BOOK
REVIEW Tomorrow
never dies The End of Saddam Hussein: History
Through the Eyes of the Victims by Prem
Shankar Jha
Reviewed by Chanakya Sen
Reams have been written about the ethics of
journalism in relation to the American wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet the larger question
of how the media influence foreign policy
itself remains. Analyst Prem Shankar Jha's new
book goes to the heart of this matter. In the
James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, a
maniacal media
baron orchestrates wars with the objective of
world domination by his newspaper, Tomorrow.
Jha's meticulous account is less cinematic,
but equally gripping.
The media played a sinister role in the
Anglo-Saxon mutilation of Iraq. Thus, the
world media have to accept partial
responsibility for the rioting, looting,
sectarian terrorism, violence against women,
utility blackouts and rampant unemployment
that have engulfed Iraq since the fall of
Saddam Hussein. "The destruction of Iraq
was not accidental, but cold-bloodedly
intentional" (Introduction, p X), arising
from the combination of Washington's paranoia,
awesome military power and misuse of the media
for propaganda or "spin". A constant
tussle between the state and the media in the
era of information technology laid constraints
on foreign policy, culminating in Iraq's
"civilization being torn to pieces"
(Robert Fisk).
When he was in his early 20s, Saddam was
integral to an American plot to overthrow
Iraq's then-dictator, General Abdel Karim
Kassem. The US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) installed him in an apartment on al-Rashid
Street in Baghdad to observe the ruler's
movements. But after a botched assassination
attempt in 1959, the Americans whisked Saddam
away to Cairo, Egypt. The 1963 coup against
Kassem was a redux of the anti-Mosaddeq coup
in Iran, planned to perfection by the CIA.
American agents then provided Saddam with
lists of "communists" who were
subjected to mass summary executions. The CIA
station chief of the time regarded it as
"a great victory".
In the Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980, the
US delivered battlefield intelligence, food,
loans, dual-use technologies and cluster bombs
to Saddam's Iraq. Prior to this, the US had
mildly encouraged Iraq to invade Iran,
meanwhile, hushing up its resumption of
diplomatic ties with Baghdad due to fear of
media suspicions. The rupture of Iraq's
relations with Washington started before the
1990 occupation of Kuwait, thanks to
persistent media coverage of Iraq's
deteriorating human rights situation and the
barrage of criticism regarding president
George H W Bush administration's closeness to
Saddam. It was from the Israeli-influenced US
media that Saddam learned of the Iran-Contra
scandal, and it was the media that mainly
discredited the US-Iraqi friendship.
"Revelations in the US media created a
sense of betrayal, isolation and desperation
in Iraq" (p 20), and triggered the fatal
invasion of Kuwait.
Once Kuwait was occupied, the Bush
administration embarked on a demonization
campaign against Saddam, who was suddenly re-labelled
"the butcher of Baghdad". With the
US government now backing the vilification,
tales of Iraq's purges and mass graves flooded
the media. Meanwhile, severe violations of
humanitarian law by coalition forces went
unreported during the first Gulf War.
The cat-and-mouse weapons inspection game that
ensued during Bill Clinton's presidency was
also affected at various junctures by the
clever use of psychological warfare planted in
the media. By 1998, the United Nations Special
Commission (UNSCOM) had eliminated 90 percent
to 95 percent of all of Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), but the US and United
Kingdom's cruel and self-defeating policy of
retaining sanctions continued. In the
media-driven politics of the 1990s, sowing
doubts, and convincing the world that Saddam
was irrational and could not be trusted,
counted for more than the truth. In February
1998, Clinton's press relations machine
launched a public relations blitz advocating
war on Iraq, a move that was narrowly averted
by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's
intervention.
Smear operations and leaks to the press
hustled the UN Security Council and US public
opinion into retaining economic sanctions,
crippling Iraq's infrastructure. Cooked-up
stories about Iraq's weaponization of VX gas,
and UNSCOM chief Richard Butler's questionable
use of press conferences, national radio and
television in order to serve American
viewpoints, pointed to the power of
misinformation serving vested interests.
Operation Desert Fox, four days of intense
pounding of alleged Iraqi WMD installations,
was "not simply at attack on Iraq but the
United Nations itself" (p 55). It was
aided by a pliant media, setting a precedent
for President George W Bush's own
unilateralist wars two years later.
By December 2001, thanks to the pretext of the
September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush was more
or less convinced of the need to invade Iraq
immediately. His new National Security
Strategy that confused "preemption"
with "prevention", and
"capability" with
"possibility" needed a laboratory.
"Iraq was chosen to be the first guinea
pig" (p 87). Justice and fairness again
became the victims of a media jamboree. War
plans were leaked to newspapers on the eve of
any compromise solution that Kofi Annan or
chief weapons inspector Hans Blix had cobbled
together.
Five weeks after the United Nation's
Monitoring, Verification and Inspection
Commission (UNMOVIC), the successor to UNSCOM,
admitted to finding "zilch" in Iraq,
Britain and the US manufactured consent by
reiterating crude falsehoods in the media and
declaring that Iraq was in "further
material breach" of UN resolutions.
