Iraq, peace journalism and the construction of truth

Most journalists, in so far as they would analyse it at all, would conceptualise news as a linear progression of cause and effect – things happen, they get reported, people respond. I’m suggesting that modern newsgathering is more accurately conceived as a feedback loop.

How much official Western policy towards Iraq has been driven by media strategy? Was the bombing of anti-aircraft positions around Baghdad a few weeks ago a fact that happened and was then reported – or a fact created in order to be reported? How far can we disentangle the strands? It’s a little bit like trying to unmix paint.

If it’s even partly a fact created in order to be reported, then when the success of the mission comes to be evaluated, part of it must be the way it was reported. It means our responses as journalists will be factored in to any decision to repeat such an exercise in future.

That’s a feedback loop – a model for understanding the process of news in our modern, media-savvy world. It means the facts that crop up tomorrow contain a residue or imprint of the reports published and broadcast today. That’s one way – there may be many ways – in which news wields an influence over the course of events. Hence our notion of journalistic responsibility.

Demonising the ‘enemy’

Instead of reflecting reality, I will focus on journalists’ role in framing that reality, and as a factor, whether we like it or not, in what happens next.

The corollary of peace journalism is war journalism. If you inhabit an orthodoxy you do not name it – inspecting it from the outside enables us to identify it as a construct, not a given. One distinguishing feature of war journalism is to present conflict as zero sum game of two parties – a giant tug of war in which any inch gained by one can only be the same inch lost by the other. Even Hollywood allows for three parties – the good, the bad and the ugly. But in news, readers and audiences want brevity, we presume, so they get a binary opposition of goodies and baddies.

It’s been highly effective in the case of Iraq whose suffering population have been turned into ‘unpeople’ as John Pilger says and whose leader has been demonised as the Hitler of our times. Indeed the Norwegian Supreme Court recently ruled that ‘Saddam’ was an actionable term of abuse. Closer to home, one of the stricken areas of the British countryside is Cumbria, where the theory that foot and mouth might have been introduced by Saddam Hussein is raised only partly in jest.

In our critiques of war journalism we suggest that divisions like goodies and baddies are in fact subdivisions of another more fundamental split between self and other – identity and alterity, in the sense of ‘alter ego’. The crucial aspect of this is that it transforms one party into a threat, into that-which-we-are-not and against which we define ourselves – a dangerous force which might overrun and obliterate us at any time.

Interrogating the ‘threat’

One form of therapy for this debilitating condition is to interrogate the notion of a threat, as I have done in papers we have published these last few years through our think-tank Conflict and Peace Forums.

One simple example is the recurrent story - not a bad page lead for a quiet day - that ‘Saddam’s plague weapons could wipe out our cities’. This is a recognisable archetype. Any such report will feature quotes from experts, either Richard Butler or members of UNSCOM speaking about the size of chemical or biological weapons stockpiles – or in my favourite case, an aviation expert revealing some new dastardly scheme to deploy these deadly weapons.

This was the essence of a story in The Sunday Times, which focussed on a crop spraying aircraft. Iraq had supposedly adapted it to be able to operate as an unmanned drone to dump lethal doses of anthrax – enough to kill half a million people if deployed over Washington DC, according to an authoritative study quoted by the paper, and a threat to us in London.

The story quoted Ken Munson, an expert with Jane’s defence group, as saying the aircraft type in question could very easily be adapted for the purpose. I rang Ken Munson and asked him one question strangely absent from The Sunday Times piece, about the range of the aircraft in question. The answer – 250 to 300 miles. So as long as the evil Saddam could arrange to have it stop for refuelling a couple of dozen times en route, there would be an authentic threat.

Of course there is a history of these stories. My colleague from Oslo, Rune Ottosen, who’s been a most assiduous observer of military media strategies, identifies several key stages in the build up to some form of armed intervention.

The crucial stage is the creation of big news - a crisis at hand which can only be averted by decisive action. The classic example is the ‘dead babies’ story, which goes back at least as far as the First World War. One story about the consequences of this has just come to light in the last few days. There was an incident when a British ship sank a German vessel then returned to the scene where a number of German seamen were in life jackets in the water, waiting to be picked up. Instead the captain gave the order, ‘shoot the baby-killers’ and all the men were killed – an atrocity and a war crime, based on the entirely false propaganda put about by the British authorities, that German soldiers were killing babies with bayonets.

