If America hadn’t invaded Iraq, I may never have begun writing a book about filters, distortion, and manipulation in media representation. But the Iraqi war showed up a filter that I hadn’t spotted until then, and because of it a lot of things suddenly fell into place. The run-up to the war was a replay of my earlier experiences in the Arab world and the Holy Land, played on fast-forward. The puppets had new names, but the strings attached to them were familiar.
The fact that the filtering, distortions, and manipulations of previous years were not incidents, but formed a pattern, became clear to me in Kuwait. The U.S. army was busy building up the troops there that would invade Iraq within a couple of weeks. I arrived at my hotel in the middle of
the night, zapped through the channels, and immediately spotted a familiar kind of bias in the language. Was I in Iraq’s nineteenth province, or in the British designated mini-state of Kuwait (Arabic for “small fort”)? CNN and Arabic stations both mentioned the Gulf War, but how many had there been, actually? The region itself began the count with the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s; then came the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, with the American liberation six months later—which made this the Third Gulf War. But CNN spoke of the Second, because America hadn’t been involved in the Iran-Iraq War.
Word choice meant perspective, and this was neatly illustrated in the text boxes under the images that sum up the situation in three or four words. Hezbollah had “the attack on Iraq”; America’s Fox News placed the invasion within the context of the “war on terror”; CNN used “Strike on Iraq”; and Iraqi television devoted itself to the “Ultimate War.” The viewers of each different channel believed that the labels they saw offered the true essence of the conflict. Each group of true believers must have thought it was great that things were being reported objectively at last.
The positioning of the chess pieces in this war also reminded me of the Holy Land. America had as much military superiority over Iraq as Israel had over the Palestinians, but wiping Baghdad from the map over the course of a morning was not possible—first, public opinion around the world had to be brought round. This was another media war, but on a larger scale, as I discovered the next morning in the press center that the U.S. army had set up in the Sheraton Kuwait City. I took my place on an uncomfortable folding chair among about a hundred and fifty fellow reporters; then a fully versed, confident army spokesman stepped up and ran through all the latest developments with a big smile. Most of
my colleagues hoped to get into Iraq as embedded journalists within an American army unit, and they’d come to the Sheraton to learn whether there were any concrete details available. Unfortunately, the army couldn’t say anything yet, the PR official said affably, let alone which journalist could join which unit. “I want you all to stop worrying,” he finished. “We’re going to make sure that after the war your boss comes up to you and gives you a slap on the back and compliments you on what a fine job you’ve done.”
Hello, everybody!
This was like the Ajax captain taking the referee aside before an important match against Feyenoord, putting his arm around him, and saying, “Don’t you worry. We’re going to make sure that the Football Association is very happy with you.” The Israeli representatives had never been this shameless. The reaction from the folding chairs was more one of relief than howls of derision; I held my tongue, too, because I thought I might need that man one day—perhaps during a poison-gas attack.
The briefing had finished, and over the free snacks I bumped into a frustrated Dutch TV veteran. The U.S. army had little reason to place a journalist from an insignificant country like ours in an interesting army unit. The journalist had a choice: Sucking up and pleading to the army spokesman and then, after all that humiliation, still probably ending up in a field hospital in Kuwait or in an anti-aircraft defense facility in far-away Bahrain. Or he could lobby, for example via the Ministry of Defense in The Hague, who would only do something on the condition that you didn’t embarrass them later. There you are in the desert, dependent on the soldiers around you for food and protection, and then they hear that on yesterday’s news you talked about the serious human rights violation committed by three of those same soldiers.
The briefing at the Sheraton was my first glimpse of the polished steel of the American PR machine, and the television showed even more. The Israeli government had been good at manipulation, but now the creators of Disney World were at work. The best communications advisors, an army of spokespersons, unlimited resources ... The mightiest ape in the jungle was stamping around here and not just in Kuwait. There were presentations at the UN with “proof” of the existence of Iraqi weapons-manufacturing plants, an unending stream of accusations of Iraqi involvement in September 11, and visionary speeches about democracy. Think tanks linked to the government plied editors with reports, opinion pieces, and other PR smart bombs. Central Command, the regional headquarters of the American army, sent an endless stream of communiques into the world from a small podium in Qatar that it lavished $250,000 on to set up.
