Chapter 7

The Long War

Famous combat photographer James Nachtwey lived near the World Trade Center. On 11 September he grabbed his camera, like all good journalists, and headed in the direction from which everyone was fleeing. ‘I made my way through the smoke to photograph the skyscraper where it lay in ruins in the street … . Then I heard what sounded like a huge waterfall in the sky. I looked up and saw the second tower falling straight down at me.’ Nachtwey realised that he had no time to take a picture. He ran to safety and survived. War correspondent Bill Biggart was also shooting pictures and remained to take what he thought would be the shots of a lifetime. His camera, undamaged, was found near his body. In the final frame was an image of the second tower as it began to implode.

The media fightback started straight away. ‘Buildings collapsed. Democracy stands’, ran the leader of the Los Angeles Times, a few hours after the attack. Nevertheless, with the exception of Pearl Harbor, the American War of Independence and the self-inflicted wounds of the Civil War, 9/11 was the first time Americans had suffered major military harm on their own soil.

The 9/11 abomination changed the world dramatically, as have the events that flowed from it – the declaration of the ‘war on terror’, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the development of an American strategy of pre-emptive war and the introduction of new legislation in the Western democracies that threatened traditional civil liberties.

Historian John Lewis Gaddis observed, ‘It’s as if we were all irradiated, on that morning of 11 September 2001, in such a way as to shift our psychological make-up – the DNA in our minds – with consequences that will not become clear for years to come.’1 And yet 9/11 may have crystallised long-existing currents in world politics. The optimism of the post-Cold War new order had already faded. Jihadism had long been a real threat, as evidenced in a previous attack on the same World Trade Center in 1993. The 2001 onslaughts were a serious intelligence failure in the same way that Pearl Harbor was; in both cases, the writing was already on the wall. The attacks also provided an opportunity for the Bush administration to implement pre-existing plans, such as the removal of Saddam Hussein, as part of a neo-conservative vision to transform the regimes of the oil-rich Middle East into a system – in theory, a democratic one – favourable to Western interests. Instead, the use of US military power, especially in Iraq, alienated NATO allies and potential ones in the Middle East.

The 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, Virginia. (US Department of Defense)

In the Cold War the West eventually won the battle of ideas. In the long war that followed 9/11 the West increasingly lost the media war and the moral high ground. In the field in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Western coalition’s military use of the media was often outflanked by the insurgents’ propaganda. It was by no means clear who was going to triumph in this self-fulfilling clash of civilisations.

Afghanistan

Though the first war in Afghanistan was militarily successful for the West, the media were thwarted at every stage, from the difficulty of crossing over into Afghanistan to the danger of covering the war once inside and the imposed restrictions by US forces. The onset, though, held promise for the military and even the media. The Islamic world displayed some sympathy, or at least toleration, for Washington’s rapid invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the sanctuary of al-Qaeda. The jihadist training camps were viewed by Western intelligence as a tempting target, though in retrospect it might have been easier to have accepted the Taliban’s offer to try Osama bin Laden under Sharia law. In October 2001 special forces from the United States, Britain and Australia arrived in Afghanistan to support the Northern Alliance, a coalition of clans, tribes and warlords who had long fought the Taliban. The Northern Alliance was in mourning for its charismatic leader, Ahmed Shah Massud, who had been assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before 9/11. The media too mobilised its mass formations, both in Pakistan and northern Afghanistan. CNN field producer Kieran Baker described the mayhem of 1,500 journalists who descended on Islamabad and the Marriott Hotel. Baker wrote, ‘The growing demands of expectations of TV news reminds me increasingly of how the film industry operated: by the end of this operation we had ten drivers, a fleet of four-wheeled vehicles, five fixers and translators, and over 50 staff.’

Embedded journalists were a part of this war as well. The Pentagon claimed it had a significant number of reporters aboard the ships at sea on the first day of the war, when the Tomahawk cruise missile controllers engaged targets. Journalists attempting to access the war on the ground had a much tougher time, especially dealing with the bureaucracy in Tajikistan. Others sought to cross into Afghanistan from Pakistan. The BBC’s John Simpson, despite his 6-foot-4-inch frame, managed a famous crossing in a burqa. When Sunday Express journalist Yvonne Ridley tried this same tactic she was caught by the Taliban.

Even when correspondents wheedled into the enclave held by the Northern Alliance it was hard going. While the international press viewed Afghanistan as a great story, the Afghans viewed the journalists as an easy means to the only currency that held any actual value for them – the US dollar – and would use persuasion or force without hesitation to obtain it. Australian Paul McGeough delivered one of the best accounts of being cooped up in this perilous enclave. He described how domestic journalism is a competitive and ugly business, but in war zones even the most hardened loners look out for one another with a camaraderie based on a simple truism: on the road you need to find strangers whom you can trust, especially when the bullets start flying. ‘There are only three boxes,’ wrote McGeough, ‘and you have to tick them off quickly as you assess prospective candidates: do they share your security worries, do they have a broad view of the story that is likely to keep you together on the road and will they drive you mad?’2 McGeough wasn’t exaggerating the dangers. Three journalists with him were killed by a Taliban counter-attack on 11 November 2001. He barely survived himself. A week later, four journalists, two men from Reuters and correspondents for El Mundo and Corriere della Sera, were shot by armed men on their way from Jalalabad to Kabul.

From an ‘economy of force’ Western perspective this intervention in Afghanistan was a successful and rapid war. Special forces, the use of proxy armies and that old warhorse the B-52 bomber soon forced the Taliban out of Kabul. Another old warhorse, John Simpson, was the first journalist to ‘liberate’ the Afghan capital for the BBC. The Beeb, though, did not have a good war. It had been scooped by al-Jazeera which had a bureau in Kabul and a monopoly of the coverage from the Taliban side. An original experiment in impartial 24-hour news reporting in a region long characterised by state-controlled media, al-Jazeera broke the Anglo-American ‘media imperialism’ in the Arab and Muslim world. CNN was said to film the launch of cruise missiles but al-Jazeera recorded what happened when they landed. As the historian of the news station said, ‘It was ironic that the puritanical Taliban tolerated al-Jazeera, but the United States would not.’3 Al-Jazeera’s portrayal of the war in Afghanistan prompted a realisation in Washington of its absence in the Arab and Muslim media. US forces reacted by laying waste to the station’s HQ in Kabul, although no one was killed. Journalists began to feel that they were being targeted by both sides, a suspicion intensified by the wars that followed.

Though President Bush had vowed to capture or kill bin Laden, ultimately he failed. The Saudi arch-terrorist and his commanders escaped from Afghanistan into the Pakistan tribal areas, despite major US engagements at Tora Bora in December 2001 and in Operation ANACONDA in March 2002. Both engagements were staged in the forbidding Afghan highlands where guerrillas had traditionally fared better than conventional armies. Although much has been written about these US failures, the simplest explanation initially offered was that bin Laden had bribed key warlords to help him escape.4 Yet, with a multi-million-dollar bounty on bin Laden’s head, a more plausible explanation was the shared affinity of religious and political support, allied to a visceral hatred of the infidel Americans.

Apart from the failure to capture bin Laden, the initial war in Afghanistan was a victory for the American military, especially over the media. The coalition relied on air power, which is difficult for the media to cover, and special forces’ operations, which are always off-limits to journalists. A few pools were arranged, yet they were soon abandoned, unilaterally in the case of CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. If the Western control of the media was relatively ad hoc in Afghanistan, however, the US military was simultaneously devising a very detailed system of manipulation for the forthcoming onslaught on Iraq.

‘With Us or Against Us’

Although bin Laden escaped and the Taliban administration collapsed, both regrouped in Pakistan, paradoxically. Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, responded to George Bush’s challenge – ‘You are either with us or against us’ – and accepted the economic and military inducements to side publicly with Washington. At the same time, however, he could not alienate his own Islamic parties and intelligence services by abandoning the Taliban completely – particularly since India had supported the Northern Alliance. Moreover, fiercely independent tribal areas had always ignored Islamabad’s writ. Thus Bush’s Manichean imperative was never going to be fully obeyed in the Islamic world, even by moderate pro-Western governments.

Many Islamic rulers viewed the build up to war in Iraq with grave suspicion, despite the personal dislike many felt for Saddam Hussein. Nearly all regarded the Anglo-American policy with even more suspicion: they felt that its preemptive strategies, based on dubious dossiers and poor intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, were part of a crusade against Islam, not jihadist terrorists. Correspondents would later prove that these doubts about the war were well founded. Immediately after the war, investigations, particularly one by Mick Smith, later the defence correspondent of the London Sunday Times, revealed the ‘Downing Street Memos’. These memos showcased deliberate attempts by US officials to dupe their government into war by manipulating the UN weapons inspection process, as well as strong-arming Saddam Hussein into war by launching an escalation of operations over the southern no-fly zone, which was effectively the beginning of the air war in May 2002. They also disclosed Blair’s commitment to war as early as April of that same year. Although the content of the memos was sensational, US media were hesitant to cover the story because of questions over their veracity, or because some American newspapers were portrayed as being supportive of the received wisdom in Washington.

The author interviews the Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Boyce, in Whitehall, during the height of the Iraqi crisis. Boyce stood up to Tony Blair’s warmongering and was almost sacked. (Author’s collection)

Much later, in 2016, investigative journalist Tom Bowyer published his Broken Vows: Tony Blair, the Tragedy of Power. The author described how Blair kept the planning for the 2003 war in Iraq from his cabinet and even from his defence chiefs. When the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Mike Boyce, found out the details and opposed the plans as too dangerous Blair almost fired him. Those who opposed Blair in the intelligence agencies, the Foreign Office and MoD were silenced or occasionally forced out. Not only was the intelligence twisted to fit political ends but British troops went into action woefully illprepared because of the fiction that Blair’s kitchen cabinet had not decided on war until the last minute. Britain’s armed forces were to suffer terribly under Blair. They lost two wars for which they were criminally under-resourced. In 2002 many of the intelligence and defence planning secrets were still shrouded in mist, although the mass protests in the British streets suggested that popular opinion had not been fooled by the lies of Blair’s spin doctors.