In the case of Iraq, this became the notorious story invented by Hill and Knowlton when the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington gave lying testimony to a congressional committee that she’d been a nurse at the Kuwait City hospital and had seen Iraqi soldiers turning off incubators in the premature natal unit.

Then there was the equally well-known case of the aerial pictures of a supposed build up of Iraqi troops, massing on the border dividing occupied Kuwait from Saudi Arabia. Except the Pentagon pictures never materialised. Then a reporter from a Florida newspaper commissioned Soyuz Karta, an offshoot of the Soviet space programme now touting for business in the private sector, to take some shots of the area. They showed no troops, just a mass of empty desert – the only road was covered with undisturbed sand.

So part of the antidote to the war journalism mentality is to discuss these cases, to keep raising them and store them in our collective memories. I was stationed at Nato headquarters in Brussels throughout the Kosovo crisis and there came a point when Nato started saying a verifiable withdrawal of Yugoslav troops must already be underway in order to end the bombing.

So I kept asking – how can that work? When does a Yugoslav tank commander, on the road out of Kosovo, cease to be a legitimate target and become the start of a verifiable withdrawal? Equally with massacres. Sometimes incidents reported as massacres turn out to be massacres. Sometimes they don’t. We know about the incubators in Kuwait City. My colleagues and I have compiled a manual of Peace Journalism in which we suggest that readers and viewers should at least be reminded of this chequered history, when something occurs which looks as if it might be a massacre.

The truth can take a long time to emerge. What investigations are underway and what are they investigating? What don’t we know – it can be as important to report as what we do know. Certainly the rush to characterise the killings at Racak in Kosovo in January 1999 as another massacre would have benefited, journalistically, from such a note of caution being inserted.

Self and other?

So one form of therapy for these ways of framing conflicts – the zero sum formulations of war journalism – is to keep ventilating the issues, to keep contributing to our capacity to inspect the orthodoxy from the outside. If news presents itself as a window on the world, beguiling us into thinking we are looking through it to things as they really are, these discussions are the equivalent of sticking a strip of tape across the pane and reminding us of the framing that’s going on.

Another important form of therapy is to transgress the boundary between self and other, and that’s where the issue of depleted uranium (DU) can be useful.

Ingeborg Eliassen is the foreign editor of a provincial Norwegian newspaper, Stavanger Aftenblad. She went to Iraq about eight months ago to report on the suffering of people under sanctions, and when she got back she filed three big pieces for the paper on what she’d seen there. Even though she had more material, and more pictures, she thought that was probably about enough for her readers at that time.

She said a friend of hers once told her: ‘Ingeborg, I really admire what you do, but I always end up asking myself, what’s it got to do with me?’ So she set out to show exactly what it had to do with her. She contacted 200 Norwegian service personnel who’d served in the Gulf, and found that as many as 47 had suffered symptoms of Gulf War illness – something which, we now know, may be attributable to exposure to DU.

So she ran this in the paper, on the front page, which gave her an opportunity to use the remaining material from her trip to Iraq. The theme was such as to transgress the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’. When it comes to DU, ‘they’ share ‘our’ plight – ‘they’ are in the same predicament as ‘us’. In other words, the ‘self’ resides in the ‘other’ and shares the same conceptual space in the story.

It also works the other way round. In most mainstream media representations, Iraq qualifies as the ‘other’ because it’s a rogue state, out of step with the ‘international community’ and threatening ‘our security’ with acts of ‘terrorism’. It’s part of a binary opposition, a tug of war – so if ‘we’ were not beating Iraq, ‘they’ would be beating ‘us’ – something we couldn’t countenance.

An interesting transition is noticeable though, in some UK media through the last few years. In three TV reports (shown to the conference), the first carried the classic bipolar analysis from President Clinton – Iraq is a threat to her neighbours; and indeed from an Iraqi spokesman who also presented this as a giant tug of war, vowing that Iraq would prevail in the end.

The second was by a reporter who went to Iraq and filed a series of pieces in early 2000, documenting the effects of sanctions on everyday life. The example shown featured the impact on the fashion industry; the book trade, schools and, with pictures of a mother sitting helplessly in a hospital while her young son died of leukaemia, healthcare.

The third, on the bombing of Baghdad on February 16, offers the fascinating spectacle of important precepts in the official view of this conflict coming under serious interrogation.