What a professional steamroller it was, and it resounded in the coverage—much louder and more clearly than in the Holy Land. The West was going to war, which meant enormous public interest, which meant that the Western media had to fill up their broadcasts and newspaper pages. But with what, if there were hardly any developments to report on? CNN provided the answer on a daily basis: The American army “media effort” delivered information each day; it was rarely news, but it was always “fit to print.” Then they’d show another CNN frontman at CentCom: “It has now been confirmed that the third flight-deck mother ship has entered the Persian Gulf and will be ready for battle within the next seventy-two hours. The upper echelons can, of course, confirm nothing, but all indications are that an attack is imminent. Back to you, Jim.”
The opponents also stuck to the Holy Land script. The
Iraqis were playing the Palestinians’ role, and they managed to present an even weaker media policy. Every day, the Iraqi Minister of Information, Al-Sahhaf, appeared on all channels, uttering a medley of abuse and boasting (“My assessment is that, as usual ... we will slaughter them all”). In his Arabic commentary, Al-Sahhaf used such strange expressions that I was not the only one who had to look up his abusive term for Americans and Brits—“
Uluzj:
An obscure term for untamed donkeys,” it said in my dictionary.
The eccentric Al-Sahhaf was good for a short article; but, just like with the Palestinians, I wondered what would have happened if Saddam had seized upon the media attention to score a few points: “I’m being accused of secretly developing weapons of mass destruction, but why am I not allowed to do that when Israel can? Let’s clear the whole region of weapons of mass destruction!”
With a decent PR office and a lobby of sympathizers, Saddam could have probably got such a suggestion onto the Western agenda. I could picture the bombardment of opinion pieces, letters, and columns, the introduction of government resolutions, and ready-made reports. Which Western government would have been able to speak out against a regional disarmament conference? But this was not the kind of campaign that Saddam fought; and as with the Palestinian Authority, his choice could be put down to the nature of dictatorship, as would be clear after the war. Saddam didn’t want to clear the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction—as a dictator, you’ve got much more control at home if you can put down uprisings with a single blow, as the gassing of thousands of Kurds at the end of the 1980s had shown. The resistance had fallen apart after that. This was why Saddam had allowed the impression that he had those kinds of weapons to
persist, right to the bitter end: It was to prevent an insurrection among his own subjects.
New faces, old patterns. Once again, nonviolent fundamentalist organizations were not allowed a voice. This allowed the American government to maintain that Saddam was working with Al-Qaida, and that the elimination of the Iraqi regime would be a blow to terrorism. This assertion would have probably been a little harder to sell if a larger proportion of the Western general public had known that Al-Qaida’s main goal, on the contrary, was to overthrow secular Arab dictators like Saddam Hussein. The internal opposition in Iraq was actually made up of fundamentalists.
The parallels continued to mount up. I’d have liked to have had a look around Baghdad, but my visa application was repeatedly refused—a familiar frustration and not something you could explain to superiors and critics who’d never had any direct experience of dictatorship. How could Miss Germany visit Iraq, but the
NRC
newspaper not? I’d called, faxed, and offered bribes for weeks at a time ... But somebody in the Iraqi Ministry of Information must have put a cross next to the
NRC.
All of the major Dutch media providers got into Iraq in the months before the invasion, apart from the
NRC.
Old doubts began to resurface in my mind, such as whether the news media were really able to explain the nature of dictatorship. Did the hundreds of thousands of anti-war demonstrators in Europe know what Saddam did to his subjects? I was not aware that many of the demonstrators thought anything other than: “Of course dictators are bad, but war is really horrible, so we’re against it under any circumstances—Peace, man!” I’d say dictatorship is war, too; a regime’s war on its own people.
