Distant Voices Read online

  October 1993 – January 1994

  IV

  MYTHMAKERS OF THE GULF WAR

  SINS OF OMISSION

  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.

  In a genuinely free society, there needs to be unrestricted debate, drawing on a diversity of sources that reflect the complexion of a society that is not one nation. As the Daily Mirror has pointed out, it will be the sick and old who will pay the bill for this war. So whose ‘national interest’ is at stake?

  Is the build-up to war really a demonstration of America’s world ‘leadership’ at a time of deepening recession and diminishing sources of raw materials and opportunities for ‘free trade’? Why have sanctions not been allowed time to succeed? We all, it seems, live by the January 15 deadline. Saddam must leave Kuwait by that date. But the facts are not as they have been represented. At his news conference on November 30, Bush actually hoped Saddam would meet James Baker ‘at a mutually convenient time’ between December 15 and January 15. He did not name a specific date. The Iraqis may be awkward about the date, but so is Bush; and why should life and death for thousands of innocent people, who do not appreciate the ‘values’ of High Noon, hang upon it?

  The Observer recently illustrated an article about the British Army in the Gulf, with a picture of a Colonel Denaro blowing a hunting horn to summon his driver. The colonel was described as ‘an extravagant character with an attractive swashbuckling manner’. His regiment, the Hussars, ‘are sometimes to be found wearing their big Browning automatics in shoulder holsters over tank crew’s overalls, which gives them a rakish appearance’. Some of the officers come from ‘the same stock as Wellington’, and are heirs to the Light Brigade, ‘the same gallant six hundred . . .’19 The Charge of the Light Brigade was one of the most pointless imperial disasters in history.

  The national newspaper editors being called to discuss war coverage at the Ministry of Defence should read the Crimea diaries of perhaps the greatest of all British war reporters, William Howard Russell, of The Times. Not for him propaganda in the ‘national interest’. He reported the sacrificial battles, the waste, the blunders. ‘Am I to tell these things?’ he wrote to his editor, John Delane, ‘or am I to hold my tongue?’ To which Delane replied: ‘Continue as you have done, to tell the truth, as much of it as you can.’20 Both were described as ‘treasonous’, having incurred the wrath of the monarch, the prime minister and the rest of the establishment. This, of course, ought to be no more than an occupational hazard.

  January 7, 1991

  VIDEO NASTIES

  IN 1972, I watched American B52s bombing southern Vietnam, near the ashes of a town called An Loc. From a distance of two miles, I could see three ladders of bombs curved in the sky; and, as each rung reached the ground, there was a plume of fire and a sound that welled and rippled, then quaked the ground beneath me.

  This was Operation Arc Light, described by the Pentagon as ‘high performance denial interdiction, with minimised collateral damage’: jargon that echoes today. The B52s were unseen above the clouds; between them they dropped seventy tons of explosives in a ‘long-box’ pattern that extended several miles. Almost everything that moved inside the box was deemed ‘redundant’.

  On inspection, a road that connected two villages had been replaced by craters, one of them almost a quarter of a mile wide. Houses had vanished. There was no life; cooking pots lay strewn in a ditch, no doubt dropped in haste. People a hundred yards from the point of contact had not left even their scorched shadows, which the dead had left at Hiroshima. Visitors to Indo-China today are shocked by the moonscape of craters in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where people lived.

  The B52s now operating over Iraq are the same type of thirty-year-old aircraft. We are told they are bombing Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, and the ‘outskirts’ of Baghdad. Before the introduction in Vietnam of military euphemisms designed to make palatable to Congress new hitech ‘anti-people’ weapons, the term used was carpet-bombing. This was vivid and accurate, for these aircraft lay carpets of death, killing and destroying comprehensively and indiscriminately. This is what they were built to do; and that is what they are no doubt doing in a country where most people neither have shelters nor are ‘dug in’.

  The other night, on television, a senior ex-RAF officer included the current B52 raids in his description of ‘pinpoint strikes . . . part of the extraordinary precision work of the Allies’. John Major and Tom King constantly refer to this ‘remarkable precision’ and, by clear implication, the equally remarkable humanitarian benefits this brings to the innocent people of Iraq, although further information about these benefits is curiously unforthcoming.

  The British media amplify this. Indeed, so zealously have the London-based ‘media response teams’ spread the authorised word that the controllers of information in Whitehall have had to rein them in, rather like the sorcerer and his apprentice. George Bush has wagged his finger. Come on guys, let’s not be ‘overly euphoric’. John Major’s autocue has said as much.

  The first authorised version of the war was the Euphoria Version, put out by Bush himself and the Major autocue. This has now been replaced by the It Won’t Be Easy Version. According to the Controllers of Information, the ‘phenomenal surgery’ of Allied technology, alas, failed to ‘take out’ most of the Iraqi Air Force and the Scud missiles. The echoes from Vietnam grow louder. The fabled ‘tunnel’ has returned. Wait now for the ‘light’.

  Protesting far too much, Bush says comparisons with the Vietnam War are inappropriate. Listen carefully to General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and himself a product of the Vietnam War, and the vocabulary and attitude are the same. The principal weapons used against Iraq, such as the Tomahawk cruise missile, have a ‘circular error probability’. This means they are targeted to fall within a circle, like a dart landing anywhere on a dart board. They do not have to hit, or even damage, the bull’s-eye to be considered ‘effective’ or ‘successful’. Some have hit the bull’s-eye – the Tomahawk that demolished the Ministry of Defence building in Baghdad is the most famous – but many, if not most, clearly have not. What else have they hit? What else is within the circle? People, may
be? The numerous autocues say nothing.

  General Powell has also referred to ‘minimised collateral damage’. Like ‘circular error probability’, this term was invented in Vietnam. It means dead civilians: men, women and children. Their number is ‘minimised’, of course, although we are not told against what benchmark this is measured. Of course, the Iraqis have no wish to admit they are bleeding badly, preferring to exaggerate the numbers of enemy planes brought down: just as the British did during the Battle of Britain.

  The common feature of the Euphoria Version and the It Won’t Be Easy Version is manipulation. What is distinctive about this war, compared with even the Falklands War, is that media scepticism has been surrendered without a whimper. There are rare exceptions, notably in the Guardian. Lies dished out are lies swallowed whole. Video-game pictures are believed by intelligent people; no context is called for. John Major’s congratulatory message to the BBC was affirmation of the public broadcaster’s role.

  Television’s satellite and video-game wizardry merely reinforces our illusions. The system of ‘sound bites’, perfected by the Cable News Network (CNN), means that if truth intrudes, it is quickly rendered obsolete. Genuine, informed analysis is out of the question. There is no blood. An emotional screen is erected between us and reality, and our sensibilities are adjusted accordingly.

  Pilots are represented as heroic, as heirs of ‘the few’ who faced the Luftwaffe. Truth is turned on its head. No one doubts the pilots’ courage; but the original ‘few’ were up against equals, not those of a Third World country – regardless of propaganda about a ‘massive Iraqi machine’. The Israelis are also described as showing ‘extraordinary courage’ in the face of ‘this outrageous attack’ on them, while the people of Iraq are devoid of human form, let alone courage. Unlike the Vietnamese, they are not even stick figures allowed to flit like phantoms across the screen.