Invasion of Iraq-II

We have discussed about the ways, means and methods through which the United States remained involved in Iraq after Operation Desert Storm. In this part of the discussion, we would not only further expand upon the topics already discussed, there would be many new questions that would be brought into the discussion net and many new ideas would be explored. One major part of the overall discussion would be that as to how the Western media failed the whole world on the whole brouhaha of Iraq.

At a presentation to the United Nations Security Council, Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix had the following to say: -

“More than two thousand chemical and more than one hundred Biological samples have been collected at different sites.”

Out of them all, at the time of the presentation, almost three-fourths of them had been screened and there was virtually no evidence of the presence of traces of any type of banned material. Hans Blix was right. However, the failure of the United Nations on that account just shows that its time for downfall has already begun, the question now is not ‘if’, but ‘when’.

George W Bush had it clear in his mind that he had to complete daddy’s unfinished task!

The way Donald Rumsfeld has been calling the shots from the Pentagon, has been seen by all. He only uses the ideas and opinions when they suit the motives of his own and the Jewish lobby he loves so much. General Shinseki’s case is a broad example of the attitude and type of management shown by Rumsfeld. When Shinseki told senior Pentagon officials that in his opinion five to six times the number of troops, equipment and ammunition currently deployed would be required for the Operation Iraqi Freedom and after the War was over. He was labelled as an unpatriotic man and was asked to leave. Today, it seems that his ideas and opinions were surely right. Rumsfeld’s pathetic ways of leadership were exposed to the whole world when the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal broke out.

While giving a reading to Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the whole war planning was done just in sixteen months. In the book, Bob Woodward has mentioned that in case of war planning, the time in which the invasion was to be exclusively conducted through air raids, was brought down by Rumsfeld from sixteen days to twelve, from twelve to five and from then on, just to nine hours! This shows the measures of inconsistency present in the Bush Administration while they were planning for the war in Iraq. President Bush knew exactly how to fool the media and his pundits had done that with considerable success. Where the media was showing the American advance towards Baghdad live across the world, there they did not show the civilian bodies that had been tortured, massacred and brutally murdered in cold blood. Had such things been shown, surely we would have seen a swing in public opinion across the United States.

People in the United States, even today do not know exactly as to why was the invasion done in the first place. This being primarily because the reasons that were often quoted by the Bush administration, have not proven to be true at all. The Weapons of mass destruction were not to be found and neither could the Bush administration prove any of its allegations pertaining to the links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. However, the major issue here is that why did the United States media not carry out enough critical reporting and investigative journalism at a time when it was needed the most? This question has also not been answered effectively, not even by many renown American journalists.

One major practice of the American media during the initial war days was surely embedded journalism. During the war, almost six hundred journalists were ‘embedded’ with American and British troops and all what they reported, was what the officials at the White House and 10 Downing Street wanted the masses to know. (1)

What this tells us is about the lack of objectivity in press reporting regarding the Iraq war and the conduct of the ‘coalition forces.’ While the media, through the coverage given by these embedded journalists did show each and every movement of Iraq’s new occupying forces, there they did not show most of what they should have. For example, there was no count of the number of civilians killed during the Operation Iraqi Freedom. Similarly, there was no report or coverage of the torture and abuse being carried out by the occupying forces. These things only made their glimpses in the media at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Even today, the mainstream Western media, in order to follow keep the masses shielded, have never kept a count of the growing number of civilian casualties in Iraq, while on the other hand crying foul every time an American or British soldier gets killed! That is surely biased coverage, hands down!


With regards to Iraqi casualties, the only credible figures that we have, have been provided by the British medical journal, The Lancet which recently claimed that Iraqi casualties have been around 655,000! That is more than a hundred times the number of people who died on 9/11. According to CNN (which has only now started to give somewhat a different picture which is a good sign but much more needs to be done), fifty-four thousand Iraqi families have been displaced since this one sided imperialistic war began!