It was quite strange that many of the idealists who were now demonstrating against the invasion had been the ones calling for intervention during the Kosovo crisis, if necessary without UN permission: “We must do something.” Saddam Hussein was a much more prolific murderer than Milosevic, and you wondered if the difference in media coverage played a part. During the Kosovo crisis, journalists could film the consequences of ethnic cleansing, and the brutality was given a face. This kind of striking reporting was not possible in Iraq; at best, you could get Iraqis who had fled the country years earlier to speak, if they dared to, because many had left relatives behind. But a talking head has much less impact—just ask the Palestinians who have to explain occupation.
I
n the run-up to the invasion there were blank spots, too. One of the largest was the reaction of ordinary Iraqis. The White House predicted that the American soldiers would be welcomed into the country as “liberators”—“with rice and flowers” was one of the expressions.
With the exception of a few donor darlings, almost all of the regimes and experts in the Arab world predicted a catastrophe for America. I didn’t really find this very interesting, as my mistrust of Arab talking heads had grown too great. Of course the regimes were against an American invasion. It was being sold as a democratizing mission and, if it was a success, more would follow—hardly an alluring prospect for the dictators and kings in their Arab palaces.
There was one country where the reactions to the forthcoming invasion of Iraq did have some significance: Kuwait. The country had been occupied and devastated by Saddam Hussein in 1990, and America had chased him out six months
later. Saddam had regularly threatened Kuwait with new attacks in the years following the liberation, which had catastrophic consequences for its economy and stock market. Who would invest in a country that might be plundered by Saddam at any moment?
If supporters for the invasion were to be found anywhere, it would be in Kuwait—most likely amongst the liberal members of the population. The war would bring democracy to Iraq; liberals want democracy; so you’d expect them to support the invasion.
I spoke to a ship owner, a businessman, a lawyer, an economist, and other liberal Kuwaitis. They were highly educated, spoke excellent English, and were charming, successful, and rich. They desperately wanted to be rid of Saddam, but they all asked a variation of the same question: Why should America bring democracy to Iraq if it was keeping dictators in the saddle in the rest of the region? Would a democratically chosen government in Baghdad really be able to beat an independent path, especially if it clashed with American interests? Would an Iraqi party be able to win an election with promises to support Palestine, to put up oil prices, to grant all contracts to Europe and China? Or was it the case that the White House wanted a “Saddam lite,” who, just like all the other leaders of “moderate regimes,” would renounce weapons of mass destruction, pass commissions on to the American business community and, at worst, be slightly antagonistic towards Israel.
If I’d been at the beginning of my posting, I would have felt compelled to try to get this into the news. The Americans thought they’d be met with joy and open arms, but even the most pro-American Arabs in the region, the Kuwaiti liberals—the ones who wanted a society built on an American
model and who owed their freedom to the American liberation of their country—didn’t trust them.
By now I knew, as I conducted the interviews, that these liberals would not get much further than the background features in the media, or not even that far. One by one, they’d say somewhere during the conversation, “This is off the record, you know, no names ...” with a winning smile, to mask the humiliation of a successful economist well into his fifties not daring to share his opinions with a guy in his early thirties. If there’s no first name or surname available, news is instantly rendered a little less “fit to print”; but the lack of a journalistic hook has an even greater effect. Kuwait was not a democracy: There were no free parliamentary votes, no demonstrations, strikes, or other news events to which correspondents could hitch the liberals’ objections. Try imagining this report: “Today in Kuwait, thousands of people marched against Western support of their dictators. They demanded the dismantlement of the secret Western bank accounts in which dictators hoard their loot, and chanted slogans against the generous commissions that Western defense companies pay out to dictators and their entourages. Banners displayed protests against Western training and armament of the Arab secret services who torture and murder on a large scale.”