The Iraq war was reported like a Formula One race, as we watched
the home teams speed to the chequered flag in Baghdad’s Firdos Square
By John Pilger
On
8 April, newspapers around the world carried a despatch from a Reuter’s
correspondent, “embedded” with the US army, about the murder of a
ten-year-old Iraqi boy. An American private had “unloaded machine-gun
fire and the boy fell dead on a garbage-strewn stretch of wasteland”.
The tone of the report was highly sympathetic to the soldier, “a softly
spoken 21-year-old” who, “although he has no regrets about opening
fire, it is clear he would rather it was not a child he killed”.
According
to Reuters, children were “apparently” being used as “fighters or more
often as scouts and weapons collectors. US officers and soldiers say
that turns them into legitimate targets.”
The child-killing soldier was allowed uncritically to describe those like his victim as “cowards”.
There
was no suggestion that the Americans were invading the victim’s
homeland. Reuters then allowed the soldier’s platoon leader to defend
the killer: “Does it haunt him? Absolutely.
It haunts me and I didn’t even pull the trigger. It blows my mind that they can put their children in that kind of situation.”
Perhaps
guessing that readers might be feeling just a touch uncomfortable at
this stage, the Reuters correspondent added his own reassuring words:
“Before
like many young soldiers he (the soldier) says he was anxious to get
his first ‘kill’ in a war. Now, he seems more mature.”
I read in the Observer last Sunday “Iraq was worth £20m to Reuters”.
This
was the profit the company would make from the war. Reuters was
described on the business pages as “a model company, its illustrious
brand and reputation second to none.
As a newsgathering
organisation, it is lauded for its accuracy and objectivity.” The
Observer article lamented that the “world’s hotspots” generated only
about 7 per cent of the model company’s £3.6bn revenue last year.
The
other 93 per cent comes from “more than 400,000 computer terminals in
financial institutions around the world”, churning out “financial
information” for a voracious, profiteering “market” that has nothing to
do with true journalism: indeed, it is the antithesis of true
journalism, because it has nothing to do with true humanity.
It
is the system that underwrote the illegal and unprovoked attack on a
stricken and mostly defenceless country whose population is 42 per cent
children, like the boy who was killed by a soldier who, says the
Reuters story, “now seems more mature”.
There is something deeply corrupt consuming this craft of mine.
It
is not a recent phenomenon; look back on the “coverage” of the First
World War by journalists who were subsequently knighted for their
services to the concealment of the truth of that great slaughter.
What
makes the difference today is the technology that produces an avalanche
of repetitive information, which in the United States has been the
source of arguably the most vociferous brainwashing in that country’s
history.
A war that was hardly a war, that was so one-sided it
ought to be despatched with shame in the military annals, was reported
like a Formula One race, as we watched the home teams speed to the
chequered flag in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, where a statue of the
dictator created and sustained by “us” was pulled down in a ceremony
that was as close to fakery as you could get.
There was the
CIA’s man, an Iraqi fixer of the American stooge Ahmad Chalabi,
orchestrating that joyous media moment of “liberation”, attended by
“hundreds” or was it “dozens”? Of cheering people, with three American
tanks neatly guarding the entrances to the media stage. “Thanks, guys,”
said a marine to the BBC’s Middle East correspondent in appreciation of
the BBC’s “coverage”. His gratitude was hardly surprising. As the media
analyst David Miller points out, a study of the reporting of the war in
five countries shows that the BBC allowed the least anti-war dissent of
them all. Its 2 per cent dissenting views were lower even than the 7
per cent on the American channel ABC.
The honourable exceptions are few and famous. Of course, no one doubts that it is difficult for journalists in the field.
There is dust and deadlines and danger, and a dependent relationship on an alien military system.
It
is unfathomable which of these constraints contributed to the Reuters
travesty described above. None, I suspect; for what it represented was
the essence of propaganda.
The protection of and apologising
for “our” side is voluntary; it comes, it seems, with mother’s milk.
The “others” are simply not the same as “us”.
Imagine the terror
of a mother, cowering with her children on the road as the “softly
spoken 21-year-olds” decide whether to kill them, or kill the old man
failing to stop his car?
The children are clearly “scouts”;
the old man is, well, who knows and who cares? Now imagine that
happening in a British high street during an invasion of this country.
Absurd?
That only happens in countries like Iraq, which can be
attacked at will and without a semblance of legitimacy or morality:
weak countries, of course, and never countries with weapons of mass
destruction; the Americans knew Saddam Hussein was disarmed.
The
corruption of journalism is most vivid back in the commentary booth,
far from the dust and death. “Yes, too many died in the war,” wrote
Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer.
“Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short.
The
death toll has been nothing like as high as had been widely feared.
Thousands have died in the war, millions have died at the hands of
Saddam.”
Mark his logic, for it is at the heart of what is dispensed day after day, night after night.
The
clear implication is that it is all right to have killed thousands of
people in the invasion of their homeland, because “millions” died at
the hands of their dictator.
The lazy language, the idle dismissal of human life each life part of so many other lives is striking.
Saddam
Hussein killed a great many people, but “millions”? the league of
Stalin and Hitler? David Edwards of MediaLens asked Amnesty
International about this. Amnesty produced a catalogue of Saddam’s
killings that amounted mostly to hundreds every year, not millions.
It
is an appalling record that does not require the exaggeration of
state-inspired propaganda whose aim, in Rawnsley’s case, is to protect
Tony Blair from the grave charges of which many people all over the
world believe he is guilty.
The protectors of Mr Blair regard
the entirely predictable crushing of a third-world minnow by the
world’s superpower as a “vindication”.
The great Israeli
journalist and internationalist Uri Avnery wrote recently about this
corruption of intellect and morality. “Let’s pose the question in the
most provocative manner,” he wrote on 18 April.
“What would
have happened if Adolf Hitler had triumphed in World War Two? Would
this have turned his war into a just one? Let’s assume that Hitler
would have indicted his enemies at the Nuremberg war crimes court:
Churchill for the terrible air raid on Dresden, Truman for dropping the
atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Stalin for murdering millions
in the Gulag camps. Would the historians have regarded this as a just
war?
A war that ends with the victory of the aggressor is
worse than a war that ends with their defeat. It is more destructive,
both morally and physically.” —Zmag