People Like Us (25 page)

Instead, the liberal Kuwaits sunk into the “background,” where other problems played out. In order to explain the mistrust of the pro-Western Arabs, you’d have to recount that, despite the American story about democracy being brought to the region, in fact all kinds of dictators were being supported. But how did you get such Western support onto television? CIA agents don’t allow any cameras to be present when they explain to their Arab associates the latest insights that have been attained about how to break somebody both
psychologically and physically. The American businessman with a CIA past will not let a journalist record how he sold the latest eavesdropping technology to a befriended Arabic secret service at far above the market price, with the profits being shared between them. There are no images of Western secret agents flying terror suspects to Arab countries so they can torture them out of reach of human rights stipulations. Remember: No images, no story.

 

 

I
’d spoken to another fellow journalist during the briefing given by the American army at the Sheraton hotel. “Have you just got here?” he’d asked me. “You’d better hurry up. The farmers in the North are the story. They can work their fields for the last time tomorrow, because after that the American army will be there. I’ve got names and numbers.”

I nodded thankfully and, despite my five years’ experience, I was still astonished that something so inane could be the story. But the explanation was simple: The Anglo-American media machine was dominating the news stream and, within that, the story was the build-up of American troops. When were they going to strike? The evacuation of the farmers was a good illustration of this—one that you could easily get a shot of in the constant competition for space amongst newspaper journalists.

It had all been shown before. A sophisticated media campaign lays down an image—rice and flowers—and it becomes hard to shift afterwards. Just think how impossible an honest Q&A session would sound:

That was why the army spokesmen in the Sheraton was so relaxed. He had us all chained up, and he knew it.

I was going to quit my job after the fall of Baghdad, so once the American troops entered Iraq I knew that my final weeks on the ground had arrived. It would be a revealing time, but in the beginning I saw only the repetition of familiar patterns. Was the fighting being done by “Zionist crusaders,” “American and British invading troops?” or by “allies?” Were their opponents the “Iraqi national resistance” or “Saddam loyalists?” Were we seeing a “heavy bombardment of densely populated cities” or “Operation Shock and Awe,” a name that Sony claimed for a new computer game while the war was still being fought.

Each camp had its own terminology, and played the good guy in its own version of events. Fox News reported accusations of Iraqi cooperation with Al-Qaida as fact, and reasoned
accordingly: How, then, could Europeans be against the elimination of the man behind September 11? Of course, they hate America! Hezbollah TV did the same with the accusation that Israel’s Mossad had committed the attack: How, then, could Americans blame Iraq? Of course, they hate Islam!

 

 

I
followed the war from the capital city of an important Arab country—the place where I’d started out five years earlier,
Umm iddunya,
the mother of the world, Cairo. Behind the scenes, the Egyptian government was helping the Americans where it could, but what was going on among the population? This was a blank spot, but because of the war there was now so much extra space in the newspaper that we could show the contours of those blank spots. I began a newspaper column, “The Arab Street.” I walked through the city and struck up conversations with ordinary Egyptians, doing the previously mentioned vox pops. On television, these could never be more than quick flashes: “It’s against Islam ... very bad”—if the people dared speak at all. An article offered more room, and you could present the speakers anonymously:

I wrote it all down, and the
NRC
’s inbox filled up: Your correspondent is making Arabs look ridiculous. It proved again that you have to have had this kind of conversation yourself—then you know that people say this kind of thing without hesitation and more in a tone of resignation than anger. They only get angry when you start contradicting them.

It was a strange routine. During the daytime I had the conversations for “The Arab Street,” and in the evenings I watched television. It resembled the beginning of my correspondent’s job when Iraq was being bombed during Operation Desert Fox and I was summarizing press releases from my hotel room in Amman. I didn’t have to do that anymore, because I’d stopped doing radio and television, and the
NRC
only asked for background.

So I had time to watch television, and gradually something occurred to me—not what was said and shown on the Western channels, but precisely what was not said and shown. In the run-up to the invasion, the authoritative Anglosphere media had adopted the perspective of the American PR machine, and this continued during the war. The embedded journalists who’d been assigned to the front by the army spokesman in the Kuwait Sheraton provided images of soldiers ducking away from enemy fire, crawling under walls, and reaching a position from where they could eliminate the enemy. The Iraqi enemy remained faceless, whereas you did get to see
the fear, tension, or relief on the faces of the Americans. It was like a video game—game over for the newly beaten division of the Republican Guard, and America through to the next level, with a new army division.