The mainstream media and the United States have actually failed to get things about Iraq correctly. The biased reporting that created the mental framework and prepared the American citizens for a war against a country which had no connection with 9/11 and had no WMDs, the culture of embedded reporting and presenting false analysis in talk shows, all of it speaks for itself. Over here, I do not mean to discredit and trash the American media for everything but what I aim to convey is the distinction between what is news and what is propaganda.

What we know today that in the United States, the make up of war was surely beginning soon after 9/11. Terrorism and the shock caused to the United States people after 9/11 was used as a source for scaring the population and therefore keeping them firmly behind the official AIPAC (American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee) sponsored Bush administration executed plan for their unauthorised and illegal invasion of Iraq.

With regards to the media and its sources, a study conducted by the New York Review of books shall be mentioned here. The study claimed during the war’s build up, the sources referred to by American journalists, were too few and very much pro- government. Those who had different opinions were more than just a few but they were conveniently kept aside. This was claimed by Michael Massing, the author of the study who is also the contributing editor for the Columbia Journalism Review. (2)

Much of the pre-war reporting, even investigative reporting was done on the assumption that official and pro-war sources were beyond any level of scrutiny. This explains that as to why Iraqi Exiles were hot favourites of the Bush Administration and not deserving journalists like Judith Miller. In the study mentioned above, Massing went on to say that these Iraqi defectors, who were surely on the payroll lists of the intelligence and the Pentagon were busy day in and out transferring totally twisted and credulous information to the mainstream press—the same propaganda they were passing on to the Bush Administration.


The Judith Miller case is one that we should now discuss in some detail. What we now know is that Judith Miller had been covering Iraqi National Congress’ Ahmad Chalabi for around ten years and that this defected source was the man giving the New York Times’ reporter all the front page defective news about Iraq’s so called Weapons of Mass Destruction.

American media seldom gets things wrong, this time it did! At the time of the Vietnam War, investigative journalists in the United States did not bow down to state pressure. The best evidence of this being all those critical investigative works of Seymour Hersh and the exposing of the Watergate scandal shortly after the Vietnam War by Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Karl Bernstein. This did not happen this time. Why could the otherwise distinguished journalist like Michael Isikoff, Fareed Zakaria, Seymour Hersh, Wolf Blitzer, Robert Fisk, etc. could not come up with any credible pieces of work this time round? While I do not have a definite answer to that, what I can surely say is that the journalistic community inside the United States has ignited anti-American feelings all over the world just because of the patriotism that shielded their eyes of the truth.

Coming back to Judith Miller case, Miren Gutierrez, Editor-in-Chief Inter Press Service, writes “The New York Times admitted in a May 26 editorial that after reviewing their Iraq coverage “we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.”

The words of The Times’ editor does not only tell us about how the paper was brought into disprepute because of its own lenient less scrutinising editorial policy, in the wider perspective it also tells us about prevailing standards of reporting in the mainstream press across the United States before the war. Though journalists from other American newspapers and news magazines have not been caught, that does not mean that such standards of editorial leniency were only followed by the Times.

There were some good pieces of investigative work done in the prewar period, but all of them got buried. One example that is worth mentioning here is about Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son in law who was also his weapons chief until his defection in 1995. While the administration and the media used him as an important source of obtaining all the information they wanted about Iraq’s notorious weapons programme, but they ignored one very important assertion made by him: all of Iraq’s banned weapons had been destroyed!


Newsweek obtained the script of the interview in which that assertion was made and did put it up in its magazine two weeks before the war, however Kamel’s words did not receive the prominence they should have. Other than Newsweek, the interview was only picked up by the Washington Post and the Boston Globe in the United States. (4)

The failure of the American media has been laid flat and wide open in this article so far. What needs further analysis over here is the working of the mainstream media during the prewar phase and an analysis of its do’s and dont’s. What is being asked by many intellectuals, observes and mass media consumers is that why did the United States media fail to ask critical questions and give a really down to earth picture about Iraq. The feelings of the Muslims had always been ignored by the Western media so therefore I would not take that into consideration overhere as this aspect seems more or less irrelevant.

