A
morally hollow victory
By Mary Riddell
7 April 2003
The showdown approaches and
the propaganda war moves on. Do not linger on images of a shroud-wrapped
infant with a dummy clamped between grey lips. Do not think of a mother
clasping the broken bodies of her two children in the car shot up at
a military checkpoint. Or, if you cannot remove them from your memory,
see such killings as the necessary price of liberation.
Be mindful, as the endgame
plays out, of the Home Secretary's guidelines on war coverage. Some
British journalists, he complains, are reporting the conflict in a manner
that lends 'moral equivalence' to the Iraqi regime and encourages a
'progressive and liberal public' to believe this distorted version.
Mr Blunkett, who yesterday embellished his assertions, is doubly wrong.
There is no bias, nor the slightest hint that Bush, Blair and Saddam
register equally on the weighbridge of tyranny.
On the separate question
of whether Iraqi acts of war are on a par with those of the coalition,
the answer is also simple. Ours are sometimes worse. The spectre of
chemical attack remains, but, amid Iraqi Scuds unfired and bio-weapons
undiscovered, reality trumps fear. The cluster-bombing of civilians
by an invading force proclaiming its superior power is an outrage agains
t humanity and the Geneva
Convention.
The Government defends their use. Clare Short's conscience has not visibly
twitched. Geoff Hoon, when asked on Radio 4 to consider Iraqi mothers
mourning their dead children, demonstrated the compassion of a haddock.
How unsurprising that, from Basingstoke to Basra, the Whitehall psy-ops
department has failed to win its PR battle.
This, politicians say, is
partly the fault of a feral media. Making 'snap judgments' on the basis
of television footage is dangerous, according to the Foreign Secretary
of a government that invited us to judge Saddam's mindset on the basis
of a plagiarised PhD thesis. The First and Second World Wars might never
have been won, Jack Straw mused, if they had been covered by 24-hour
news channels.
It is true that war reporting
has speeded up since AD 106, the year that Trajan commissioned the column
offering a picture chronicle of his Romanian campaign. The Bayeux Tapestry,
many years in the making after the Norman Conquest, could not compete
with any factual embroidery confected between Channel 4 News and The
World Tonight .
But reporters have been embedded
since Crimea and before. The Dunkirk spirit would almost certainly have
withstood those images of conflict fit to be shown on Sky. In fairness,
Mr Straw acknowledged the merits of front-line news and deplored delay
and censorship that once 'helped governments to suppress the truth'.
They still do. Only obfuscation
is harder now, in an age of scrutiny. Politicians dislike ceaseless
coverage not because it masks the truth but because it exposes it. You
can no longer dismiss a marketplace bombing causing many civilian deaths
and tell everyone, as Mr Straw did, that it seems 'increasingly probable'
that Iraq did it. Two British journalists claim to have found fragments
of a US missile, and most people prefer their word to the Minister's.
Wartime PR is a slippery game. It always was.
In America, in 1917, the
administration grasped, for the first time, that war, like pop-up toasters,
was a marketable commodity. Its salesman, Woodrow Wilson, who had run
for office on a peace ticket, established a giant propaganda ministry,
the US Committee for Public Information. Its mission was to persuade
liberal progressives that war chimed with their ideas of a new and rational
world order.
'Four-minute men' were recruited
as volunteer preachers instructing their communities to shop unpatriotic
neighbours as suspected spies. Citizens were warned that America might
be renamed New Prussia, while Hollywood was told that no films could
be exported without an undertaking to show US propaganda films alongside.
But something more fundamental
was happening. According to Stuart Ewen, the social historian of spin,
the CPI extinguished the Enlightenment dictum that people were essentially
rational. Public opinion was for mobilising and managing. The public
mind, Ewen wrote, was now seen as an entity to 'be manufactured, not
reasoned with'.
The mantra, then as today,
was to make the world safe for democracy. Although Wilson's war was
more marketable than Bush's, the tactic of persuasion his agency devised
has lasted. Almost a century on, politicians with battles to sell still
seek to manipulate minds. The made-to-measure mentality is supposed
to be as amnesiac and forgiving as required. It is primed never to ask,
should no weapons of mass destruction be found: what was this war for?
It is meant to agree that
killing 1,000 civilians and countless thousand unlamented soldiers,
some as young and hopeful as dead British 'heroes', is a down payment
on a better world. It is groomed to think, against all precedence, that
you can bomb a nation to democracy. Just in case the corpses do not
speak for themselves, Blair is dropping some more leaflets to tell Iraqis
that their new-look country will not be a Pentagon across the water.
Except that it most probably will, if neo-conservatives have their way.
But PR decrees that we must
forget the dangers of such a move. Equally, we are supposed not to notice
that Arab TV stations, a new and potent public-relations force, are
inflam ing multitudes of hearts and minds with their graphic version
of what the Western coalition has been up to.
We, by contrast, are invited
to despise the independent al-Jazeera, condemned by Mr Blunkett as a
Saddam tool, and soak up good news images. Ignore the nastiness and
think instead of the brave 'rescue' of Private Jessica Lynch from the
hospital ward where she was being treated with all available medical
skill.
The PR campaign wants upbeat
stories. It does not want curmudgeons who opposed this war because pre-emptive
strikes against sovereign states run counter to law and sanity. If Baghdad
falls mercifully quickly, and if there is no more terrible loss of life,
the mind- management machine will decree that Bush and Blair have secured
a triumph. They will be just as wrong as they were last week.
Their setbacks have been
of their own devising, not manufactured by media that have dithered
between triumph and disaster. And, actually, 24/7 coverage has done
the Government a favour. The soap of war, with its sanitised pictures
and labyrinthine storylines, should be a politician's dream. Such visual
Ritalin offers a distraction from how dangerous the bigger picture may
look.
Nato and the UN lie among
the mangled bodies on the road to Baghdad. Ravaged cities continue to
hold out against the coalition. Still, barring a catastrophic fightback
by Saddam, the carnage may end soon. The PR machine decrees that, at
such a point, all objectors should repent and give thanks for the wisdom
of Bush and Blair.
But victory does not vindicate
a misguided attack or clarify its consequences. At least we knew roughly
what sort of war we were getting. Marketing the peace will be a tougher
challenge. We have been sold a new world order and no one can specify
what the product will be.
This article originally appeared
in The
Observer