Patrick Cockburn: How well was the Iraq war reported?
“Good journalists who knew what they were about could produce critical stories but they go only where the Americans went. An example of the disadvantage of this was the US marines’ bloody but victorious assault on Fallujah in November 2004 which was heavily covered by the media. But the insurgents’ counterstroke, during which they captured most of the northern city of Mosul for a few days, passed almost unnoticed by the outside world because there were few American troops there and hence no embedded journalists to report this military disaster.”
The winner of the Orwell Prize for his coverage of the most fiercely debated conflict of modern times, reflects on the task he and his colleagues faced.
Journalists are departing from Iraq. In Baghdad US newspapers and television are slimming down or closing their bureaux. The British media always had a slighter presence but there is less and less coverage of the war. This might be justified by saying there is no war to cover, but Iraq is still the scene of a horrendous amount of violence with suicide bombers killing at least 144 civilians in the past two days.
The main reason for reduced foreign interest in Iraq is that the US is pulling out by the end of 2011 and its forces will have left the centre of Iraqi cities by the end of this June. US military casualties are a fraction of what they once were. British troops will soon finally depart from Basra.
Iraq is still one of the most dangerous places in the world but security is vastly improved compared with 2006, when at the height of the Shia-Sunni civil war some 3,000 people were being killed every month.
As the war de-escalates it is worth asking how the foreign media performed during a conflict which has now gone on longer than the First or Second World Wars. Could somebody outside Iraq reading the newspapers, watching television or listening to the radio have got a real understanding of what was happening in the country? Was the news reporting better than it had been in Vietnam to which it is often compared? There should be a number of health warnings here about war reporting in general. In one sense it is easy because war provides instant melodrama which people want to see or read about. Demand for news is generally greater than supply. But the melodrama is often misleading as to what is generally happening. This is particularly true of television because on modern battlefields there is usually very little to see. This has been since the end of the 19th century when armies began being armed with rifles using smokeless powder firing long distance. Everybody with any sense kept their head down.
Yet war movies such as Saving Private Ryan give the impression that modern war is fought at point-blank range along the lines of the battle of Waterloo. Television or still photographs of real wars always look tame by comparison, which is why images such as the Soviet Army raising the red flag over the Reichstag or the French surrender had to be restaged for the cameras after the shooting had stopped.
In practice, the television camera is an immensely influential but clumsy and misleading instrument for covering warfare. For instance, during the rout of the Iraqi army during the American invasion of 2003, there were frequent pictures of tanks on fire giving an impression that the Iraqi army had fought to the end. This was an important point to establish since, if Iraqi soldiers had refused to fight for Saddam Hussein, then they might not feel they had been defeated and be capable of resuming the war later on.
I recall climbing on top of burnt-out tanks on the road north of Baghdad in the last days of the war and finding no bodies inside. The tanks had been abandoned before they were hit from the air. In other words, there was probably a lot more fighting to come.
The most frustrating moment for me and many other reporters came as the war escalated in 2004. It soon became clear that the US-led occupation forces controlled only islands of territory and their military position was deteriorating. But George Bush and Tony Blair were able to maintain that the war was confined to only four out of 18 provinces of Iraq and the extent of the violence was being exaggerated by the media. This was quite untrue, but journalists could not disprove it because if we ventured into these supposedly pacific provinces we stood a good chance of being kidnapped or decapitated.
All this was very different from being a reporter in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion 20 years earlier. It might be dangerous but it was often safer to be a journalist than anybody else. The most ferocious Lebanese militias issued press credentials which usually preserved one from harm by their fighters. But in Iraq journalists were fair game for kidnappers or casual killers. This limited the extent to which journalists could leave their hotels, though it was still possible with extreme caution. I used to travel with two cars, the job of the second one being to see if we were being followed and, if so, tell us immediately so we could dodge down side streets and escape the car thought to be interested in our movements.
Even minimal security is expensive and a side-effect of having to take such measures was to make it impossible for freelance journalists not working for major papers, television companies or radio stations to stay in Baghdad. Many journalists took the option of embedding with the American or British armies. This was not the total surrender to the powers-that-be as it was sometimes portrayed. Good journalists who knew what they were about could produce critical stories but they go only where the Americans went. An example of the disadvantage of this was the US marines’ bloody but victorious assault on Fallujah in November 2004 which was heavily covered by the media. But the insurgents’ counterstroke, during which they captured most of the northern city of Mosul for a few days, passed almost unnoticed by the outside world because there were few American troops there and hence no embedded journalists to report this military disaster.
The worst coverage of the Iraq war was probably at the beginning and at the end of the conflict. At the beginning there was the uncritical acceptance that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. In the last two years Washington had equal success in selling the "surge", the limited reinforcement of US troops employing more aggressive tactics, as turning the tide in favour of the US. A danger now is that this myth will take on a life of its own leading to similar methods being employed in Afghanistan and the far right in the US blaming President Obama for withdrawing from Iraq just as victory was being won.
Patrick Cockburn: How well was the Iraq war reported? – Commentators, Opinion – The Independent