Deliberate abuse of intelligence was known,
but rarely dissected dispassionately in even
the so-called "liberal" media
outlets.
The invasion of Iraq in May 2003 was "a
straightforward exercise in brute power with
no international sanction whatsoever" (p
113) . More than 500 eminent international
jurists declared that this unprovoked attack
on a tired and weakened nation would go
against every principle of international law.
However, the virtual war for "hearts and
minds" through the media ensured that
five months after the war was declared over,
69 percent of Americans still thought Iraq had
a hand in the September 11 attacks.
Due to the crisis facing American hegemony,
Jha reasons that Bush and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair were prepared to go so far
in the media to convince the public of a case
for war. Hegemony is not purely dominance but
requires an extra moral dimension to confer
legitimacy on the exercise of power.
Exaggerations, distortions and suppression of
the truth were essential for the US to
maintain moral leadership over a world that
was increasingly skeptical of American empire
building.
The hegemonic discourse in the media continued
after Iraq was occupied, using the
"liberation" jargon. Determined
Iraqi resistance fighters and nationalists
were depicted as "irregulars",
"Ba'ath Party fanatics",
"Saddam loyalists" and
"terrorists". Never were they
described as people outraged by the violation
and occupation of their country. In order to
enshrine the myth of liberation, US forces
stood by and allowed for the ransacking of
national treasures as an expression of
"freedom". International media were
instructed to act as legitimizers of this
"liberation" by denying victims of
coercive action - the Iraqi people - a voice.
Hardly anyone presented the Iraqi side of the
story to readers (Pepe Escobar of Asia Times
Online was one of the very few. See The
Roving Eye, the best of Pepe
Escobar ).
Jha gives two examples of gross
misrepresentation of Iraqi sentiments. Private
Jessica Lynch's "rescue" was a hoax
that the press swallowed. Iraqi soldiers had
left the Nasiriyah hospital where Lynch
recuperated two days before the so-called
daring commando raid. No threat existed on the
premises and canards that Iraqis abused and
tortured Lynch were absurd. The Pentagon,
advised by Reality TV producer Jerry
Bruckheimer, went further in the episode by
surrounding the demolition of Saddam's statue
in Baghdad's Firdous Square. BBC and CNN used
close-up shots to convey the impression of a
huge crowd cheering the statue's fall. In
fact, only 150 to 200 supporters of Ahmed
Chalabi, the dissident exile, were present on
the occasion, and several of them were hired
just for the occasion. An American motorized
vehicle, not jubilant Iraqis, pulled down the
statue.
Television networks and wire services carried
accusations as facts, without disclaimers. US
military confessions that 70 percent of the
bombs dropped on Iraq missed their targets
were seldom reported. The media treated the
war like a "video game's demon to fight,
hi-tech weapons to fight him with, it was all
over quickly and 'we won' (p 135)".
Technology's ability to reduce modern warfare
to a bloodless video game was a falsity that
served militarism as a doctrine. When tough
questions needed to be asked about civilian
casualties, all the hacks did was swap
impartiality for patriotism. Instead of
critiquing the Chalabi-directed mismanagement
of post-occupation Iraq, all readers were told
was that terrorists hate Iraq's rebuilding.
Embedded journalists on the front lines gave
the Anglo-American military new opportunities
in news editing. Pentagon guidelines separated
the media into the "good guys"
(embedded) and the "bad guys"
(independents and Arab TV channels), creating
a blatant new caste system among journalists.
Seventeen journalists were killed in the
three-week war by the US military, a majority
of whom were independents. According to
Reporters Sans Frontieres, "the US army
deliberately and without warning, targeted
journalists" (p 159).
After the fall of Baghdad, when an army of
more than 1,000 American scientists came up
with absolutely nothing in terms of Iraq's
proscribed WMD, it was a stinging reminder of
the UN's representative to Iraq Mahmoud al-Doury's
protest that "an empty hand has nothing
to give. You cannot give what you don't
have." However, the mainstream English
media fell for the incredulous alibi put forth
by Blair and Bush that Saddam was
"bluffing" and
"pretending" he possessed WMD to
deter an invasion and that this was further
proof that the dictator was an unreliable fox.
The rising chorus of worldwide disbelief and
disagreement could not have been prevented
despite this sickening marriage of state and
press. Jha concludes that "in the case of
Iraq, the truth was buried from the very
beginning in layer upon layer of 'spin' (p
196)". A monstrous injustice has been
done to the people and the state of Iraq,
thanks to the complex interplay of foreign
policy and the media, known also as the Fourth
Estate. James Bond's Tomorrow both influenced
policymakers and got suborned by them in the
horror story called Iraq.
The End of Saddam Hussein: History Through
the Eyes of the Victims by Prem Shankar
Jha. Rupa & Co: New Delhi, 2004. ISBN:
81-291-0362-1. Price US$ 9.50, 222 pages.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact [email protected]
for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
media
baron orchestrates wars with the objective of
world domination by his newspaper, Tomorrow.
Jha's meticulous account is less cinematic,
but equally gripping.