The Israeli armoured bulldozers, the size of London double-decker buses, had sliced through this woman’s house in Jenin. She was sitting stoically in front of it. (Author)

Women digging with their bare hands to find buried relatives, Jenin, 2002. (Author)

At the time, however, above all it was the one-sided backing of Israel, with Washington’s blind eye to UN resolutions critical of the Jewish state that continued to rankle in the Arab street. The security barrier that Israel was building to keep out suicide bombers appeared as de facto borders in the West Bank, and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) re-occupied several towns, most notoriously Jenin on 3 April 2002. For eight days Merkava tanks, armoured personnel carriers and Cobra helicopters firing wire-guided missiles waged war on Hamas and Islamic jihad insurgents in the town. Twenty-three IDF troops were killed. Giant armoured bulldozers the size of double-decker buses were brought in to flatten the centres of resistance. Just as the Israelis withdrew, I entered the town illegally with Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and Lindsey Hilsum and Tim Lambon of UK Channel Four News. Despite Palestinian booby-traps everywhere, we carefully examined the destruction and death. About 25 per cent of the cinderblock houses were destroyed. We counted the dead and visited the hospitals. Palestinian propaganda claimed that 500 civilians were massacred; the IDF put the initial figure of civilian deaths at 100. The final figure was fifty-two Palestinians killed. Al-Jazeera’s reporting of the siege of Jenin galvanised Arab opinion throughout the Middle East, though its reporting of the casualties was fair and contradicted the Palestinians’ exaggerated claims of deliberate, wholesale massacres. A history of the Arab television station noted, ‘Al-Jazeera has helped to quench the culture of conspiracy among the Palestinians; occasionally, as in Jenin, this has even been of advantage to the Israelis.’5

The town of Jenin has, nonetheless, become almost synonymous with the word massacre. The Israelis refused to take any journalists with them on the Jenin operation, which created an information vacuum that was filled with speculation and disinformation by adversaries. The Palestinians, in particular, proved skilful in communicating their point of view via the Internet during the ‘Electronic Intifada’. The lessons of Jenin were twofold. First, Israelis learned (again) that ignoring the media meant enemies could easily sabotage their political agenda and image during war. Second, the media learned that other forms of information dissemination would manifest if they were shut out and, as a result, they no longer held a monopoly in the global information space.

Despite the media flak, Britain’s Tony Blair, in public, continued to side with George Bush’s stance on the Arab–Israeli conflict, though in private the Prime Minister urged his American counterpart to accelerate a settlement. One element of the Anglo-American closeness was Blair’s belief that the US president would do his utmost to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict by creating, rather than merely promising, a two-state solution. For his part, Bush praised the British premier in public often – ‘We have a no more valuable friend .... As we say in Texas, he’s a stand-up kinda guy’ – though he relegated Britain’s prime minister to the role of junior partner, especially regarding Israel. Soon, this alliance would be tested by Bush’s resolve to declare war on Iraq.

Though neo-conservatives in Washington needed little persuasion to go to war against Iraq, the House of Commons did. The case depended on a series of propositions regarding the nature of the Saddam regime: its secret obsession with weapons of mass destruction; its ability to deceive UN weapons inspectors; its co-operation with jihadists and other terrorists and its willingness to hand over WMD to them; the fragility of Saddam’s popularity; and the consequences of his removal for the whole region. These propositions drew on intelligence information and would not be refuted by the mainstream media until they faced the actual audit of war. Although pre-emptive war strategies must be founded on good intelligence, Western intelligence was misled (or misled itself) on the above propositions. Intelligence agencies corrupt their purpose if they fall into line with political demands and fail to voice uncertainties over their evidence, especially if it is used publicly in the media as the casus belli. Blair and Bush stood accused of hoodwinking both national and international opinion.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defense, possessed an adamantine personality. (DOD)

In the United States the CIA was humbled. It had been designed to be the dominant force in the US intelligence community and to act independently of the military in order to protect it from becoming the tool of the general staff. The CIA was pushed aside as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld inflated the role of his department’s own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Semicovert organisations like the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) and the Office of Special Plans (OSP) were created to sell the case for war against Iraq. In the age of the Internet, however, it was difficult, if not impossible, to keep secrets – at least not for long. Knowledge of both organisations soon seeped out into the media. Nevertheless, the civilian politicians were still calling all the shots, it was argued. Equally, you could argue that the civilians in the Pentagon – Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith et al. – were stove-piping intelligence from the DoD’s Office of Special Plans directly to the White House. But the end result was that the caution advocated by many British and American generals was ignored. Their after-the-event indignation did not surface in the press for another two to three years.

Before the Iraq War the deliberate and constant drip-feeding of anti-Saddam propositions by intelligence leaks to the media, especially to major American papers such as the New York Times, created a vicious circle. Journalists stood accused of ‘mainlining uncut propaganda’ and reporting ‘faith-based intelligence’ in a ‘mawkish, cheapskate attempt to push Americans into war’.6 In the long term, bearing in mind the importance of open-source information, the numerous pro-war stories had an insidious effect on intelligence estimates. The combination of hyped newspaper stories and the selective use of intelligence data by politicians powerfully influenced the public and policy. According to a senior US intelligence official, ‘As they embellished what the intelligence community was prepared to say, and as the press reported that information, it began to acquire its own sense of truth and reality.’7 But Washington and London were about to face reality in what Winston Churchill once called ‘the thankless deserts of Mesopotamia’. Or, as Jon Stewart of America’s tongue-in-cheek newscast The Daily Show would dub it, ‘Mess-opotamia’.

The Iraq War

It is a striking testimony to both the power and the ignorance of the Western media that they instilled in the public the perception that the Iraq War of 2003 should be labelled the Second Gulf War. In historical fact, it is the third. Although this might seem to be semantic nit-picking, the distinction is important in the Middle East, where the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s is regarded as the first Gulf War. Moreover, the region’s people view the mislabelling as further evidence of Western ignorance of Middle Eastern culture and history. This perception has had serious consequences in the years following the combat phase of the war, as coalition forces’ attempts to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the Iraqi people in what was supposed to be a ‘liberation’ of Iraq from the Saddam regime turned into an insurgency against the ‘coalition occupiers’. In fact, new soldiers being deployed to the region were briefed not to refer to the war as the Second Gulf War.

Map of Iraq.

The attack on Iraq in 2003 was, for the United States, very much part of the ‘Global War on Terror’. Militarily, however, the ‘coalition of the willing’ that was assembled to fight consisted of only four nations: the United States, Britain, Australia and Poland. Though Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that the coalition comprised thirty nations, with another fifteen preferring to remain anonymous, veteran reporter Martin Bell was tart: ‘To call them a coalition was a supine use of language.’ Significantly, although US bases in Arab states were used, there were no formal Arab military contributions, unlike in 1991, and no absolutely clear-cut UN resolutions authorising the invasion. The war was perhaps the most controversial conflict of modern times – at least outside of the United States, where the controversy really only began after the combat phase of operations. The media reflected the national positions of their respective governments: in the United States the media were largely pro-war; in France and Germany the media were anti-war; in Britain the media were deeply divided. Interestingly, in Spain and Italy the media reflected more the position of public opinion than the pro-war governments. The Spanish government, though, was to pay the price for its stance when Madrid was subjected to terrorist bomb attacks on the eve of the March 2004 general election. The prowar government was shortly voted out of office in an eleventh-hour surge by its main Socialist opponents.

From the point of view of the military–media relationship, the two most striking controversies of the 2003 war in Iraq were the process of ‘embedding’ journalists with coalition forces and the coalition’s alleged attack on Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel – where many unembedded journalists were staying – as US forces liberated the city. On 8 April Taras Protsyuk and Spanish cameraman José Couso, with Reuters, were both killed by American tank fire at the Palestine Hotel. The media later attacked the US Army for its claim that it had been taking fire from the hotel before it struck. A third debate of major significance that emerged in Britain after the war related to journalists’ role in covering controversial events leading up to the invasion, namely in the Hutton Enquiry into the death of WMD expert Dr David Kelly. (A parliamentary enquiry preceded the Hutton report; the Butler Enquiry followed it.) Kelly spoke to reporters, particularly the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan, who went on to say that the government had ‘sexed up’ intelligence dossiers. Gilligan and both the BBC’s director-general and chairman were forced to resign, despite the fact that Gilligan’s assertions were generally accurate. Kelly, who was authorised by the UK Ministry of Defence to brief reporters on technical matters, was scapegoated by the MoD and committed suicide, according to the official enquiry into his death. Some investigators, however, have questioned the official verdict.

For Britain, Operation TELIC, the UK element of what the United States labelled Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, was perhaps the most controversial foreign military intervention since the 1956 Suez crisis. Public and media opinion at home were deeply divided; two senior Cabinet ministers resigned, and eventually the editor of one of Britain’s major tabloid newspapers was forced to resign over the publication of faked photographs depicting British soldiers’ mistreating Iraqi prisoners. In the United States the war became more controversial after the event, or rather after President Bush declared an end to the war’s combat phase aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003, with a banner touting ‘Mission Accomplished’ behind him. As some observers noted, it was Bush’s ‘Top Gun moment’, with the stage-managed event aboard the aircraft carrier beamed around the world.

Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s second in command, was interviewed by the author in Baghdad on the eve of the 2003 war. He swore blind that that they did not have WMD – and he was proved right. (Author)

Visiting hacks used to stay in the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad. A mosaic of George W. Bush’s father had been placed at the entrance so that visitors would have to insult the Americans by walking across the president’s face. (Author)

Though Baghdad may have fallen, Saddam Hussein remained at large until December 2003 when his capture became another global media event framed by a memorable sound-bite, this time by coalition civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer: ‘Ladies and gentleman, we got him.’ Saddam’s supporters had killed more American troops by this point than during the entire combat phase of operations and parts of Iraq seemed to be undergoing full-scale insurrection. Back in the United States debates began to rage about whether the country was embroiled in ‘another Vietnam’ and questions about the justification for the war emerged as no WMDs were found. The New York Times even apologised to its readers for its uncritical acceptance of White House assertions, not least the spurious connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. In a 2002 poll an astonishing 70 per cent of Americans believed that such a connection existed. Bush and Blair survived subsequent elections, a testimony to their resolve or to the shortcomings of their political opponents.