In the mainstream United States media of today, there are quite a few things which should be told to the public, but the issues and stories are being withheld. First thing being about the role played by large American corporate businesses in the so called reconstruction in Iraq! For example, today we know about the doings of firms like Halliburton and Kellog Brown and Root (KBR) in post Gulf War Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Towards the end of the Gulf War, Iraq, in lieu with its defeat and as a demonstration of its anger, set seven hundred oil wells along the Iraq- Kuwait border on fire. The smoke was thick to the extent that days had been converted into nights. The contract for cleaning up the mess caused by this, was awarded to Halliburton, the oil company of Dick Cheney. The size of the contract was a hefty $200 billion over a period of ten years!

Similarly, Halliburton’s sister construction company, KBR frist got a contract for assessing Kuwait’s total economic and infrastructure damage. The contract was $ 3 million and later the firm received another contract, that of extracting American troops from Saudi Arabia (they are still there) once their duties were no longer required.(5) According to David Briody, “In the decade after the Gulf War, the number of private contractors used in and around the battlefield increased tenfold. It is now estimated that there is one private contracter for every ten soldiers in Iraq. Companies such as Haliburton, which became the fifth largest defence contractor in the nation during the 1990s, have played a critical role in this trend.” (6)


Quoting the above data here was indeed necessary. Necessary from this perspective that now it can be pointed out that in case of the current conflict, the mainstream American media has not exposed the roles played by America’s corporate sector and the Jewish lobby in the formulation and implementation of American foreign policy under President George W Bush.

Without any doubts, I can surely come to the conclusion that the mainstream American media does not only owe an unconditional apology to the American people, but also to the Muslim world as the feelings of the Muslims all around the world have been hurt by the anti-Islamic reporting and other malpractices of the Western media.

This war was more “about not seeing images,” contends Snow. “People in the U.S. didn’t see the same war as people outside the U.S. or as did viewers of al-Jazeera; it’s all about the disparate perceptions by the news media in the U.S./Middle East and Europe.”(7). In order to well inform the people about the ground realities in this War on Terror, the American media must bid an adious to this gloomy and distracted world of images. The sooner they do it, the better.

What the masses now need to know, is about the commercialisation of the whole policy planning and implementation procedure of Iraq. Journalists in the United States have generally failed to take the government to account by asking tough questions. Whatever happened with the New York Times with regards to the Judith Miller scandal shall not be repeated at any costs.

The press and the government in the United States have not enjoyed good relations in the last eight years. However, this does not mean the media puts the blames for its failures on the shoulders of the American government. Actually, the hijacking of the mainstream media and the overt manipulation of the minds of common Americans was actually a well planned execution of the Bush Administration from right after 9/11 and the beginning of Bush’s self declared and self imposed War on Terror.

The “war on terror” was indeed the reason and the starting point that the Bush Administration required in order to set forth and go on firmly implementing its plans for attacking Iraq and Afghanistan and thus, playing its role in moulding and changing the shape of the Middle East by bringing in a set of consumer and corporate oriented values knit and cobbled together under the garb of democracy. These values would not only serve America and Israel by giving them unstinted control over Arab natural resources, but also would it allow them to establish their military hegemony in the region by burying the Palestinian cause into the dust-bins of History. That this strategy has backfired in the face of a strengthening Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran in the region, is a totally different story.

Phrases and propagandist words like “weapons of mass destruction”, “axis of evil”, “shock and awe”, and “war of liberation” have surely scared the American masses and by doing so, the mainstream media made sure that a large percentage of the American population supported the Bush Administration in all its policies whether it was invading Afghanistan (the invasion and subsequent military operations have led to the killing of people whose number is four to five times that of the total death toll on 9/11), invading Iraq under utterly false pretences or is it about tax rises for the middle class due to which American consumer spending has been reduced, unemployment rates due to outsourcing are rising and trends indicate that poverty levels might rise as well.

