rarely “guerrillas.”
The Afghans in the 1980s, on the other hand, were almost invariably in “rebellion” and so “rebels” as headlines at the time made clear (“Officials Say U.S. Plans to Double Supply of Arms to Afghan Rebels,”
New York Times
). They were part of a “resistance movement” and as their representatives could write op-eds for our papers, the
Washington Post
, for instance, had no hesitation about headlining Matthew D. Erulkar’s op-ed of January 13, 1987, “Why America Should Recognize the Afghan Resistance” or identifying its author as working “for the Afghan resistance.”
But the phrase “Afghan resistance” or “the resistance” was no less likely to appear in news pieces, as in an October 22, 1983, report by
Post
reporter William Branigin, “Feuding Guerrilla Groups Rely on Uneasy Pakistan.” Nor, as in James Rupert’s “Dreams of Martyrdom Draw Islamic Arabs to Join Afghan Rebels” (
Washington Post
, July 21, 1986), was there any problem calling an Islamic “fundamentalist party” that was part of the “Afghan Jihad” a “resistance party.” President Ronald Reagan at the time regularly referred to fundamentalist Afghans and their Arab supporters as “freedom fighters” (while the CIA, through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, shuttled vast sums of money and stores of weaponry to the most extreme of the Afghan jihadist parties). “Freedom fighter” was commonly used in the press, sometimes interchangeably with “the Afghan resistance,” as in a March 12, 1981, piece by
Post
columnist Joseph Kraft, “The Afghan Chaos” (“Six different organizations claiming to represent Afghan freedom fighters”).
Similarly, the Chechens in Grozny in 2000 were normally referred to in U.S. news accounts as “rebels”: “separatist rebels,” “rebel ambushes,” “a rebel counterattack,” and so on. (“Rebel,” as anyone knows who remembers American rock ’n’ roll or movies of the 1950s and 1960s, is a positive term in our lexicon.) Official Russian terms for the Chechen rebels, who were fighting grimly like any group of outgunned urban guerrillas in a manner similar to the Sunni guerrillas in Iraq today—“bandits” or “armed criminals in camouflage and masks”—were quoted, but then (as “anti-Iraqi forces” and other Bush administration terms are not) put in context or contrasted with Chechen versions of reality.
In a typical piece from CNN, you could find the following quote: “‘The [Russians] aren’t killing any bandits,’ one refugee said after reaching Ingushetia. ‘They’re killing old men, women and children. And they keep on bombing—day and night.’” In a Daniel Williams piece in the
Washington Post
, the Russian government’s announcements about the fighting in Grozny have become a “daily chant,” a phrase that certainly suggests how the reporter feels about their accuracy.
Here’s a quote from a discussion in a
Washington Post
editorial of an Associated Press photo of the destruction in Grozny. The photo was described elsewhere as “a pastel from hell” and was evidently of a sort we’ve seen far too little of in our press from either Falluja or the Old City of Najaf:
Russian leaders announced with pride Sunday that their armed forces had captured Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, five months into their war to subdue that rebellious province. Reports from the battle zone suggested that the Russians had not so much liberated the city as destroyed it…. Grozny resembles nothing so much as Stalingrad, reduced to rubble by Hitler’s troops before the Red Army inflicted a key defeat that Russian schoolchildren still celebrate.… All in all, this is not likely to be a victory that Russian schoolchildren will celebrate generations hence.
Similar writing certainly certainly wasn’t found on American editorial pages when it came to the “razing” of Falluja, nor were those strong adjectives like “brutal,” once wielded in the Grozny accounts, much to be found either.
Testimony
: Perhaps the most striking difference between news stories about the Afghan revolt, the destruction of Grozny, and the destruction of Falluja may be that in the cases of the first two, American reporters were willing, even eager, to seek out refugee accounts, even if the refugees were supporters of the rebels or rebels themselves. Such testimony was, for instance, regularly offered as evidence of what was happening in Grozny and more generally in Chechnya (even when the accounts couldn’t necessarily be individually confirmed). So the
Post
’s Daniel Williams, for instance, in “Brutal Retreat from Grozny Led to a Killing Field” (February 12, 2000) begins by following Heda Yusupova, mother of two “and a cook for a group of Chechen rebels” as she flees the city: “[She] froze in her tracks when she heard the first land mine explode. It was night, and she and a long file of rebels were making a dangerous retreat from Grozny, the Chechen capital, during the final hours of a brutal Russian advance. Another explosion. Her children, ages 9 and 10, screamed.” It’s a piece that certainly puts the Russian assault on Grozny in a striking perspective.
Post
reporter Sharon LaFraniere wrote a piece on June 29, 2000, bluntly entitled “Chechen Refugees Describe Atrocities by Russian Troops,” in which she reported on “atrocities” in what the Russians labeled a “pro-bandit village”: “‘I have never imagined such tortures, such cruelty,’ [the villager] said, sitting at a small table in the dim room that has housed her family here for nearly three years. ‘There were a lot of men who were left only half alive.’” And when Russian operations against individual Chechens were described, it was possible to see them through Chechen eyes: “Three times last month, Algayeva said, Russian soldiers broke in, threatening to shoot the school’s guard. They smashed doors, locks and desks. The last time, May 20, they took sugar, plates and a brass bell that was rung at school ceremonies.”
As in a February 29, 2000,
Boston Globe
piece (“Chechen Horror”), it was also possible for newspapers to discuss editorially both “the suffering of the Chechens” and the way “the United States and the rest of the international community can no longer ignore their humanitarian obligation to alleviate—and end—[that suffering].”
The equivalent pieces for Iraq are largely missing, though every now
and then—as with an Edward Wong piece in the
New York Times
on life in resistant Sadr City, Baghdad’s huge Shiite slum—there have been exceptions. Given the dangers Western reporters face in Iraq and the constricting system of “embedding” that generally prevails, when you read of Americans breaking into Iraqi homes, you’re ordinarily going to see the event from the point of view of the troops. Iraqi refugees have not been much valued in our press for their testimony. (There is a deep irony in this, since the Bush administration launched its war citing mainly exile—that is, refugee—testimony.)
We know, of course, that it’s difficult for U.S. reporters to go in search of such testimony in Iraq, but not impossible. For instance, Dahr Jamail, a determined freelance journalist, managed to interview refugees from Falluja, and their testimony sounds remarkably like the Grozny testimony from major American newspapers in 2000: “The American warplanes came continuously through the night and bombed everywhere in Fallujah! It did not stop even for a moment! If the American forces did not find a target to bomb, they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give a picture of how panicked everyone was.”
For the “suffering of the Iraqis,” you had to turn to the periodic “testimony” of Iraqi bloggers like the pseudonymous Riverbend of Baghdad Burning or perhaps Al Jazeera. The suffering we actually hear most about in our press is American suffering, in part because it’s the American troops with whom our reporters are embedded, with whom they bond, and fighters on battlefields anywhere almost invariably find themselves in grim and suffering circumstances.