Embeds and Fembeds

‘Embedding’ was a new label on an old bottle. Back in 1942 war correspondent Ernie Pyle would have seen himself as embedded, as would the twenty-nine British journalists who accompanied the task force to the South Atlantic in 1982. Now, however, it sparked controversy, not least within the press corps itself, because hundreds more journalists covering the conflict were not accredited in the same, if any, way. For the American-led coalition forces, accreditation was designed to provide the media with ‘minimally restrictive access’ to the front line with little censorship (within the confines of OPSEC).8 That this approach was related to wider strategic information operations was evident from the Pentagon’s embedding agreement with the media, issued six weeks before the start of the Iraqi war:

Media coverage of any future operation will, to a large extent, shape public perception of the National Security Environment now and in the years ahead. This holds true for the US public, the public in Allied countries whose opinion can affect the durability of our coalition, and publics in countries where we conduct operations, whose perceptions of us can affect the cost and duration of our involvement. Our ultimate strategic success in bringing peace and security to this region will come in our long-term commitment to supporting our democratic ideals. We need to tell the factual story – good and bad – before others seed the media with disinformation and distortions, as they most certainly will continue to do. Our people in the field need to tell our story.

This directive can be read in a number of ways. If journalists in the field were embedded with the troops then they could surely see the story for themselves and report it to the wider world beyond the battlefield. Did this mean, then, that soldiers were to report their stories to the wider world via the embeds? This would shape the media as more of a conduit for the official version of events and thus more open to charges of propaganda. Or was the directive a method for ensuring journalists interpreted what they were seeing in a manner that was conducive to, or coincided with, the soldiers’ stories? Again, this would lay the media open to charges of vigorously supporting the military. Many members of the military had long been frustrated by the press corps’ apparent lack of knowledge and understanding of soldiering, especially since many in the press corps had little practical experience of military life since the end of the draft in the United States and national service in Britain. Such journalists may not have fully comprehended military events unless soldiers explained them. It was a nice twist from ‘seeing is believing’ to ‘believing is seeing’.

Before looking at how this relationship worked during combat operations, other notable aspects of the Pentagon’s February 2003 embedding agreement require examination. Apart from accompanying air, sea and ground forces ‘to ensure a full understanding of all operations’, the media would also be ‘given access to operational combat missions, including mission preparation and debriefing, whenever possible’. Dropping in on units in the tradition of ‘parachute journalism’ was not to be allowed; embedded journalists were expected to stay for weeks and even months, sharing the billeting, transport and other facilities afforded to the soldiers they were accompanying. While they were not allowed their own transport, they did have to bring their own equipment, which they would load, maintain and use themselves. The importance of speedy reporting within a real-time environment was fully appreciated. The agreement purported to enable reporters ‘to tell [their] story in a timely manner’ and also stated that ‘no communications equipment for use by media in the conduct of their duties will be specifically prohibited’. As a contingency, ‘in the event of commercial communications difficulties, media are authorised to file stories via expeditious military signal/communications capabilities.’ As for the philosophy behind any possible delay or prevention of copy, ‘the standard for release of information should be to ask “why not release” versus “why release”. Decisions should be made ASAP, preferably in minutes and not hours.’

The news organisations rather than the military allocated which reporters should become embedded. Freelancers would also have to be nominated by a recognised news outlet. This system resulted in bizarre appointments, such as Iran-Contra scandal figure Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and talk show host Geraldo Rivera for Fox News. Embedded reporters were to sign a release indemnifying the military from any lawsuit should something happen to them, although ‘the personal safety of correspondents is not a reason to exclude them from combat areas’. The unit commander had the right to exclude a reporter who was not deemed physically fit enough to undergo the ‘rigorous conditions required to operate with the forward deployed forces …. Gender will not be an excluding factor under any circumstance’. Female reporters, incidentally, became known as ‘fembeds’. The reporters would have to adhere to a mutually agreed set of ground rules and were reassured that these rules would ‘recognise the right of the media to cover military operations and are in no way intended to prevent release of derogatory, embarrassing, negative or uncomplimentary information’. All interviews with service personnel were to be on the record, the embeds could not carry firearms and their reports had to be generic rather than specific on such matters as troop sizes, positions and equipment.

At the end of the list was an amusingly worded item: ‘Use of lipstick and helmet-mounted cameras on combat sorties is approved and encouraged to the greatest extent possible.’ The inadvertent humour that stemmed from the mention of the tiny lipstick cameras was tied into media commentary on the fembeds. Over the previous decade, amidst charges of ‘dumbing down’ the news for purposes of ‘infotainment’, the competition for declining audiences had resulted in what one veteran British female correspondent had described as the ‘babe factor’. Female war correspondents had achieved fame because of their journalism skills in the past but now many women were being ostensibly employed more for their appearance than their ability. Moreover, female correspondents’ youth, and hence their inexperience, meant that they were dependent on military spokespeople to explain some of the technical developments. This dependency was implicitly understood in the US Public Affairs guidelines, although no reference was made to the cultural difficulties that Western female reporters might experience when reporting from Islamic societies.

The British equivalent of the Pentagon’s guidance was the Green Book, produced by the Ministry of Defence and updated in the early 1990s. The British were apparently caught by surprise by the American embed system, as there is no reference to it in this document. Instead, it mentions accredited correspondents who would be limited in number and still deployed in pools. In stark contrast to the Pentagon, which accepted any journalist despatched, under the UK’s arrangements the MoD granted reporters ultimate accreditation, thereby giving it a theoretical power to veto any reporter. The main concerns of the Green Book related to operational security, reporting of casualties and filming prisoners of war.

Once the fighting began, the experience of the embedded reporters varied, naturally, according to the experience of the units to which they were attached. Around 660 journalists were embedded with US forces and 150 with the British, but only 10 per cent of the total number of correspondents were involved in frontline combat. Nonetheless, those reporting live from the battlefield provided some of the most spectacular television footage ever seen. ‘It was like watching through 600 straws,’ said one senior American news executive, although often 540 of those straws showed nothing, such was the nature of combat. Viewers were seeing for the first time what ordinary soldiers had already discovered: the reality of war was moments of incredible brutality punctuated by long periods of boredom.

The sheer scale of the media presence was staggering. The BBC sent 200 of its people to the region, its largest foreign assignment ever. CNN fielded the same presence, while the three major American networks of ABC, NBC and CBS sent some 500 staff members to Kuwait. The New York Times deployed thirty employees to the region. There were also the new, regional, Arab media players, the most significant of which were al-Arabiya, Abu Dhabi TV and al-Jazeera.

Talk of that tired axiom, the ‘fog of war’, pervaded the first week of the fighting. Multitudes of reporters, especially those fuelling the relentless appetites of the 24-hour live broadcasting services (radio and television), were transmitting to viewers countless pieces of information; for reporters to stand back, take a deep breath and form a considered opinion was close to impossible. ‘This media war has swiftly become a fiendishly complex campaign, long on assertion and painfully short on delivery. Too many hearts, too many different minds,’ one senior British journalist concluded. The resultant confusion was more akin to a snowstorm of information than to a fog generated by the military authorities, mainly because the media management arrangements were far less intrusive than they had been in 1991. General Tommy Franks was much less of a star performer than ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf; Franks imposed his personality and policies on the media far less effectively than Schwarzkopf did. Aside from Franks, the main reason the media arrangements were less intrusive was that the Gulf War had first been conducted by an air war lasting a month, followed by a 100-hour ground war that was fought at night. In 1991 a news blackout was initially imposed, although this ban was quickly lifted as the progress of the forces grew. That progress, however, was so swift that some pool reporters found they were unable to get their copy back to the forward transmission units for timely use. As a result, viewers did not see that part of the conflict until it was over.

In 2003 the ground war began simultaneously with the air war. There were no pools this time; the journalists were embedded with the forces. Moreover, technology had improved considerably since 1991 and the embeds were able to broadcast live from the battlefront – within the usual constraints of operational security. This advance in technology had been foreshadowed in Afghanistan when John Simpson broadcast from the front line via his videophone. Though his pictures were not the usual broadcast standard they provided an unprecedented window into the battlefield. As Operation IRAQI FREEDOM began with a rapid push towards Baghdad, journalists gave running commentaries of the columns’ progress in real time.

One of the embedded journalists, Brian Appleyard of the London Sunday Times, wrote, ‘At first this device seemed like a propaganda triumph. The early shots of the US Cavalry blazing across the desert with CNN’s Walter Rogers bouncing alongside excitedly in his Humvee said exactly what the Pentagon wanted to hear – “there is no opposition, and it’s breakfast in Baghdad.”’9 He continued:

But then we woke from the dream of a quick, clean war and cheering Iraqis. Sandstorms, militia and fedayeen got in the way. Saddam – or one of his doubles – was alive and, more to the point, he was on television. Within a few days it was clear that the Iraqis were actually winning the propaganda war.

They are winning because, in stark contrast to the coalition, they keep it simple. They broadcast the message: we’re still here and we will win. Furthermore, they let reporters in Baghdad say more or less what they liked, censoring them invisibly to the viewer by restricting their movements.

And so we drink thirstily from the Baghdad trickle and then turn round to be drowned from the coalition flood. The key problem is the embeds. They are all over southern Iraq … and they’re all babbling excitedly, reacting, understandably, to every shot that’s fired and every rumour that flashes around the battlefield ….

The embeds are certainly tightly controlled, but the effect of their reports has been a massive loss of control for the military. The sheer volume of their reportage has swamped the media and wrong-footed the generals. Whether they like it or not, the mood now is that there has been a psychological and military miscalculation of enormous proportions and that has spread a damaging and depressed uncertainty amongst the British and American electorates.

As for [William Howard] Russell’s question – ‘Am I to tell these things or hold my tongue’ – well, there is no answer, there is only context. The context today is that of an enervated audience brought face to face with life on a battlefield they are not equipped to understand.

