Nineteen months after they pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdaus Square and eleven months after they pulled Saddam Hussein himself out of a hole in the ground, the US army continues to create wastelands of rubble where Iraqi cities once stood. While the rubble emerges on TV screens, often awash with the green hue of nightvision lenses, the human beings that once existed in these neighbourhoods — Falluja was home to 300,000 — have disappeared. As one commentator put it, there is no soundtrack to this war, even as 2,000 pound bombs blast neighbourhoods out of existence. This is not surprising. The US army wants you to see little, hear less and perceive nothing at all. So every nanosecond of footage from the new front in Iraq comes to you sterilised by the Pentagon’s censors. The BBC, which is just a tad more squeamish about these matters, has now taken to saying: “Reporting with restrictions from Falluja. Our correspondent is embedded with the Marines.” The consequence of this mass anaesthetising of the mass media has had a profound effect on the world. Not only has it helped the US president notch a famous election victory — thanks to the unqualified support of audiences fed on the electronic pap dished out by Fox News — it has desensitised global responses to human suffering on an unprecedented scale. In many ways, the on-going Falluja operations represent a new level of US ruthlessness. At least a quarter of the city is flattened to get at insurgent outfits, allegedly based here, which have been involved in acts of terror like the kidnapping and beheading of foreign personnel. In the process the distinction between the terrorist and the civilian is obliterated. Article 14 of the Second Protocol of the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits the “starvation of civilians as a method of combat” as well as the denial of drinking water, medical supplies, and the like. Yet, as the Washington Post has reported, over the last few months water supplies were turned off as part of military strategy and, over the last few days, attempts by the International Red Cross and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society to deliver food, medicines and water to Falluja were repeatedly frustrated by the US army. This lack of distinction between civilians and the guerilla fighters surfaced in the death estimates as well. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi claims that no civilian died in the offensive because they had all left. He can say this because the more than 1,200 Iraqis killed in this week-long operation have all been conveniently termed as “insurgents”, including the children. As the Falluja pattern is replicated in other cities like Mosul and Baquba, in the coming days, the non-Islamic world is unlikely to express its outrage. The silences in media coverage have assisted in bringing about this unconscionable acquiescence. Arguably, the US army’s biggest success in its 19 months on these desert sands is its capture of the media. It is a process that began innocuously enough when hundreds of US reporters participated in workshops organised by the Pentagon to acquire skills to survive in the battlefield in the run-up to the Iraq war and which fructified in the “embedded journalism” that showcased the capture of Iraq by the “liberators”. Today, in Falluja, the media takeover is almost total apart from an occasional feed that may emerge accidentally, like the NBC sequence of an unarmed “insurgent” being shot pointblank. An explanation for this extreme nexus has been raised. In Daya Kishan Thussu’s and Des Freedman’s War and the Media, BBC’s Nik Gowing explains why media professionals have come to rely on the military: it’s not just for information but for infrastructural support in situations that are just too dangerous for individual reporters and cable networks to function. Gowing terms it a Faustian bargain: “It is a deeply uncomfortable situation which leads to questions about how much information the media really receive and how independent news organisations can really be.” Of course, the independence of the media during war has always been suspect. But what we are seeing today is qualitatively different from the lack of critical distance that characterised, say, reporting by the US media during the Vietnam era. Today, as media scholars Thussu and Freedman point out, the military and the media have melded to the point that they can no longer be seen as separate entities. The media itself has become the “surface upon which war is imagined and executed”. The Pentagon seems to have learnt its lessons from the Vietnam war when Walter Cronkite’s observation on CBS that the war was a “bloody stalemate” is believed to have caused President Johnson to say, “it is all over”, and TV visuals of American casualties and injuries caused the tide of popular opinion to turn against the war. Today, the Pentagon has seized upon modern media technology to present what James Der Derian, professor of political science at Amherst, described as a “virtuous war”, combining virtual technologies with a claim to embracing humanitarian motives (in Iraq it’s about spreading democracy). It’s a war with “bloodless” images, a war that looks good on TV. All this makes it incumbent on those who value the role of the media as an unbiased observer of the human condition — who regard the media as a public sphere which creates and is created by social responses — to search for ways to retrieve the independence and commitment that is central to the media’s role. Here we need to commend the role of Lancet editor Richard Horton. Lancet, one of the world’s bestknown medical journals, recently chose to publish a new report by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health which claimed that Iraq had suffered a rise of 5-7 per cent civilian deaths in the last 18 months. The study concluded that there have been 100,000 “excess deaths” of civilians in Iraq since the US invasion. The figure embarrassed both Washington and London, with UK’s foreign secretary Jack Straw instituting an inquiry into how the casualty rates were calculated. In an interview to the The Observer, London, some days ago, Horton acknowledged that this study was “atypical” for Lancet, but added that when the Iraq situation is becoming ever more unstable, “we have a choice: do we want the blood of Iraqi civilians and children on our hands or don’t we? The only way we know (what has happened) is by actually having scientists go and get the data.” It’s a principle media professionals should remember.