After the film ‘Wag the Dog’, the December 1998 attack became known as the ‘Zippergate bombing’ among journalists. Back then, it was an obvious joke to make that the incident was really contrived for US political purposes rather than in pursuit of any genuine strategic objective. By the time of the reports from the February 16 attack, this has become a serious analytical factor, albeit voiced here ‘only’ by Alexei Arbatov, the Russian spokesman at the UN.

This was one of several pieces from this time to feature the Labour MP Tony Benn calling it a ‘terrorist’ attack. While Benn is generally written up as a fringe voice, (e. g. ‘veteran left-winger’) the notion that this might in fact amount to state terrorism is for the first time getting a serious airing in mainstream media. It represents a significant breach in what Noam Chomsky identifies as the official discourse for these events.

Neither was this an exception to the rule. The Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper, led with the line that Britain risked ‘diplomatic isolation’ by following America in this policy, emphasising the dissent of other countries, led by France and Germany. The Guardian went further, warning about President Bush ‘this man is dangerous’. The Financial Times reminded us that the no-fly zones might sound official but they were declared by London and Washington, acting outside the UN policy.

Even The Economist, which personifies the complacent conservative consensus in foreign policy, said Iraq’s neighbours, far from believing themselves threatened, were embarrassed by the West’s policy for dealing with the man it persists in calling ‘Mr Hussein’.

So the ‘other’ is being made visible in the ‘self’. After the US administration pulled out of the Kyoto climate change treaty, The Guardian went so far as to call America the ultimate ‘rogue state’. That’s partly due to the manner in which Bush took office –the Florida coup which brought an extreme right-wing regime to power. It’s a kind of licence for the gloves to come off. What is compassionate conservatism? Actually, it’s just good old fascism!

But the change is also due to the tireless efforts of colleagues here, Voices in the Wilderness and people who work with them, who have managed to keep the questions about sanctions and the bombing on the agenda.

Transcendence and ‘liddism’

So if the bipolar model doesn’t work any more, what would? This is the third form of therapy which is not yet widely enough understood. Part of this work has led me to a place on the board of the Toda Peace Institute, and one thing colleagues there are doing is to convene a Security Commission for West Asia. This is a group of representatives from all the Gulf states, the UN and one from each of the ‘Perm five’ – Britain, the States, France, Russia and China.

They’ve begun to meet for regular conferences to think about a sustainable security regime for the Gulf, in which the authentic security threats can be discussed and means identified to overcome them. One of the early factors in that process has been to frame the issues as tripolar – with the Iraq, Iran and the Gulf Co-operation Council states around Saudi Arabia the three main security entities.

Looking further afield, it’s clear that if weapons of mass destruction really are going to be eliminated in that region then Israel’s nuclear missiles must be put in the same pot and the US and Britain must stop threatening Iraq’s security because their unchallengeable technological superiority in conventional warfare is inviting an asymmetric response.

The commission is not inter-state but working instead at the level of civic society. (I use the word civic, not civil, because it’s already clear the new Administration is backing civil society as one where everyone is polite to each other). But I’ve already suggested the work of Voices in the Wilderness shows that civic society initiatives can exceed the capacity of states to control the discourse.

But perhaps the biggest challenge is to rethink our notion of security itself. One of the essential texts for understanding the 20th century came out of New York – Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. The notion that we can live in a city but not be part of it has an obvious parallel with the official Washington security doctrine for the Gulf – dual containment.

This is another orthodoxy we are beginning to inspect from the outside, thanks partly to a term coined by Paul Rogers, a professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University in England. In a forthcoming book, The Politics of the Next Fifty Years, he calls this ‘liddism’ – the notion that we can indefinitely keep a lid on cauldrons of deprivation and bitterness such as that building up among Iraq’s people under sanctions.

It will spill over unless we take action to turn down the heat. And that also means acting now to avert the consequences of global warming, which will bear most heavily on the world’s poor. That will, in turn, exacerbate the macroeconomic problems of overproducing capital in saturated markets, bringing the risk of stagnation as we see in Japan or crashes as we may be seeing on Wall Street.

It will also bring many people on to our doorsteps and if Britain’s experience of the last year is anything to go by, that will further impoverish the political discourse, at least, in rich countries as well.

So we may need a new security paradigm if we’re to safeguard our own way of life. Once that is more widely understood by journalists, we’re likely to see the embargo on reporting the effect of sanctions against Iraq broken more frequently.

Jake Lynch is a correspondent based in London and Sydney for Sky News and The Independent newspaper.