The first casualty of war is the truth and the wound is fatal.

Appleyard likened the snowstorm phenomenon to the Hollywood movie Groundhog Day:

The 24-hour news channels have become televisual hypertext. A banner headline beneath the picture tells us the story currently being covered, but, beneath, a news ticker keeps telling us other stories. What is true? What is important? Press the red interactive button and it gets worse – screens and menus proliferate. Ironically, the screen I found most restful was the still, commentary-free shot of the Baghdad skyline on BBCi [the BBC’s interactive TV services]. Only there, it seemed, was life going on as normal.

British forces on patrol in Umm Qasr. (Author)

British media ops in Umm Qasr, run by a highly efficient reservist captain. (Author)

This rampant media coverage caused some tension with the politicians, not least because the Iraqi town of Umm Qasr was reported to have been taken on nine separate occasions before it actually fell. CNN stated that the town had been taken over at the same time as al-Jazeera reported only heavy fighting. The UK Ministry of Defence announced three times over three days that it was secure, and then it fell. Geoff Hoon, the UK secretary of state for defence, blamed imprecise language: the coalition had not clearly differentiated the port and the town itself, which shared the same name. ‘Umm Qasr is a town similar to Southampton,’ he communicated to the House of Commons, meaning that the port and town were in separate places. ‘He’s either never been to Southampton, or he’s never been to Umm Qasr,’ said one British soldier on patrol in Umm Qasr. ‘There’s no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It’s more like Portsmouth.’ The media also had a field day with conflicting claims about the widely reported but fictitious Shi’a uprising in Basra. ‘Don’t look now, but the Shiites have hit the fan,’ punned Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto. As Foreign Secretary Jack Straw noted: ‘Twentyfour hour news actually changes the reality of warfare. The media is changing the nature of warfare, it is not just reporting on it.’

P. J. O’Rourke’s comment on embedding was typically succinct: ‘One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you’re not in the army. The whole idea of putting you in the army and not giving you a gun – gee, no thanks.’ Chris Ayres, who quoted O’Rourke’s comment in his book War Reporting for Cowards, was by his own admission not cut out to be a military correspondent. He had been covering the celebrity circuit in Los Angeles for the London Times before being embedded.

Prepared for the ‘worst camping trip of his life’, Ayres confessed that the first casualty was not so much truth but personal hygiene. He admitted that he was more interested in staying alive than staying objective: ‘It was then I realised the true genius of the embedding scheme. It had turned me into a Marine. I was thinking like a fighter, not a reporter. And yet I wasn’t a fighter. I was an idiot in a blue flak jacket.’ In this context, only four embedded journalists became fatalities in the first phase of the war, one of whom died of natural causes. Unilaterals suffered a more deadly toll: nine were killed. Incidentally, in the thirteen years of the US involvement in Vietnam the death toll was sixty-five Western reporters. Journalists were statistically ten times more likely to die than Western soldiers during the actual invasion.10 About twenty-four correspondents were disembedded out of 750 for a variety of offences or because of exhaustion or illness.

What was the overall assessment of embedding? The BBC’s Martin Bell said that it meant that journalists were not being accredited but rather recruited. Phillip Knightley’s verdict was even gloomier:

A radical American plan for managing wartime media perpetuated an illusion that the Iraq war was a triumph for modern media and its technology. In reality it was an overwhelming victory for the military and its propagandists. ... Given the increased danger, greater degree of manipulation and control by government, and the new emphasis on seeing the war through the eyes of soldiers, the age of the war correspondent as hero appears to be over.

Don McCullin, the renowned war photographer, was also scathing in his assessment:

If you’re ‘embedded’ with the army, you don’t have the real freedom to be among the population. You’re basically a dog on a leash, and who wants to be like that? It’s so different now. When I was in Vietnam with the American army during the Tet offensive, I could do what I wanted. I was sleeping under tables, yards from dead Vietnamese bodies. I photographed dying and terribly injured American soldiers. I am sure the Americans wouldn’t stand for that now.

It was a short, one-sided campaign; a veteran reporter argued that one of Saddam’s statues put up more of a fight than Saddam had himself. Yet the war produced excellent writing. John Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad, for example, has been compared with John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post is an Arab-American of Lebanese descent; he provided a fine perspective from the Iraqi point of view in Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War. Thus, Knightley’s verdict might be premature. Moreover, many heroic reports by journalists in Iraq came out after the initial invasion, at which point coalition forces were not in a position to protect themselves properly, much less control the media.

Atrocity Stories

Even before the war started, tales of the brutality of Saddam’s regime were deeply rooted in Western minds. Indeed, on the eve of hostilities Leader of the Opposition Iain Duncan Smith informed the British Parliament:

His [Saddam’s] main victims have been his own people. The tale of his rule of lawlessness is a litany of horror. Dissident women are raped, children are tortured and prisoners are trapped in steel boxes until they confess or die. As we have heard, chemical weapons have been used against the Kurds, and Shi’a villages razed to the ground.

Such statements were confidently based on evidence gathered for years by human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, including reports of tongue amputations and rapes of female family members for alleged slander against Saddam Hussein.

On 27 March President Bush and Prime Minister Blair held their first wartime summit. They did not miss the opportunity to reinforce their message about the brutality of the regime the coalition was fighting. Their purpose for the summit was to counter the most recent media scepticism about military and civilian casualties, reports of brutal fighting and doubts about the length of the war. President Bush commented on images of two British soldiers slain execution-style, which al-Jazeera had aired (the pictures were not shown by British broadcasters): ‘If anyone needed any further evidence of the depravity of Saddam’s regime, this atrocity provides it.’ This statement caused a minor storm in the UK, especially when the families of the two fallen soldiers, Sapper Luke Allsopp and Staff Sergeant Simon Cullingworth, were given extensive media coverage about how distressed they were at President Bush’s remark; the Ministry of Defence had led them to believe that their sons had been killed in action. A few days later General Mike Jackson was said, by one colleague, to have been ‘as close as I have ever known to a senior military officer calling his prime minister a liar’.

At their joint press conference President Bush also emphasised the moral stand of a democracy fighting a brutal dictatorship, citing reports that Iraqis were murdering citizens to blame the coalition for their deaths and were considering the use of chemical weapons. Bush said one Iraqi dissident had his tongue cut out and then bled to death after being tied to a stake in the town square, adding, ‘That’s how Saddam Hussein retains power.’ He continued, ‘If he uses weapons of mass destruction, it will just prove our case. And we will deal with it. We’ve got one objective in mind. That’s victory, and we’ll achieve victory.’

In his radio address to the nation on Saturday 29 March, President Bush reiterated the atrocities he maintained the Iraqi enemy had committed in the previous week:

In the last week the world has seen first-hand the cruel nature of a dying regime. In areas still under its control, the regime continues its rule by terror. Prisoners of war have been brutalised and executed. Iraqis who refuse to fight for the regime are being murdered. An Iraqi woman was hanged for waving at coalition troops. Some in the Iraqi military have pretended to surrender, then opened fire on coalition forces that showed them mercy. Given the nature of this regime, we expect such war crimes, but we will not excuse them. War criminals will be hunted relentlessly and judged severely.

Later that day, the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, accused the coalition of killing 140 civilians over the previous twenty-four hours and denied allegations that Iraqi soldiers were disguising themselves as civilians. Coalition sources, meanwhile, confirmed that an apparent suicide bomber had killed four American soldiers from the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division when a taxi stopped at a checkpoint outside Najef, the first of many such incidents to be reported in the war. Iraqi television said President Saddam Hussein had awarded the bomber, a junior army officer, two posthumous medals. More bombers would follow, threatened the Iraqis. Fox News, however, reported that the suicide bomber was a Saudi citizen linked to al-Qaeda.

The emotive association of suicide bombers with the Iraqis’ irregular warfare tactics helped bring the war on terrorism back into focus. This correlation was further augmented by reports from the northern front that US special forces had supported for the first time Kurdish Peshmerga troops against the Ansar-al-Islam, a terrorist group of around 700 members that had been linked with al-Qaeda. Ironically, two members of US special units were reported killed in an ambush in Afghanistan on that day.

Shaping the Information Space

British viewers awoke on Tuesday 25 March to reports that coalition aircraft had bombed a market in the al-Shaab district of Baghdad, with the loss of at least fourteen civilian lives. The Iraqis maintained it was a deliberate attack on civilians. In response to a reporter’s question at a United States Central Command (CENTCOM) briefing later that day, Deputy Director of Operations Brigadier General Vince Brooks said:

Embedded with US Marines in Baghdad. (Tim Lambon)

US Abrams tanks parked in Baghdad. (Tim Lambon)

We did have an air mission that attacked some targets, not in that area but in a different area, and during that period of time, they encountered surface-to-air missile fire ... we’ve seen uncontrolled surface-to-air missile fire. And what I mean by that is, normally they are controlled by radar, but there’s a hazard to turning on a radar against one of our aircraft, a very certain hazard, and so the firing crews have decided not to turn on the radar, and fire the missiles ballistically. They’re also using very old stocks, we’ve discovered, and those stocks are not reliable, and missiles are going up and coming down. So we think it’s entirely possible that this may have been, in fact, an Iraqi missile that either went up and came down, or given the behaviours of the regime lately, it may have been a deliberate attack inside of town.

Worse was to come. On Friday 28 March another marketplace was bombed, this time killing fifty-two people in a working-class suburb of Baghdad.11 Iraq blamed the coalition. Echoing the baby milk plant story, each side was jostling to dominate media opinion as to who were the good guys and who were the innocents. The media were ill-equipped to evaluate the complexities of bomb damage assessment; the military was trying to master the art of broadcasting damage assessment. What was lost – at least within the short span of the 24/7 news cycle – was the truth.

