Distant Voices (17 page)

Who are ‘we'? ‘We' are those who work to and speak for a Tory agenda while pretending otherwise. ‘We' are the New Right. The present Labour Party leadership, who are Thatcher's greatest triumph, are every bit as effective as Lilley and Howard. ‘We are the party of law and order,' announced Tony Blair in Brighton, no doubt prompting Michael Howard to up the ante one week later.
¹⁸
This is the essence of the relationship between the two party leaderships. Gordon Brown says he will not take Value Added Tax off fuel; Kenneth Clarke concurs. David Blunkett says there is ‘not enough productivity' in certain London hospitals; Virginia Bottomley agrees and promises to close them. Barry Sheerman, from
Labour's front bench, urges the minister for defence procurement to sell more British arms to tyrants like the Emir of Kuwait; the minister assures him he will do his best. And so the pattern proceeds, with each side pushing the other along the same sectarian path.

For this reason the Labour Party conference was significant. The ‘broad church' was finally demolished, and John Smith's ‘triumph' had nothing to do with the ‘democratic principles enshrined in one man, one vote', but in the historic fact that Labour's New Right is finally accepted by the media.

The official Tory, as well as the liberal, media understand the scale of the New Right's achievement: that Labour has finally rejected Anthony Crosland's argument, which spoke for the party's once dominant old right, that ‘a concerted attack on the maldistribution of wealth should be part of Labour's policy'. That last veil has now been dropped. At Brighton, the term ‘one member, one vote' represented an attack not on the trade union establishment, but on the party's remaining egalitarian values. In order to give John Smith his media triumph, trade union leaders reversed the democratic decisions of their rank and file. For example, 750 delegates of the Union of Communication Workers voted against Smith's proposals. At Brighton, just nineteen delegates went against them.

It is this kind of collaboration that has served to blunt real political opposition in Britain. When the party conference voted democratically against the nonsense of keeping Trident, the leadership demonstrated its commitment to ‘democracy' by ignoring it.

In my experience, Britain's ‘host culture' is a rich mosaic of multicultural life: of people who enjoy both their differences and their sense of community and owe no allegiance to an
ancien régime
or Toryism's ‘modernised' successor. Like
Social Trends
, a
Guardian
poll has found that Britons are now well to the left of all the ‘mainstream' parties. Clear majorities believe that there is ‘one law for the rich and one for the poor'; that privatisation should be stopped; that there
should be higher taxes; that it is more important to reduce unemployment than to control inflation.
¹⁹
In other words, those who have ‘put out the people's eyes', to paraphrase Milton, have not blinded them.

October 1993 – January 1994

AT THE HEIGHT
of the First World War Lloyd George, the prime minister, confided to C. P. Scott, the editor of the
Manchester Guardian
: ‘If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and they can't know.'
¹

His words may soon apply to a modern equivalent of that slaughter. Like events in the Gulf, current and beckoning, the First World War was distinguished by a ‘drift to war' – a specious notion that allowed for war preparation – and by an inferno of which there was little public comprehension or warning, and by the theatrical distortions and lies of the warlords and their mouthpieces in the press.

‘There is no need of censorship,' wrote Philip Gibbs, a leading journalist of the time, later knighted for his services. ‘We were our own censors . . . some of us wrote the truth . . . apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of the facts which did not come within the liberty of our pen.'
²
Max Hastings, a former Falklands War correspondent and now editor-in-chief of the
Daily
and
Sunday Telegraph
, said something strikingly similar on BBC Radio the other day: that it was the duty of a journalist in effect to gloss over during wartime, because ‘one should recognise the national interests of the nation of which one is a part . . .'
³

That ‘national interests' include going to war when one's nation is not in any way threatened is rarely mentioned these days. Hastings's view is widely shared: if not openly, then subliminally. My own experience of war reporting is that journalists – bar the few ‘mavericks' – seldom question the
assumptions behind ‘our wars'. An almost secular myth about the Vietnam War was that the media was against it. This was never the case; most were against the fact that the war was fought inefficiently, and that the Americans were losing it. Equally, some of the journalists in the Falklands who had previously defended their objectivity were unabashed in praising their own
subjectivity
in the cause of Queen and country. Their main complaint was about access, being denied the facility to be on ‘our side' and help win the propaganda war.

If war breaks out in the Gulf the British media – which, unlike Iraq's, is said to be ‘free' – will bear much of the responsibility for a ‘patriotic' and culpable silence that has ensured that people don't know and can't know.

It is as if the very notion of the journalist as a teller of truths unpalatable to ruling elites, as whistle-blower in the
public
interest, has been fatally eroded. This is in part the result of the ‘communications revolution' or ‘total television', in which vast amounts of repetitive information are confined to a narrow spectrum of ‘thinkable thought', and the vocabulary of state and vested-interest manipulation is elevated above that of free journalism. In the Gulf coverage, the effect is that many people are overwhelmed and immobilised, their misgivings not reflected in the opinion polls, only their compliance.

From tabloids to television, radio to ‘qualities', the war drums are heard, their beat perhaps made all the more acceptable by the work of honourable sceptics, humanitarians and professionals, journalists like John Simpson and Robert Fisk. Otherwise we have the ‘ugly momentum that is driving Bush steadily towards war' (
Observer
); a war that is ‘necessary to protect civilised values' (
The Times
); a war for which ‘no price is too heavy to pay' (Bush, reported uncritically almost everywhere). And anyone who gets in the way is a ‘yellow-belly' (
Sun
); or ‘an eccentric with a lust for publicity . . . a very British kind of nut' (
The Times
on Tam Dalyell); or using ‘weasel words' (
Guardian
).
⁴

And, of course, war is fun! Every night there is Peter Snow's
bloodless sandpit to play in, and sexy shots of Hornets and Tornadoes, with a camel left of frame and the sun rising over the cockpit. Cue the bagpipes; cue the British major who wants to ‘get in there now!'
⁵

Military minders attached to the Joint Information Bureau manipulate most of what you see from the Gulf. A well-known broadcaster, who does not wish to be named, says: ‘The cocoon is such that you end up being gung-ho and unquestioning. It's a bit much when you know things that you can't say: for instance, that many of our lads will almost certainly be killed by friendly fire, from the Allied side.'

