[Reader-list] The real war and the info war

[Ravi Sundaram]

Fisk wrote this before the actual drive to war, but its a pretty good 
analysis of the info-war model, so efficiently tested in the first gulf war...


The war of misinformation has begun
By Robert Fisk

16 March 2003

All across the Middle East, they are deploying by the thousand. In the 
deserts of Kuwait, in Amman, in northern Iraq, in Turkey, in Israel and in 
Baghdad itself. There must be 7,000 journalists and crews "in theatre", as 
the more jingoistic of them like to say. In Qatar, a massive press centre 
has been erected for journalists who will not see the war. How many times 
General Tommy Franks will spin his story to the press at the nine o'clock 
follies, no one knows. He doesn't even like talking to journalists.

But the journalistic resources being laid down in the region are enormous. 
The BBC alone has 35 reporters in the Middle East, 17 of them 
"embedded"  along with hundreds of reporters from the American networks and 
other channels  in military units. Once the invasion starts, they will lose 
their freedom to write what they want. There will be censorship. And, I'll 
hazard a guess right now, we shall see many of the British and American 
journalists back to their old trick of playing toy soldiers, dressing 
themselves up in military costumes for their nightly theatrical 
performances on television. Incredibly, several of the American networks 
have set up shop in the Kurdish north of Iraq with orders not to file a 
single story until war begins  in case this provokes the Iraqis to expel 
their network reporters from Baghdad.

The orchestration will be everything, the pictures often posed, the angles 
chosen by "minders", much as the Iraqis will try to do the same thing in 
Baghdad. Take yesterday's front-page pictures of massed British troops in 
Kuwait, complete with arranged tanks and perfectly formatted helicopters. 
This was the perfectly planned photo-op. Of course, it won't last.

Here's a few guesses about our coverage of the war to come. American and 
British forces use thousands of depleted uranium (DU) shells  widely 
regarded by 1991 veterans as the cause of Gulf War syndrome as well as 
thousands of child cancers in present day Iraq  to batter their way across 
the Kuwaiti-Iraqi frontier. Within hours, they will enter the city of 
Basra, to be greeted by its Shia Muslim inhabitants as liberators. US and 
British troops will be given roses and pelted with rice  a traditional Arab 
greeting  as they drive "victoriously" through the streets. The first news 
pictures of the war will warm the hearts of Messrs Bush and Blair. There 
will be virtually no mention by reporters of the use of DU munitions.

But in Baghdad, reporters will be covering the bombing raids that are 
killing civilians by the score and then by the hundred. These journalists, 
as usual, will be accused of giving "comfort to the enemy while British 
troops are fighting for their lives". By now, in Basra and other 
"liberated" cities south of the capital, Iraqis are taking their fearful 
revenge on Saddam Hussein's Baath party officials. Men are hanged from 
lamp-posts. Much television footage of these scenes will have to be cut to 
sanitise the extent of the violence.

Far better for the US and British governments will be the macabre discovery 
of torture chambers and "rape-rooms" and prisoners with personal accounts 
of the most terrible suffering at the hands of Saddam's secret police. This 
will "prove" how right "we" are to liberate these poor people. Then the US 
will have to find the "weapons of mass destruction" that supposedly 
provoked this bloody war. In the journalistic hunt for these weapons, any 
old rocket will do for the moment.
Bunkers allegedly containing chemical weapons will be cordoned off  too 
dangerous for any journalist to approach, of course. Perhaps they actually 
do contain VX or anthrax. But for the moment, the all-important thing for 
Washington and London is to convince the world that the casus belli was 
true  and reporters, in or out of military costume, will be on hand to say 
just that.

Baghdad is surrounded and its defenders ordered to surrender. There will be 
fighting between Shias and Sunnis around the slums of the city, the 
beginning of a ferocious civil conflict for which the invading armies are 
totally unprepared. US forces will sweep past Baghdad to his home city of 
Tikrit in their hunt for Saddam Hussein. Bush and Blair will appear on 
television to speak of their great "victories". But as they are boasting, 
the real story will begin to be told: the break-up of Iraqi society, the 
return of thousands of Basra refugees from Iran, many of them with guns, 
all refusing to live under western occupation.
In the north, Kurdish guerrillas will try to enter Kirkuk, where they will 
kill or "ethnically cleanse" many of the city's Arab inhabitants. Across 
Iraq, the invading armies will witness terrible scenes of revenge which can 
no longer be kept off television screens. The collapse of the Iraqi nation 
is now under way ...
Of course, the Americans and British just might get into Baghdad in three 
days for their roses and rice water. That's what the British did in 1917. 
And from there, it was all downhill.

Weasel words to watch for

'Inevitable revenge'  for the executions of Saddam's Baath party officials 
which no one actually said were inevitable.

'Stubborn' or 'suicidal'  to be used when Iraqi forces fight rather than 
retreat.

'Allegedly'  for all carnage caused by Western forces.

'At last, the damning evidence'  used when reporters enter old torture 
chambers.

'Officials here are not giving us much access'  a clear sign that reporters 
in Baghdad are confined to their hotels.

'Life goes on'  for any pictures of Iraq's poor making tea.

'Remnants'  allegedly 'diehard' Iraqi troops still shooting at the 
Americans but actually the first signs of a resistance movement dedicated 
to the 'liberation' of Iraq from its new western occupiers.

'Newly liberated'  for territory and cities newly occupied by the Americans 
or British.

'What went wrong?'  to accompany pictures illustrating the growing anarchy 
in Iraq as if it were not predicted.

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