‘Shock and awe’, the term used by the media for Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, was part of a command and control doctrine (more formally called Rapid Dominance) that integrated a psychological element into the military campaign. Sunday Times journalist Brian Appleyard, who said the Gulf War was a ‘lockdown and a turkey shoot’ in which ‘operational imperatives came first, truth a poor second’, was among the few to recognise the new role of the media in information operations. He wrote:

Twenty-four hour live, on-the-spot television news with all its accompanying technology put an end to any hopes of a Falklands style shutdown when GW2 came round. So, instead, the plan was to weaponise the media as an aspect of ‘psy-ops’ – psychological warfare. They would be part of the ‘new kind of war’ dreamt up by Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon think-tankers. In this war technology would win quickly and cleanly and the grateful Iraqis would flood, cheering, onto the streets, to welcome liberal democracy. So why not let us watch?

After the first few days, however, especially after the failure of the opening decapitation strike, the coalition appeared as though it were fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Self-imposed limits on the deployment of firepower to minimise civilian casualties were part of the overall strategy to persuade the Iraqis that the war was about the removal of Saddam Hussein and not against them. The Iraqi propaganda machine was projecting the liberation of Iraq as an invasion by foreign mercenaries, and resistance surprised observers. As Defence Secretary Rumsfeld explained:

The outcome of this conflict is not in doubt. The regime will be removed. But, for our coalition of free people, we believe it is important not just to win, but to win justly. The power of our coalition derives not simply from the vast overwhelming force at our disposal, but from the manner in which we employ that force. The Iraqi people will see how we employ our force and know that we are coming not to occupy their country, not to oppress them, but to liberate their country.

Nonetheless, the failure to witness any further mass desertions was disappointing from the coalition’s point of view. In the aftermath of the previous Gulf War, when rebellions had occurred in the north and the south, the southern Shi’a uprising had received very little media attention – and no coalition assistance other than the establishment of the no-fly zone. Memories of that failure undoubtedly played a part in the reluctance of the civilian population to rise up again, at least until they could be reassured that the Saddam regime’s grip in the region had been destroyed. Often this involved attacks on the symbolism of the regime, as when British forces entered Basra on Saturday 29 March and destroyed two murals of Saddam. To reinforce the psychological– military force nexus, the British also destroyed a building in which 200 loyalist fanatics were meeting. None were reported to have exited the building. As a direct refutation of the coalition’s posture as liberator, the Iraqis responded by charging that the British were attacking civilian installations, food depots and the civilian population itself. As UK military expert Michael Clarke wrote:

British light armoured vehicle in Basra, at the start of the push north to Baghdad. (Author)

The US has got all the means to get messages across but has put far too little effort into understanding which messages are likely to work and which to insult the intelligence of a proud people. The British outside Basra feel they have a better approach – from the wording to use on leaflets, to the ‘message by action’ in al-Zubayr [on 23 March] when they identified the house of the much-feared local Ba’ath party leader and drove a Warrior light tank through his bedroom wall to snatch him straight from bed into custody. The Iraqis rather respect that. But the British approach to psy-ops is getting short shrift from their American commanders.12

The Iraqi Ministry of Information was bombed on the night of 28 March and in the early morning of 29 March, a day after the main communications centre, including the telephone exchange, was hit. Also on 29 March BBC Monitoring reported that Baghdad radio’s frequencies had been taken over by the coalition and were now broadcasting anti-Saddam statements. Despite this, and other reports of strikes against Iraqi television and radio, the regime’s propaganda was still broadcasting throughout the first week. Saddam named the heroes defending the Iraq motherland, including a farmer who was said to have shot down an Apache helicopter. Anti-war demonstrations from around the world featured prominently in news bulletins.

Unsung heroes: the local and army interpreters played a crucial role. Here a British army officer politely deals with complaints in Basra, May 2003. (Author)

From the annual Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood, Michael Moore – author of Stupid White Men – was shown denouncing President Bush and the war. After ten days, London’s Sunday Times pointed out that ‘the coalition should be winning the propaganda battle convincingly with Saddam’s rotten regime. As things stand it is, at best, a draw’.

In Donald Rumsfeld’s 28 March briefing at the Pentagon one journalist asked him if there was any deliberate attempt to disguise the number of dead and wounded. He replied indignantly:

Oh, my goodness! Now, you know that wouldn’t be the case. There’s no ... no one in this government, here or on the ground, is going to underreport what’s happening. That’s just terrible to think that. Even to suggest it is outrageous. Most certainly not! The facts are reported. [Pounds fist.] When people are killed, they’re killed and we face it. When people are wounded, we say so. When people are missing and we know they’re missing, we say so. And when we’re wrong and they wander back into camp, as several have recently, having been lost or with other units, we say so. Absolutely not!

When, on Saturday 29 March, the media spent most of the day reporting that the coalition had ordered a pause of four to six days in the advance on Baghdad to regroup – later denied by CENTCOM spokesmen – the Iraqi information minister called the reports a coalition deception and said Iraq would ‘cut the snake [of coalition convoys] in half’. Iraqi satellite television, meanwhile, showed pictures of three damaged American tanks and another vehicle abandoned near Najaf. The presenter said the crews had fled after a confrontation with Iraqis. Al-Jazeera television quoted an Iraqi military spokesman as saying Iraq had shot down a total of five coalition fighter planes, six drones, four helicopters and 130 cruise missiles, as well as having destroyed over 100 tanks and other armoured vehicles. Iraqi spokespeople made ludicrous claims, including the famous comment by the Iraqi minister of information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, dubbed ‘Comical Ali’ by the British media and ‘Baghdad Bob’ by the Americans: he had declared live on air that no American tanks were in Baghdad, only to have those non-existent tanks shown clearly in the background.

Closure: the world’s media are assembled to witness the ‘spontaneous’ pulling down of the Saddam statue in the centre of Baghdad. (Tim Lambon)

Coalition reports were far more credible, though the former editor of the liberal Guardian could still opine, ‘If, for reporters and their readers, there is one thing worse than the fog of war, it is the queasy perception that those in charge of the shooting match haven’t the foggiest idea what is going on.’13 And not the foggiest idea about an exit strategy. The American-staged toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad’s Paradise Square on 9 April gave the media a sense of closure. That scene was their exit strategy. The embeds nearly all drifted away, and the media’s money and resources quickly dwindled. If the embeds were a critical part of shaping the information space, both within Iraq and the strategic environment beyond it, then they could not be relied upon to fall in line with future public affairs or information operations strategies. The Pentagon was subsequently to contract work out to PR firms. And, as the insurgency worsened, debates about winning Iraqi hearts and minds through information operations (or ‘smile ops’ as some sceptics labelled it) became subsumed by worldwide outrage about media revelations in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. It should not be forgotten, however, that the notorious photographs of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners were not taken by reporters, but by the soldiers themselves.

Media scrum in Baghdad. Trying to take shots of General Petraeus. (Tim Lambon)

The Occupation Fiasco

The occupation fiasco was not inevitable. The disaster was created by the intellectual acrobatics of simultaneously ‘worst-casing’ the original Iraqi threat while ‘best-casing’ the subsequent costs of occupation. One of the finest accounts of the endless blunders during the occupation was by Thomas E. Ricks, the Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent, in his bestselling book Fiasco: The American Adventure in Iraq. In the book Ricks quotes Pamela Hess, a seasoned reporter for United Press International (UPI): ‘abominable’ was the term she used to describe the media operations of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the American administration in Baghdad. In Hess’s view, the CPA’s relationship soured with the press because of its insistence that all was well and the reporters’ consequent determination to disprove that contention. ‘Had they been more willing to admit that things were bad instead of putting lipstick on the pig, I think reporters would have been kinder,’ she said. The CPA acted more as a monitor of the media than a provider of information; Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, seemed strangely detached in the ‘Emerald City’, the Green Zone of seven square miles protected by 17-foot-high blast walls.14

The first nine months were marked by disaster – from the security vacuum that led to a locust storm of looting, to the army’s insane de-Ba’athification, which sent tens of thousands of armed, angry, unemployed young men into the streets. The initial military impetus and latent Iraqi gratitude that had caused the fall of Saddam was lost, as was the core of the hearts and minds campaign. US troops in their dramatic body armour and sunglasses looked as if they were delivering democracy for Darth Vader.

The capture of Saddam in December 2003 made little difference. Later, his bungled execution was a publicity disaster for the West and the Baghdad government. Pictures taken illicitly on a mobile phone by someone present at the hanging were yet another reminder that everyone with a phone was now a potential journalist. This phenomenon has been dubbed ‘citizen journalism’ by some. Many professional reporters, however, resent this phrase, preferring ‘electronic witnesses’ as a more appropriate description of people who record historical events on portable digital equipment and are supposedly incapable of interpreting the events as professional journalists would.

The transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004 did not appear to improve matters either. In the previous April the US military was fighting a major battle in Fallujah. In November a second major offensive was launched in the same town, ‘a modern-day Stalingrad with dust for snow’.15 A British television team from Channel 4 News, Lindsey Hilsum and cameraman and producer Tim Lambon, was at the heart of the fighting. Their reports won a series of major journalism awards. The Economist, often the voice of the British establishment, editorialised, ‘The very fact that Americans are having to fight so fiercely inside a major city, eighteen months after liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, is a sign of how close Mr Bush’s Iraq policy is teetering towards failure.’ The conservative Daily Telegraph in London pointed out, however, that ‘a snobbish tendency among the British’, who believed that American forces were ‘trigger-happy and unwilling to engage the enemy at close quarters’, had been dispelled.

In October and November 2005 Tim Lambon and Lindsey Hilsum were working in the south of Iraq; ‘I think the Brits have lost control of Basra and the south,’ Lambon wrote in his personal log (sent to me by e-mail). He continued:

They are now bit players with little influence, guarding their own patch and moving in great danger between their bases. In terms of the insurgency, from my experience of these things [Lambon had been a frontline soldier in the Rhodesian war, as well as covering numerous wars as a cameraman/producer], they have lost the war and it is irrecoverable despite what Tony Blah [sic] and his compadres might keep spouting ... . And what of the Yanks further north? Same thing ... Iraq is not a country moving inexorably towards democracy and freedom; it’s a deeply divided ex-state on the verge of a civil war.