The military's ability to distort and the media's malleability were demonstrated in August when television showed images of what appeared to be a highly efficient US military machine moving into the desert. This was a bluff: many aircraft arrived half full, the ‘machine' was unprepared. Most of the media accepted what they were told.

We are told the use of nuclear weapons has ‘not been ruled out'. Yet a study on the effects of a nuclear war in the Gulf has been virtually ignored.
⁶
Nik Gowing, diplomatic editor of Channel 4 News, describes the narrowness of the debate thus: ‘It's quite shocking. I am thunderstruck that the British public know so little about the potential nightmare of this war. Naively, people are unaware that even if Iraq is defeated, the war may come to them: in acts of reprisal and terrorism in the centre of London, as the director of the CIA has warned.'
⁷

Stewart Purvis, editor of ITN, gives an interesting reply to this issue: ‘The line which the Opposition takes in Parliament is important to the level of news coverage of political debate. On the Gulf, Labour is synchronised with Government policy, so there is less news arising from the political debate.'
⁸
Few other broadcasters and senior press reporters will go on the record. ‘My access to the MoD and the Foreign Office is a lifeline,' said one of them. ‘I can't jeopardise it.'
⁹

The
Independent
's correspondent in the Gulf has written, ‘Second guessing President Saddam's intentions has not proved a precise science. Who predicted that he would invade
Kuwait on August 2?'
¹⁰
The answer is that the United States predicted it; and it is in this area of America's war aims and strategic purpose that the suppression of vital facts has been most evident.

According to George Bush, John Major, Douglas Hurd
et al
., the sole aim of the war is ‘the liberation of Kuwait'. The truth is to be found in events notably excluded from the present ‘coverage'. In May 1990 the president's most senior advisory body, the National Security Council, submitted to Bush a White Paper in which Iraq and Saddam Hussein are described as ‘the optimum contenders to replace the Warsaw Pact' as the rationale for continued Cold War military spending and for putting an end to the ‘peace dividend'.
¹¹

On July 25 – a week before the Iraqi invasion – the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Saddam Hussein that she had ‘instructions from the President' that the United States would have ‘no opinion on your border conflicts with Kuwait'. She repeated this several times, adding, ‘Secretary of State James Baker has directed our official spokesman to emphasise this instruction from the President.'
¹²
It was clear, wrote the syndicated American columnist James McCartney, one of the few journalists to study the leaked transcript, that the United States had given Saddam Hussein ‘a green light for invasion'.
¹³
Moreover, two days before the invasion, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told a Congressional hearing that the United States was not committed to defend Kuwait.
¹⁴
Four days before the invasion, according to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA predicted that the invasion would happen when it did.
¹⁵
And did the CIA tip off the Kuwaitis?

Then there are the actions of General Norman Schwarzkopf, head of US Central Command, during the same period. At the time April Glaspie was reassuring Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Schwarzkopf convened his top commanders for an exercise which, according to the
New York Daily News
, simulated ‘exactly the contingency' of an Iraqi drive into Kuwait. ‘The similarities were eerie,' said the paper's source, adding that: ‘When the real thing came, the one way they
could tell real intelligence from the practice intelligence was the little
t
in the corner of the paper –
t
for training.'
¹⁶

There is other evidence that Saddam Hussein was deliberately squeezed or ‘entrapped' into invading Kuwait. As a US client, he had become too powerful, too cocky and so – rather like Noriega – he had to go. And, like its strategic plans for Panama, the United States has long had a secret contingency for a permanent military presence in the Gulf, notably for the air force.

The timing of the Iraqi invasion could not have been better. Today, the US arms industry no longer faces the cuts of a ‘peace dividend' and the recession no longer threatens America's ‘world leadership'. ‘In the future,' said the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Les Aspin, ‘we are more likely to be involved in Iraq-type things, Panama-type things, Grenada-type things . . .' But what of Kuwait, whose ‘liberation' is the reason for the war? ‘Our position,' said Aspin, ‘should be the protection of the oilfields. Now whether Kuwait gets put back, that's subsidiary stuff.'
¹⁷

According to Bush, Saddam Hussein has refused to get out of Kuwait ‘at any price' and that ‘extraordinary diplomatic efforts have been exhausted'. When the war started, the
New York Times
reported that the administration feared ‘a diplomatic track' that might ‘defuse the crisis' at the cost of ‘a few token gains' for Iraq, perhaps ‘a Kuwait island or minor border adjustments'.

In fact, Washington received an Iraqi proposal along these lines and, although described by a US official as ‘serious' and ‘negotiable', it was dismissed. Indeed, on January 3, the Iraqis put forward an offer to withdraw, which, again, State Department sources described as a ‘serious pre-negotiating offer' that ‘indicated the intention of Iraq to withdraw'; and, again, it was dismissed.
¹⁸

Put these events together, add the absence of any US effort to create an international opposition while there was time, and urgent questions are raised. But who is to raise them if there is general agreement among the opinion-leaders that this is a matter of good versus evil and that the ‘national
interest' is at stake? Who is to say: this crisis
can
be settled diplomatically and a war that merely legitimises militarism is not a just war.