The conflict in Iraq can be easily termed as a mass genocide/ethnic cleansing in which the Americans are in the midst of everything. This genocide has claimed nearly 655,000 lives according to the British medical journal, The Lancet.

The failures of the American media have been clean and wide open. While those with a different opinion might argue that according to the laws American journalists cannot air or publish images of the coffins returning home, what they can surely do is to depict a more clear picture of the conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Afghanistan by demonstrating ‘distinctive journalism’ in its true sense. This can be doe by giving more air time and press coverage to the Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians who are directly as well as indirectly affected by the conflicts. Also can the coverage be made more accurate and impartial by lending greater coverage to the lives and happenings of those psychologically/physically affected soldiers who have came back from their duties. US casualties in Iraq have now crossed 2500 and surely the number of wounded soldiers would be five to ten times that. It is actually these impaired and devastated soldiers who can actually tell the journalists and the masses about the gravity of the Iraqi situation and the intensity of fighting going on and the strengths of the freedom fighters (dubbed as insurgents in the West).

All this, however despite of being wishful thinking may never actually happen. Snippets here and there are of nearly zero importance. What we need is solid investigative coverage which is rigorous and does fulfil all the ethics of journalism. This might not be possible for speculative and political reasons. Considering what has been done and practiced by American journalists in the past, implementation on the suggestions given above seems to be something not in the offing. The mainstream media would surely not like to inflame the general public. However, from my point of view, even if reporting right now is carried out like it was done during the days of the Tet offensive in 1968, things could turn out to be grossly different from what they seem to be.

Already, due to a sea of change in press coverage, awareness regarding the devastation and wrath being caused by America’s Iraq misadventure is surely increasing world over, especially in the United States. Airing of images of soldiers with deformed and amputated limbs would surely increase the stakes and inflame the American public and government, it could have some mid-term and long term positive effects as well. If the images are dealt with in mature and civilised ways, then these would turn out to serve as bastions of increasing war weariness amongst the US military and would create further consciousness and awareness about the war and Bush’s foreign policy back at home. This very awareness would surely play a vital role in making sure that more and more people vote in the American Presidential elections in 2008 and would also help them make the right choice. This would surely be achieved by the opening up debates on the state of the American economy and tax structure, Bush’s economic policies, post-Katrina reconstruction in Louisiana and New Orleans and many other issues (the list of Bush’s follies is way too long). As for my prediction, the future of governance and Presidency of the United States would surely go for the Democrats because as of now, people, the media and former President Bill Clinton himself have now started comparing the era of Bush with the eight years of Bill Clinton. The latter’s record is known to all. Democrats and CNN (Newseweek is surely following the same line) have now started questioning the whereabouts of those $5.6 trillion dollars of trade surplus that was left by Bill Clinton officially in January 2000.

The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost the Americans more thant $500 billion. Between 2000 and 2004, tax cuts for America’s top one percent had allegedly cost the economy $1 trillion. The media, the Democrats and the American people now surely want answers to their
questions from the President.

Referencs

1) The ’Prop-Agenda’ at War, By Miren Gutierrez, Editor-in-Chief Inter Press Service, June 27, 2004. Article posted on mediachannel.org.

2) Michael Massing, New York Review of Books, February 2004.

3) The ’Prop-Agenda’ at War, By Miren Gutierrez, Editor-in-Chief Inter Press Service, June 27, 2004. Article posted on mediachannel.org.

4) Rick Mercier “Why does the Media owe You an apology on Iraq” March 28-2004.

5) Dan Briody, The Guardian—excerpted from The Haliburton Agenda, July-22-2004

6) Dan Briody, The Guardian—excerpted from The Haliburton Agenda, July-22-2004

7) The ’Prop-Agenda’ at War, By Miren Gutierrez, Editor-in-Chief Inter Press Service, June 27, 2004. Article posted on mediachannel.org.