In the United States the media were beginning to reappraise their previously uncritical support of the war. An initial casualty was Judith Miller of the New York Times. During a special prosecutor’s investigation into the leaking of a CIA agent’s identity, it was alleged that her ties with the wily Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon-favoured Iraqi exiled leader before the war, had led to false frontpage scoops that became fodder for White House propaganda.16 In November 2005 she resigned her post at the Times, which had earlier delivered a harsh assessment of its own performance. Daniel Okrent, the newspapers’ ombudsman, said that a few stories ‘pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets on the shoulders of editors’. In the New York Review of Books Michael Massing’s verdict was that many major newspapers had erred, but that the New York Times stood out in particular: ‘Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters.’

Many op-ed columns also recanted their opinion of Iraq. Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria, once a respected hawk on Iraq, wrote that the president’s ‘strange combination of arrogance and incompetence’ had proved ‘poisonous’ for American foreign policy. ‘On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq – troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani – Washington’s assumptions and policies have been wrong,’ he charged. Even the saintly Washington Post began a critical self-examination of its stories leading up to the war, though it did include a defensive caveat to its self-flagellation: ‘Whether a tougher approach by the Post and other news organisation would have slowed the rush to war is, at best, a matter of conjecture.’ That comment prompted a flood of angry letters from readers saying that citizens of a modern democracy did need to know the full facts.

An avalanche of books by journalists critical of the Bush war policy swept the American capital.17 Perhaps the most influential was a trilogy by the doyen of Washington journalists, Bob Woodward. In his third volume, State of Denial, he crafted a poignant vignette of Donald Rumsfeld’s return, in his seventies, to the office of secretary of defense, a post which he had held twenty-five years before: ‘He resembled John Le Carré’s fictional Cold War British intelligence chief, George Smiley, a man who “had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all”.’18 Rumsfeld resigned not long after these words were published. Another architect of the war, Paul Wolfowitz, had already stepped down from his post at the Pentagon. As with Robert McNamara after the Vietnam debacle, Wolfowitz set off to head the World Bank, yet presumably more as a form of self-vindication rather than McNamara’s act of atonement. Wolfowitz was later forced to resign after a media frenzy over his relationship with Shaha Riza, an employee of the World Bank. After a promotion and significant pay raise negotiated by Wolfowitz, Riza was transferred out of the bank. Documentaries also joined the assault on Bush. A film castigating the bias of Fox News titled Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism was a polemical satire in the same vein as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which grossed more than $100 million in the United States alone. Most of the books and films appealed to liberal sensibilities or, as the Washington joke ran, to neo-conservatives who had been mugged by reality. Comedian Al Franken’s book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, set out to debunk the myth of liberal control over the media.

Though the Bush-friendly Fox News remained the most popular news channel in the United States, the Washington media scandals continued. The alleged leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity resulted in the ill-fated New York Times journalist Judith Miller’s 85-day imprisonment in July 2005 for refusal to reveal sources. This sentence reinforced the media self-flagellation described earlier. In the end, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, took the rap for the leak from the White House – not his superior, Dick Cheney – becoming the highest-ranking White House official to be convicted in a government scandal in years (though President Bush commuted Libby’s jail sentence). Ten of the eighteen witnesses at Libby’s trial were journalists and ugly truths emerged about reporters who subscribed to the tenet of protecting sources first and informing the public second. However, as prosecutors continue to seek testimony from the press, forcing more and more journalists to betray their sources, the public interest will suffer. At the same time, Reporters Without Borders published a press-freedom index: America ranked 53 out of 168, trailing behind Bosnia and the Dominican Republic.

In further criticism regarding Iraq CNN’s Christiane Amanpour aired her belief that the US government had muzzled the press. In early 2007 she said, ‘Journalism had gone soft. The right questions weren’t asked in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and now the whole world is paying the price. Two years ago everybody got their spine back.’ Journalists, especially in the United States, began to question what the administration was withholding from the media. The Abu Ghraib disclosures set a precedent for subsequent scandals – for example, those concerning wire taps and secret rendition to overseas prisons. But the willingness of journalists to stall publication, whether for alleged national security reasons, for the convenience of politicians or to protect sources, raised the question again: what else are they not disclosing?

Two cases in particular provoked American concern about military veracity. On 22 April 2004 Corporal Pat Tillman of the 2nd Ranger Battalion was shot in Afghanistan. He was the first professional football player to be killed in combat since the Vietnam War. His decision to serve in Iraq, and later Afghanistan, had been the subject of extensive media attention, much of it welcomed by the US Army because of its potential to boost recruitment. He was killed in action in Afghanistan and was posthumously promoted and awarded the Silver Star for heroism during the firefight. Initially, the Army refused to release the full details of Tillman’s death to the media or to his family; however, the Washington Post, among other newspapers, investigated the story. It turned out that the firefight had been between members of Tillman’s unit: he had been killed by friendly fire. The Army very soon initiated what was effectively a series of enquiries into Tillman’s death, which led to a criminal investigation. At a 2007 congressional hearing Tillman’s brother Kevin, also a ranger and sports star, criticised the Pentagon for using them both as props in a public relations exercise.

In the same hearing Private First Class Jessica Lynch testified about battlefield misinformation. In March 2003 Lynch’s convoy was ambushed near Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq. Her time as a prisoner of war and subsequent rescue by American forces initiated numerous media stories, a book and an NBC television movie, transforming her into a ‘Rambo from West Virginia’. The Pentagon’s first official report, however, said that she did not appear to have defended herself against the Iraqis. Lynch had never fired a shot and had indeed been protected in captivity by Iraqi medical staff. In this case, the media (and local politicians in West Virginia) were to blame for the initial hype, not the military, though they did little to counter the flag-waving around the saving of Private Lynch.

The Iraq War inflicted another two high-profile American military casualties in June 2007. General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not re-appointed, even though he was widely expected to stay on. Vice Chairman Admiral Edmund Giambastiani also retired. The official version of the reasons behind this was that re-appointment proceedings would have been a ‘divisive ordeal’ for the military. The effective sacking of the two most senior American military officers was scheduled for Friday 8 June, an opportune time for two reasons. First, because bad news was much easier to bury in the summer. Second, since the news would be breaking on Friday the story would probably be stale by the following Monday and weekend television news shows were considered much ‘softer’. On 8 June the American media provided saturation coverage of the tearful return to prison of heiress Paris Hilton. The departure of the officers received minor airtime on the major talk shows. Cynical news managers in the Pentagon seemed to have assessed the media correctly.

Meanwhile, conditions in Iraq grew worse. By the end of 2006 US military combat deaths had reached 3,000. Bush deployed 21,500 more troops in a surge in January 2007, augmented by 7,200 troops in March. By January 2008 the troop influx had achieved some tactical success in reducing the violence. Nevertheless, the Iraq Body Count, a private British volunteer organisation, estimated the total of Iraqi civilians killed as 60,000, although the distinguished British medical journal the Lancet estimated in October 2004 that 100,000 Iraqis had been killed since the start of the war.

Bad news doesn’t usually get better with age. In Iraq, as the country’s communities collapsed in an ethno-sectarian civil war of savage proportions, the news worsened. In truth, it was not one war but a patchwork of acute internecine conflicts. Unless the limited tactical surge success became a strategic triumph throughout Iraq, President Bush had few valid options remaining to him except withdrawal. His public defence of his last-ditch surge policy rested on two premises, one tragic and the other inaccurate. The former, the inexplicable suggestion that more soldiers needed to fall to honour the memory of those who had already fallen. The latter, a need for more time for the Iraqi army ‘to step up to the plate’ to defend the Baghdad government – but there was no Iraqi army. ‘It was more accurate to describe them as forces on secondment from the Badr Army or the Peshmerga, benefiting from coalition training and advice to be used not to stabilise a unified Iraq, but to promote their particular ethno-sectarian interests’, according to one view published in a journal of Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. Managing the exit strategy and politely asking Iraq’s neighbours to avoid a wider regional war were President Bush’s last resorts.

On patrol with the Royal Military Police in Basra. Initially the locals were reasonably friendly – soon six RMPs were cornered and killed. (Author)

A revived Washington press corps, anxious to atone for its previous docility, was still met by a Bush administration frozen in omerta, as evident by the indictment of ‘Scooter’ Libby. To quote David Halberstam’s famous phrase after Vietnam, ‘the best and the brightest’ had failed, while the less stellar policymakers in Bush’s administration remained loyal, even when they slipped out of the government or were indicted. The British view is that American governments are chronically handicapped by the lack of a civil service hierarchy independent of politicians to give impartial advice; however, though beholden to a more belligerent local media, Whitehall probably would have behaved similarly. London agreed to every policy decision in the two-war strategy; Tony Blair had gambled on the pretence that the UK, politically, was an equal partner. In the third volume of Bob Woodward’s trilogy the only references to Blair are to how much, or how little, he should be informed. Iraq was Britain’s disgrace, too.

The Other Occupation

‘There are eleven million mines in this country – almost one for each person living here.’ The British sergeant’s voice booms in the briefing tent at Kabul airport. It is 2.30 in the morning and freezing cold. I am scribbling in an oldfashioned reporter’s notebook. The sergeant also warns of the endemic diseases, including anthrax and cholera. ‘Afghanistan has eleven types of venomous snakes and there are scorpions everywhere.’ He goes into some detail about a scorpion hiding in an Italian officer’s trousers. The sergeant also notes, ‘The driving here is terrible. And, by the way, prostitutes are available, but it’s illegal. And remember the police are heavily armed. They use RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] for traffic control.’

The Western mission in Afghanistan went through many stages, ending up trying to train the Afghan army. But President Karzai had so little power in the country that he was dubbed the Mayor of Kabul. (NATO)

This guide to the dangers and peoples of Afghanistan was a military briefing in May 2002 to tired journalists and fresh troops. A British general was commanding five thousand troops from nineteen nations in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). ISAF, later a NATO force, was distinct from the US troops fighting in the east of the country still chasing bin Laden and Taliban remnants. As in Iraq, the Western troops were charged with bringing democracy, reconstruction and peace, particularly via training a new national army and police force. The recently installed president, Hamid Karzai, controlled about 10 per cent of the country; journalists dubbed him the ‘mayor of Kabul’. His government had to negotiate with the remaining 90 per cent, which meant using force or bribes. British troops were quite effective in stabilising the capital. Many schools, even for girls, were opened. But Kabul’s Western-backed government – whose mantra was ‘disarmament, demobilisation and reconstruction’ – needed money, and quickly, if it were to survive.

