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| Antonia Zerbisias: 'Gulf War 2.0: The Son... |
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| sabri |
| 03/02/03 at 14:43:01 |
| [slm] Antonia Zerbisias: 'Gulf War 2.0: The Son Strikes Back' Expect lots of effects but little substance By Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star If the U.S. invades Iraq, we'll see action all right, much more than we witnessed with the primitive Pong-ish effects delivered during Gulf War 1.0, In The Name Of The Father. But what kind of action? Military-sanctioned video from embedded reporters? Herky-jerky reporting from the field as opposed to hotel rooftops? Bigger studio sandboxes for the anchors and experts back home? Or the ugly truth of war? The decapitated heads, shattered bodies, carbonized corpses, limbless torsos and human beings screaming like slaughterhouse animals as U.S. President George W. Bush's much-vaunted "shock and awe" rain of fire, brimstone and Tomahawk missiles finds its victims? Consider how U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talks about how Saddam Hussein "deliberately constructs mosques near military facilities, uses schools, hospitals, orphanages and cultural treasures to shield military forces, thereby exposing helpless men, women and children to danger." Can this mean that mosques, schools, hospitals, orphanages and cultural treasures are on his hit list? Imagine the carnage. Twelve years ago in the Star, when I was tracking TV coverage on the eve of the last blasting of Baghdad, I wrote, "With their little computer troops, animated planes, studio-ready military experts and giant Persian Gulf game boards, the Amnets were playing news Nintendo — with real lives at stake." As it turned out, the sterile graphics and Pentagon-controlled news conferences masked the grim and grotesque consequences of the missiles, the fact that their targets included civilians as well as soldiers, bomb shelters as well as bunkers, mothers and children as well as men and materiel. "Television will never bring you the full horrors of war. That's impossible," says CBC-TV's Brian Stewart, who has covered some of the most vicious wars of our time. "No matter what television does show, it will never be more than one-thousandth of just how horrible it is. It's always sanitized, even by virtue of being shown through a lens." Remember the little animations of how those so-called smart bombs could turn corners and zoom in on munitions plants and not milk factories? We were lied to. Judging by most of what we saw, Gulf War 1.0, officially known as Desert Storm, was a clean conflict, a surgical-strike war, in which the only damage was "collateral" — as if tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of human beings didn't die. But back then, journalists were mostly caged in hotels and military briefing tents. There was no way to source or corroborate what they were being fed by the military flackery. And, even if they could check, how much of it would have reached their audiences before it would be censored by higher-ups for aesthetic, political or profit motives? As noted British reporter John Pilger has observed, "This was the most covered war in history and pretty well everyone missed the story." Don't believe it? Check out Peter Turnley's The Unseen Gulf War at The Digital Journalist Web site (digitaljournalist.org). Ask yourself if you ever saw these pictures on ABC's Good Morning America. As Turnley notes, "I feel a responsibility to try to contribute to making sure with my images that no one that sees the brutal realities of conflict ever feels that war is comfortable and/or convenient." Indeed, there were tales circulating at the time that President Bush the Elder was so shaken by images such as Turnley's that they contributed to his never finishing the job in Iraq. If he couldn't take it, how could Middle America? And how would that be good for keeping advertisers, already gun-shy about the war coverage? So, despite all the newly souped-up satellite phones and digitally compressed data transmission technology, it's likely that, again, death and destruction will have minor roles during Gulf War 2.0, The Son Strikes Back. That means don't count on the networks showing us many casualties, Iraqi or American. As a leaked CNN internal memo indicates, all reportage will be carefully screened. Hardly surprising: Pictures can turn the tide of history. Like Paul Watson's Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of a U.S. pilot's body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, or like the Vietnam-era photo of a naked 9-year-old Kim Phuc running screaming from the burning napalm on her back — both images that helped reshape American public opinion of U.S. foreign policy — new pictures from Iraq might provoke political blowback on the home front. "The things we see — the filth and obscenity of corpses — cannot be shown," British war correspondent Robert Fisk recently wrote. "First, because it is not `appropriate' to depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second, because if what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again agree to support a war." The Pentagon has taken steps to ensure such pictures, even if captured by brave and enterprising journalists, might never make it out of Iraq. "All TV and radios in Baghdad, including those of foreign media, will be blacked out by (microwave) weapons," The Toronto Sun's Eric Margolis reported last week. "The world may not see any civilian casualties from the bombing campaign or any subsequent street fighting." Can it be a coincidence that this war is being brought to us by a bunch of men, most of whom have never been up close and personal with violent and explosive death? Bush, his Vice President Dick Cheney and many of their minions managed to sit out Vietnam, thanks to their wealth and/or connections. Notes Fisk, who has witnessed more horrors in a minute than all these "Chicken Hawks," as their critics call them, put together have ever seen: "We are going to have a just war; we are going to liberate the people of Iraq — some of whom we will obviously kill — and we are going to give them democracy and protect their oil wealth and stage war crimes trials and we are going to be ever so moral, and we are going to watch our defence `experts' on TV with their bloodless sandpits and their awesome knowledge of weapons which rip off heads." And won't it be a lovely war too? Wonder what they're going to name it this time. [wlm] |
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