Image-Making,
Lies and the "Liberation" of Iraq
By Patrick
Martin
12 April 2003
Several photographs
publicized by an antiwar web site shed light on the way the American
media is manipulating images of the war in Iraq to give the false impression
that the vast majority of the Iraqi people are joyfully welcoming the
invasion and occupation of their country by US and British troops.
These photographs,
available on the web site of Information
Clearing House show that the toppling of a statue of Saddam
Hussein in Firdos Square, given massive publicity in the US and international
media April 9-10, was a stage-managed affair.
As transmitted
to the world by US television and newspaper reports, the pictures from
Firdos Square purported to show a mass of enthusiastic Iraqis hailing
the US military and trampling on a gargantuan bronze statue of Saddam
Hussein. Hours of television time and pages of newspaper coverage were
devoted to these pictures, with accompanying commentary comparing the
scene to the bringing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the liberation
of Paris in 1944.
The first photograph
on the Information Clearing House site is a wide-angle shot encompassing
the entire expanse of Firdos Square, rather than the narrowly focused,
closely cropped framing used in the mass media. It shows that the crowd
surrounding the statue of Saddam Hussein is anything but massive, and
that the square itself has been surrounded by US Abrams tanks, cutting
it off from the rest of the city.
The caption
supplied by the site notes that Firdos Square is across the street from
the Palestine Hotel, where most international journalists based in Baghdad
are located, a fact that even the Washington Posts TV critic noted
was either splendid luck or brilliant planning on the part of
the military. Of the 200 or so assembled, the majority were journalists
and American soldiers. The BBC reported that only dozens
of Iraqis were involved.
Who those dozens
were is suggested by two additional photographs published below the
wide-angle photo. They show the arrival from exile of the Pentagons
handpicked Iraqi leader, Ahmed Chalabi, in Nasiriya on April
6, accompanied by several aides, and a close-up of one of the participants
in the April 9 statue demolition scene in Baghdad. It is clear from
the two pictures that the man celebrating liberation in
Baghdad was one of those accompanying Chalabi into Nasiriya three days
earlier.
The significance
of this should be clear: those who spontaneously gathered
in Firdos Square included Iraqi political agents of the American military,
dispatched from Nasiriya to Baghdad to serve as an appropriate backdrop
for the visuals desired by Bush administration spin doctors. If not
Wag the Dog, it is at least a case of rent a crowd.
Or, as Robert Fisk of the British newspaper the Independent described
it, the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima.
To a critical
observer, the live coverage from Firdos Square had already suggested
that there was less than met the eye to the scenes of universal rejoicing.
Even this small and controlled crowd fell silent and muttered its disapproval
when a US Marine initially draped the statues head with an American
flag. An Iraqi onlooker supplied one of his own countrys flags,
and there were cheers when this replaced the Stars and Stripes.
The Los Angeles
Times quoted one Iraqi bystander who said that while some Iraqis in
the square were praising Bush in English to the American media, others
were denouncing the US president in Arabic. Today I saw some people
breaking this monument, he told the Times, but there were
peoplemen and womenwho stood there and said in Arabic: Screw
America, screw Bush. So all this is not a simple situation.
The cynical
staging of news and manipulation of visual images in the
service of gargantuan lies is typical of both the Bush administration
and the US media. It is the technique of Madison Avenue applied to the
justification of a program of aggression and military conquest. In their
Orwellian presentation, conquest is liberation, bombing
is humanitarian aid, and seizure of the worlds second
largest oil reserves is rebuilding Iraq.
To expose Firdos
Square as outright fakery is not to say that every account of Iraqis
welcoming the arrival of US or British troops is equally phony. There
is no doubt that millions of Iraqis hated and feared the regime of Saddam
Hussein and welcomed its end, whatever their feelings about the new
regime of violence that is replacing the Baathist dictatorship.
But the reality
is more complicated than the simplistic and cynical propaganda of the
Bush administration and its media accomplices. First of all, the vast
majority of Iraqis have not taken to the streets to hail the conquering
armies of the US and Britain.
Indeed, as even
some American media outlets have reported, since the Firdos Square episode
of April 9, whatever euphoria might have existed in Baghdad has largely
turned to fear and anger directed against the American occupiers. ABC
News on Friday evening showed outraged citizens of Baghdad denouncing
the US for unleashing chaos and a wave of killings and looting. Some
were filmed shouting that the hellish conditions in the city proved
that the US had come not to liberate the country, but rather to steal
its oil wealth.
The first days
of the invasion evoked fierce resistance from Iraqi soldiers and civilians
alike, and far from precipitating a wave of emigration out of the country,
the onset of the war witnessed thousands of Iraqi exiles returning from
Jordan, Syria and elsewhere to stand and fight against the aggressors
from the West.
American and
British soldiers were not pelted with flowers, but faced heroic and
death-defying armed resistance. It was only after Bush and Blair changed
tactics, resorting to unrestrained bombing of civilian neighborhoods
and the wholesale incineration of Iraqi troops, that this resistance
was largely overcome.
By Pentagon
figures, more Iraqis were killed in Baghdad on Saturday, April 5the
day of the Third Armored Divisions drive-by killing rampage through
the citythan died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The total number of Iraqis killed in three weeks of war likely exceeds
the 50,000 Americans killed over a 12-year period in Vietnam. This death
toll is in a country whose population is less than one tenth that of
the United States.
Added to this
must be the long-term impact of Husseins repressive regime (supported
by the United States government until 1990), the Iran-Iraq War, the
shattering defeat in the first Persian Gulf War, and the effects of
12 years of US-imposed economic sanctions, which starved Iraqi society,
causing a death toll estimated by UN aid workers at between 1 million
and 1.5 million, with children accounting for over half of the victims.
The result is
a society that has been physically, emotionally and morally traumatizedas
demonstrated by the widespread looting, not only of targets associated
with the regime, such as the homes of the Baathist elite, but
of hospitals, educational institutions, the UNICEF feeding program,
and other vital elements of Iraqs social infrastructure.
If sections
of the Iraqi people are now prepared to welcome the invading forcesand
just how large remains to be determinedtheir motivation must be
understood as a complex mixture of hatred of Hussein (not only for his
repression and corruption, but for his failure to defend the country
against invasion), relief at the end of bombing, hope for restoration
of essential services, and, for some, the desire to curry favor with
the new masters.
Far more Iraqis
have lost a loved one to American bombs, missiles, tanks and guns, or
to the US-led economic blockade, than have embraced American soldiers
or shouted praise for George W. Bush. As the essential American purpose
in Iraq becomes more evidentcontrol of Iraqs oil reserves
and domination, in partnership with Israel, of the Middle Eastthere
is no doubt that popular opposition to the US occupation will intensify.
The liars and
image-makers in Washington and the media understand little of the historical
process and its deep impact on popular consciousness. What they cannot
comprehend is the deep-seated legacy of decades of struggle against
colonialism and foreign domination. Whatever the broad layers of Iraqi
society may think of Saddam Hussein, they retain an abiding hatred of
imperialism and a determination to resist a return to colonial domination
in a new form and under new, American masters.
This article
originally appeared on World Socialist
Web Site