The promised reconstruction money didn’t arrive in time or in sufficient quantities. When the correct amount did occasionally land in time, it was often misused by ignorant Westerners or corrupt locals. Banditry, warlordism and drug-running were rampant; the anarchy thus enabled the Taliban to regroup and take over much of the Pashtun south. Production of opium held the Afghan system together; if disbanding Saddam’s army was the prime mistake in Iraq, threatening to destroy the opium crop was the disaster in Afghanistan. Ninety per cent of the heroin on European streets allegedly came from Afghanistan. Rather than banning or controlling the heroin supply, some experts viewed legalisation as the only rational route, especially considering the worldwide shortage of morphine-related medical drugs. Instead, occasional attempts were made to destroy a few opium fields in the south. Then the Americans threatened to indulge in mass spraying, which was considered manna from heaven for Taliban propagandists. Meanwhile, production and profits exploded: ‘For Afghanistan’s drugs lords, business was very good under the United States Central Command,’ declared one distinguished American journalist.19 Some correspondents did support the war on drugs in Afghanistan, however. ‘Name your crisis in Afghanistan – insurgency, corruption, porous borders, weak government control – and at its source you’ll find the raw, sticky gum of opium,’ wrote Washington-based writer Sam Dealey.20

The 5,000-plus British troops in the south, especially in Helmand Province, bore the brunt of the fighting as Taliban commanders ordered their own surges in 2005 and 2006. At home the UK suffered its worst-ever terrorist attack when four British-born or British resident suicide bombers hit the London transport infrastructure on 7 July 2005. By this stage the British had privately agreed with Washington to withdraw from Iraq to strengthen their operations in Afghanistan. A two-front war was threatening to break the British Army. As ever, the British complained about heavyhanded US tactics in Afghanistan; the anger generated by such tactics spread into the lawless tribal areas that snaked 1,700 miles between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

German forces as part of the ISAF deployment in Kabul, 2002. It was strange to see the German cross in a war zone again. (Author)

On patrol with British troops in Kabul, 2002. The locals, assuming I was the translator, came up to me and regularly asked if the Russians had come back. (Author)

British troops occupied a former Russian observation point overlooking a major road access to Kabul, 2002. (Author)

ISAF media facility in Kabul in early 2002. (Author)

As Iraq descended into the sectarian hell of Shi’a versus Sunni, the internal conflict in Afghanistan raged within the largest Sunni ethnic group, the Pashtuns, who were divided between the anti-Western fundamentalists, many of whom lived in Pakistan or the adjoining tribal areas, and the pro-Western, less fundamentalist Pashtuns who dominated the government and the security forces in Kabul. Though the Afghan army had performed better than its equivalent in Iraq, President Karzai’s grip on the country was loosening by 2007. As with Iraq, Afghanistan’s fate would be dictated by its citizens and its neighbouring states, not an army of occupiers. The return of a chastened Taliban to Kabul, probably by negotiation this time, threatened defeat for the reputation of NATO and for the West in general. The Taliban’s presence in Kabul’s government was better, though, than an actual major Western military reversal on the ground in the Afghan plains.

Afghan government policy forced British troops to defend isolated positions, known as ‘platoon houses’, in Helmand Province. The Taliban came close to capturing a number of them. In mid-summer 2006 a British journalist was nearly killed while on patrol with members of the Parachute Regiment. Because of the danger involved, the Ministry of Defence stopped mounting media visits to the platoon houses, assuming that Western journalists could not access the region on their own. The Taliban, however, continued to publicise its own successes. The Ministry eventually backed down and allowed journalists access, including Mick Smith of the London Sunday Times. Smith wrote, ‘Despite the Terry Lloyd incident [when a British non-embedded journalist was killed by American friendly fire in Iraq], US forces are generally much more receptive to a media presence – there was a New York Post journalist embedded with the US Marines who killed Lloyd.’21

In March 2007 I asked Chris Hughes, of the mass-circulation British tabloid the Daily Mirror, to summarise his experiences in southern Afghanistan:

In November 2006 I was part of a team that reported from Nowzad in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, and wrote several spreads detailing how British troops were under fire daily and nightly from rebel forces and what it is like to be with them when that happens. We detailed what ‘reconstruction’ means – in the sense that, after RPG [rocketpropelled grenade] attacks, thousands of machine-gun rounds and cannon sorties from British Harrier jets, they would leave several Taliban dead and a town in ruins. Afterwards the Brits would – under air cover from NATO jets – fill in a hole in the street, just to show the Taliban they were not going to let the war stop them from trying to help the local community. Filling in that hole in the street took two jets, a troop of Royal Marines and a dozen engineers, and we debated the futility of this. More than 50 Brits have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001 and I would like to think reports like the one we filed from Nowzad may have helped people back home decide whether it is worth it. Every death of a British soldier we report in our paper has a political impact because the Secretary of State, each time, sees fit to deliver a statement on the death. So I believe strongly that if we keep writing about what is happening out there we will keep making politicians uncomfortable about the decisions they are making. I don’t necessarily believe that they are wrong, I just think we should keep hammering away at them to keep on their toes. It’s their job to be questioned constantly and that’s what we are doing.

NATO patrol in the last stages of major operations in Afghanistan (NATO)

The last AWACs plane leaves Afghanistan in 2014. (NATO)

As the British death toll mounted in both countries, but especially in Afghanistan, the ‘bring-the-troops-home’ mood expanded and threatened to undermine the lame-duck premiership of Tony Blair. When the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, criticised policy in Iraq and said occupation troops were sometimes exacerbating the crisis, the British media went into overdrive. Never before had Britain’s most senior serving Army officer openly challenged government policy. Dannatt’s soldiers and the majority of the public praised his courage, though it threatened a constitutional crisis in addition to feeding the media frenzy.

Troubles elsewhere

Darfur

When the United States launched its invasion of Iraq a rebellion erupted in Darfur, Sudan’s western region, which is the same size as Texas. Later, bin Laden welcomed this revolt as a new front. Although Sudan had long been at the top of the US agenda, after 9/11 Sudan’s government in Khartoum had conjured up a massive charm offensive to woo Washington away from sending more cruise missiles.22 In 1998 President Clinton attacked Khartoum with cruise missiles and thereafter the Islamist regime had tried to appease Washington. In a rare foreign policy success for Washington in 2005 American diplomats played an important role in ending the fifty-year war between Sudan’s north and south. Strangely, neither the Bush administration nor the American media covered much of the story. The new war in Sudan’s western territories, however, generated major media attention. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the fighting and millions became refugees, prompting accusations of genocide from the State Department. This mass extermination, however, was not ethnic cleansing on the Bosnian model. The combatants were all Muslims – indeed ardent Muslims – who had fought over land and grazing rights for decades; many Darfurians blamed the imperial land allocation system implemented when the British conquered the area in 1916. Though the African Union (AU) sent in a small, inadequate force to monitor events, it could not stop the extensive atrocities committed by both the insurgents and the Khartoum government. When a UN force was mooted the Sudanese regime interpreted this discussion as Western intervention. In late 2007 a joint UN–AU hybrid force was sent. Direct Western military intervention, unlikely because of overstretch in Iraq and Afghanistan, could perhaps have united Darfur’s many factions in a joint war against infidel outsiders.23

Darfur was a much-misreported war. Sudan Liberation Army insurgents, 2004. (Author)

Though inaccessible, Darfur became an emotive, if intermittent, story for television. The regime in Khartoum was always blamed, yet not always fairly. In fact the complexities of this war were rarely explored adequately in the media. Analyst Alex de Waal and the Guardian’s Jonathan Steele were notable exceptions in the UK, while Sam Dealey and Scott Anderson covered the war effectively for American publications. US troops on the ground, presuming any could be spared, were highly unlikely in Darfur. Instead, NATO and UN advisers augmented the AU troops in a hybrid peacekeeping force – which was still ineffective. There was no military solution to the problem. None of the insurgents could win in Darfur, nor could peacekeepers impose peace. The extensive Western political pressure that had ended the main north–south civil war was required. The Pentagon was aware of the growth of al Qaeda-style groups in the region. Inadvertently stoking the fire in Darfur could have galvanised jihadism throughout northern Africa, making it a source of Islamic extremist pressure on Western Europe.

The big story was not being articulated properly, not even the tragedy in Darfur that had prompted such international attention. If the AU forces could not organise their own pay corps then they would never assemble an efficient public affairs system; the insurgents were too distracted by infighting to handle media management, while Khartoum’s clumsy attempts at media–military relations were usually counter-productive. Furthermore, with the famine-like conditions and the intimidating tribal complexities, it is no wonder that so few journalists spent long enough in the country to get a handle on the story.

Lebanon

Lebanon was equally complicated but much more accessible and comfortable than Darfur for the journalists. The 34-day conflict in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 crystallised many of the simmering issues in the Middle East, as the West lay exposed in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa. The war was begun by accident: Hezbollah had not expected that its seizure of two Israeli soldiers would prompt such a massive response by the Israeli government. Hezbollah’s highly potent kind of warfare had the potential for a profound strategic impact throughout the Middle East. Previously Israel could have captured Beirut in a week but in 2006 it struggled for more than a month to control small villages on its own border.

The Arab media lambasted the British and the Americans for not backing a UN ceasefire early in the conflict, interpreting this delay as a desire to allow Israel the time to defeat Hezbollah. They may have been accurate in this assumption. The Arab television stations, notably al-Jazeera, broadcast nonstop coverage of the insurgents’ resistance to Israel’s weaponry, which failed to ‘shock and awe’. The BBC coverage was also impressive. The Independent’s Robert Fisk, long a resident of Lebanon, was well placed to augment his fine reputation for outspoken commentary on the region.