It was the good guy/bad guy Hollywood approach, and nearly all the analyzes coincided with the one that Central Command had sent from Qatar: The conquest of the port city Umm Qasr had top priority—not for military reasons, but to “get humanitarian goods to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible.” Fighting inside the city should be prevented, not because America’s technological advantage would be largely lost and many of their own would perish, but because “street fighting would result in many civilian casualties.” At the end of the day, it was about the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people; reporters and army spokesmen chimed this tune in chorus, implying that the war was a good thing, and that we just needed to explain this to the people of Iraq.

Every last crumb that was dropped from the Central Command podium was hoovered up. CNN called it “Be the first to know”—news as a competition. “We’ve just had confirmation from CentCom that Umm Qasr is now in the hands of American commandos. Back to you, Jim.” In the 1991 Gulf War, the same thing happened, only at that time there weren’t any Arabic broadcasters with their own correspondents refuting American statements. Now you could zap from Jim to Al-Jazeera, where they were in the middle of a live telephone conversation with the Iraqi commander in Umm Qasr.

“We now have confirmation.” Did the CNN and BBC journalists believe that themselves? Surely they were aware that the army’s task was not to deliver reliable information, but to neutralize the enemy with minimal losses? And if you have to lie to achieve this ... All’s fair in love and war.

Beside all those American press conferences, wouldn’t it have been an idea to remind people how the media had been deceived twelve years earlier? Iraq had trampled Kuwait underfoot, and the White House was intent on a military expedition; but, according to opinion polls, the majority of the American populace were against it—until a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl testified in front of the Congress that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers taking babies from their incubators and letting them die on the floor, so that the incubators could go directly to Baghdad. The witness statement was shown on television, and support for the liberation of Kuwait shot up. Long after, it came out that this “nurse” was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, and that she’d been pushed forward by the communications consultancy Hill & Knowlton. Just like it only became known years later that the American flags with which the Kuwaitis “spontaneously” welcomed their liberators had been provided by the communications consultancy The Rendon Group.

Why, in the middle of this flood of PR from CentCom, was the Western media not open about the way it had been manipulated in the past? For a while, I considered the fly-on-the-wall theory—the tendency that journalists have to believe that they are just observing without being influenced. But that was not the only thing that was off-screen on Western channels.

 

 

W
estern correspondents and presenters often referred to Iraq’s instability; after all, the country is made up of three population groups with little in common—Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center, and Shiites in the south. There was rarely any explanation after those five sentences as to
how that had come about. Until the end of World War I, the areas had been independent provinces of a Turkish colonial empire; then they were captured by Great Britain and added to Iraq. It was like grouping Poles, northern Germans, and northern Dutch people together, and telling them they were now a new country. It was a recipe for instability, which was Britain’s intention: An unstable Iraq would remain dependent on British aid and protection, and would do what London wanted. As the former American foreign minister Henry Kissinger put it in his classic work
Diplomacy
: “The borders of the Middle East had been drawn by foreign, largely European, powers at the end of the First World War in order to facilitate their domination of the area.” That was why so many borders in the Arab world were straight lines—Western governments had drawn them using a ruler on a map, and they certainly didn’t have the local populations’ interests at heart.

“Anti-Western feelings” in the Middle East received a lot of airplay in reports in the Western media. You might think that a couple of minutes of historical explanation would have been in order to understand this—for example, about Iran. Iran had a democratic government in the 1950s but, when prime minister Mossadeq decided to nationalize the oil industry, the CIA put the Shah on the throne in a coup d“etat. The shah rebuilt the country into a pro-Western dictatorship with a ubiquitous and merciless secret service and awe-inspiring corruption—a mirror of some current Arab regimes. The anger around this discharged itself in the “anti-Western Islamic Revolution.” To put down the Islamic Revolution, Western governments armed Saddam with poison gas, amongst other things, during the Iran—Iraq war. But they also secretly gave weapons to Iran, in exchange for which
Iran released Western hostages in Lebanon—the Iran Contra scandal. Henry Kissinger again: “Too bad they both can’t lose.” A million people died.