A novel hybrid, Hezbollah blended the sophistication and weaponry of a formal army with the near-invisibility of a hit-and-run insurgency. Fighting as tenaciously as the Viet Cong, Hezbollah dramatically modernised classic guerrilla tactics. Traditional armies are large, often cumbersome and organised in a disciplined hierarchy. Networks such as Hezbollah had numerous widely dispersed, agile and able soldiers who could improvise quickly, not least in their use of high-tech communications for broadcasting propaganda around the Arab world.

White flags were not in evidence. Arab media highlighted Hezbollah’s decision to face the Israeli military, unlike Arab forces in earlier wars. Morale, organisation, hi-tech weaponry and the cult of martyrdom generated effective resistance. Insurgents were adapting and rapidly learning from one another. After 2006 lessons on elaborate, air-conditioned bunker systems were undoubtedly being PowerPointed around the jihadist world. Previously Israel had managed to wipe out conventional armies in days – even when caught by surprise, such as in the 1973 war. By contrast, the IDF was ground down in 2006 and suffered major casualties at home because of rocket attacks. Israel’s military and political media machine not only struggled to persuade the outside world of any successes, it also caused its own Jewish population to question the capacity of the generals and politicians who led the war. Israel’s lively and often irrepressible press would soon attack the country’s military performance. And, unlike the mechdalim (the mistakes) of 1973, a surprise attack could not be used as an excuse.

Hezbollah performed better than the conventional forces of every Arab state that had fought Israel since 1948. It won a stunning propaganda victory and shattered Israel’s deterrence posture. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah achieved what Osama bin Laden had never managed: he had united Shi’as and Sunnis, especially the young, throughout the region in the belief that the Muslim renaissance could only come into being through force. If Iraq had demonstrated the limits of US power, the war in Lebanon displayed Israel’s weaknesses. Radical Islam was the victor. The IDF experience gave the United States pause before seriously considering an attack on Iran to prevent its nuclear programme. The Iranians might fight as effectively as their students in Hezbollah.

Arabs were not used to military victories. Hezbollah’s success galvanised jihadists worldwide. Iran, for example, displayed a long reach, ranging from attacks in Latin America to likely command of sleeper cells in the United States. The supine political response of the Sunni Arab leaders, meanwhile, who privately loathed Shi’a success, played badly in the Arab street. Militant Islam threatened to displace secular despotisms, including Syria, a supporter of Hezbollah, which had acted as Iran’s expeditionary force in Lebanon. The media, of course, encamped in droves in Beirut and along the Israeli border with Lebanon. Understandably, most of their reportage was of the bang-bang variety, although some later placed the war in context. This summer war, however, along with chaos in Iraq and the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, was a major watershed in the long war against jihadism.

Hearts and Minds in the Long Haul

The United States conducted an abysmal propaganda war in the first five years of the ‘war on terror’. The Pentagon then altered the original meaning of the war on terror and fashioned it as more of an enemy of an ideology, not a method of fighting. Donald Rumsfeld opted for ‘a global struggle against violent extremism’. President Bush was wisely advised to stop his use of ‘crusade’. It made little difference, though, on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. In November 2001 US planes ‘accidentally’ hit the al-Jazeera office in Kabul; two years later the accident was repeated when the station’s Tareq Ayoub was killed in Baghdad. As one of al-Jazeera’s former reporters concluded, ‘So long as al-Jazeera continues to challenge this [US-dominated] media order, its journalists and bureaux will remain in American sights.’24 Strategically, the United States failed, according to Rumsfeld, because ‘our federal government is really only beginning to adapt our [media] operations to the twenty-first century. For the most part, the US government still functions as a five-and-dime store in an e-Bay world’. The Secretary of Defense quoted Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s chief lieutenant: ‘More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. We are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of Muslims.’

In Iraq much more than a ‘five and a dime’ were spent on buying hearts and minds. Over the first three years of occupation several hundred million dollars were spent on an assortment of media projects designed to sell ‘good news’ stories. Perhaps the most notorious involved an American company, the Lincoln Group – contracted to pay for positive news stories written by US military personnel and placed in Iraqi publications – which was accused of being ‘an unethical weapon of mass deception’.25 Some senior officers in the Pentagon and Democrats in Congress argued that it was hypocritical for the country to promote democratic principles of freedom of speech and political transparency in Iraq while the military was paying to disseminate propaganda there. Alvin Snyder, formerly in the US Information Agency, said that this was ‘psy-ops journalism ... a new breed of journalists is following the money trail to the Pentagon’.26 Though Rumsfeld argued that non-traditional means of getting the message across were required, he criticised the practice of buying space in Iraqi papers. A military enquiry, however, found no evidence of wrongdoing, except for minor contractual issues. The Washington Post editorialised that, whether or not it violated regulations, it was still a questionable idea. Insiders in the Pentagon suggested that the buying of good news subsequently carried on as before.

Ginger Cruz, the director of strategic communications in the Green Zone’s US embassy in Baghdad, commented in a draft report in late 2006 that ‘without popular support from the US population, there is a risk that troops will be pulled back ... . Thus there is a vital need to save popular support via message’. Most of the sixteen domestic messages for the American public could have been boiled down to the obvious: ‘There are no quick and easy answers.’ The secret draft then had a section for Iraqi messages. Underneath the heading was written ‘TBD’ – to be determined. The rest of the document could be summarised thus: the United States has clearly lost the battle for Iraqi public opinion.

The insurgents, especially in the Sunni heartland, were becoming mediasavvy. Most largescale attacks on US forces were being filmed with high-resolution cameras, often from multiple camera angles, and then expertly edited before being set to inspiring, religious soundtracks. In a few cases the attacks were launched primarily to generate fresh footage. Compilation DVDs were sold in Baghdad markets for as little as fifty cents. As the rapid dissemination of the film of Saddam’s hanging proved, new mobile-phone technology made jihadist videos easy to download and circulate. Such films, allied to the graphic images shown on popular Arab television satellite channels, all gave the impression that coalition forces were on the run. Particularly popular, and not only in Iraq, were the slickly produced adventures of ‘Juba the sniper’. In a fifteen-minute video, the camera follows an American soldier from a distance as he stands near his vehicle and chats with a fellow soldier. Then the sound of rifle fire is heard. The soldier is seen falling to the ground as his panicked comrades swarm around him. Such videos discouraged co-operation with US troops and inspired donations and recruits for the jihadists. ‘One of these videos is worth a division of tanks to those people [insurgents],’ said Robert Steele, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. Along with its planted material in Iraqi newspapers (viewed with utter scepticism by Iraqis), the US propaganda effort was bureaucratic and unwieldy compared to the small and nimble insurgent propaganda systems that relied on the Web and mobile phones for rapid results.

A British expert on counter-insurgency, Dr John Mackinlay, commented on the coalition’s failure thus: ‘In crude terms our inability to engage the Muslim audience arose from a collision between the government-controlled information machinery of the West, outraged Muslim sensibilities and a “free” press characterised by its under-regulated lust for sensationalism.’ Few journalists would agree with him, especially about the under-regulation, though they might concur with his argument that ‘after the 1991 war the Americans demonised the Arab as the new villain. In a series of sand, oil and special-forces films, Hollywood directors, seldom acclaimed for their subtlety, portrayed the Arab black-hat stereotype as “inferior, chaotic, corrupt and violent”.’27

News stations such as al-Jazeera gave Arabs an alternative that re-affirmed rather than denigrated their self-image. The chronicler of the station, Hugh Miles, noted:

In Afghanistan al-Jazeera had been popular because it was the only foreign network there. During the invasion of Iraq al-Jazeera was watched through choice. It had broken the hegemony of the Western networks and, for the first time in hundreds of years, reversed the flow of information, historically from West to East.

But it would be wrong to blame the media for the fall of the West in the Middle East. It was Western policy and its implementation, not the messenger. Martin Bell summarised the recent adventures: ‘The United States and Britain didn’t make a coalition, but a gang of two, a latter-day Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, armed and dangerous and tilting at oilfields.’ Neo-conservative dreams of reforming the Middle East died in places such as Fallujah, Ramadi and Tal Afar. Chris Hughes, the defence correspondent of the Daily Mirror, offered his obituary on the American occupation in his memoir, The Road to Hell:

Camp Delta was the ultimate symbol of US failure in the hearts and minds campaign

There are plenty of Americans in Iraq, military and otherwise, who are decent men and women doing their best to help the Iraqis rebuild their country. But for all George Bush’s talk of winning ‘hearts and minds’ a significant number of US soldiers on the ground seem little more than gum-chewing grunts with nothing but scorn for the people they have conquered.

The major incidents have made headlines around the world – the massacres in Fallujah and Haditha, the Abu Ghraib disgrace, the rape of a young girl and the murder of her family in the summer of 2006. But dreadful as these (we hope) isolated happenings are, it’s the humdrummery, the banal, everyday abuse and the casual contempt that too many American soldiers show the Iraqi population that is truly unforgivable.

Iraq had failed the reality test: the state possessed no WMDs and no link with al-Qaeda. Doing away with Saddam may have benefited Iraqis but it was also a major diversion in the fight against al-Qaeda and a propaganda gift to the jihadists. As the grand old man of American columnists, George F. Will, observed in March 2006: ‘All three components of the “axis of evil” – Iraq, Iran and North Korea – are more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002.’ The ranks of Islamic extremists had been massively boosted, while American resources had been exhausted in confronting the expanded threat. ‘Worse still,’ he continued, ‘President Bush has lost the war of ideas that, in the end, was the most potent American weapon for battling the nihilism of radical Islam.’

Many experts who did their time in Iraq, both military officers and war correspondents, reached the same conclusion: Iraq threatened a military defeat or at the very least a serious diplomatic reversal for the Americans and the British. Many wanted Washington to relearn the lessons of the Cold War – the need for alliances, not least in Europe; economic and cultural engagement; and subtle diplomacy, especially with Iran – the keys to a semblance of an orderly total withdrawal from Iraq. As it happened the Western debacles in Iraq were conjuring up something way beyond Washington’s worst nightmare: a pugnacious jihadist state.