As Others See Us: Competing Visions of a Sanitized War

Brain Salad Surgery

"You have shown the world the skill and might of the American armed forces," Bush declared during his speech aboard the carrier. "Today ... with new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war. Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent."

As comforting as these words may have seemed to people in the United States, however, the Bush speech sent a different message internationally. Ever since the first US-led war in the Persian Gulf, the United States has won victories with overwhelming displays of military force. From the perspective of many people outside the United States, however, this is precisely the problem, and the military hardware with which Bush surrounded himself struck them as something to fear, not cheer.

The rest of the world did not experience the war as the clean, surgical operation that was presented on U.S. television, where major media outlets cited reasons such as taste, news judgment or concern about offending viewers to explain why they rarely showed images of dead and injured civilians. "It's something we wrestle with every day," said Cecilia Bohand, foreign pictures editor for the New York Times. "We're not trying to run posters for the Army, which sometimes it does feel like when we're not running [images of] the other side. Some of us feel we should be a little more graphic." She added that readers reacted with anger on those occasions when the Times did push the envelope by publishing a picture of a dead soldier or a dead child. "We're flooded with letters," Bohand said. "Readers don't want to see it."

"It really is disgustingly sanitized on television," said Gene Bolles, the chief of neurosurgery at Landstuhl, Germany, the destination for the war's most wounded soldiers. Bolles, who operated on Jessica Lynch and other US casualties, said he had seen "a number of really horrific injuries now from the war. They have lost arms, legs, hands, they have been burned, they have had significant brain injuries and peripheral nerve damage. These are young kids that are going to be, in some regards, changed for life. I don't feel that people realize that."

Writing in the public relations trade press, British-born writer Paul Holmes warned that "we are watching a totally different war from the one seen by the rest of the world," which "has serious long-term implications. It can only deepen the rift between the way the US sees its role in the world and the way the rest of the world sees us. It can also lead to more miscalculations, like the assumption that American invaders would be welcomed as liberators. There may not be much anyone can do at this stage about our image overseas (not that anyone in this administration seems to care), but the US media isn't doing the public any favors by refusing to depict the grim realities of war."

Cluster Bombs

To get a sense of the difference between US and international patterns in covering the war, we used the Lexis-Nexis database to compile a list of news stories that contained the phrases "cluster bombs" and "Iraq" during the period from April 3 through April 10, 2003. This period of time was significant because it marked the tail end of the war (the U.S. occupation of Baghdad began on April 9), and also included the first admission by U.S. and British generals that they were using conventional cluster bombs.

Human rights organizations and international relief agencies including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam International, Christian Aid and Save the Children have condemned the use of cluster bombs because they kill indiscriminately. Each cluster bomb contains about 200 bomblets the size of a soda can, which disperse upon impact and saturate an area the size of two football fields with explosives and tiny flying shards of steel. Between 5 and 15 percent of the bomblets fail to detonate immediately, leaving behind a deadly litter of unexploded bombs that can continue killing people who happen to encounter them after the battle has ended. "Cluster bombs have a very bad reputation, which they deserve," says Colin King, author of Jane's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Guide and a British Army bomb-disposal expert from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Regarded as anti-personnel weapons in the same class as land mines, they have been banned by more than 100 nations in a treaty that the United States has refused to sign. Their use remains legal, therefore, but highly controversial.

During the eight-day period we examined, U.S. publications only mentioned cluster bombs 120 times, even though they accounted for 2,044 of the publications archived in the Lexis-Nexis database. By comparison, Australian and European publications carried 394 stories, while accounting for 673 of the publications listed. In simple ratio terms, this means that European and Australian publications were ten times as likely to mention cluster bombs as their American counterparts.

Numbers alone, however, do not tell the full story. Most of the stories that appeared in U.S. publications mentioned cluster bombs only in passing, characterizing reports of their use as the Iraqi "government line" or making cursory, one-sentence mentions, as in a New York Times report on April 8 that said American officials "are investigating reports that cluster bombs were used against villages." Several mentions consisted of denials that cluster bombs were being used, references to their use in other wars, or criticisms of their use by Saddam Hussein in past attacks on Kurds and Shiites.

Asked about reports of civilian deaths from cluster bombs in the Hilla region south of Baghdad, US Brigadier General Vincent Brooks responded, "I don't have any specifics about that particular attack and the explosions that would link it to cluster munitions at all." His comments were quickly contradicted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which sent a four-person team to Hilla and found what ICRC spokesman called a "horror" littered with "dozens of smashed corpses." Amnesty International also investigated and reported as follows:

The scenes at al-Hilla's hospital on 1 April showed that something terrible had happened. The bodies of the men, women and children--both dead and alive--brought to the hospital were punctured with shards of shrapnel from cluster bombs. Videotape of the victims was judged by Reuters and Associated Press editors as being too awful to show on television. Independent [UK] newspaper journalists reported that the pictures showed babies cut in half and children with their limbs blown off. Two lorry-loads of bodies, including women in flowered dresses, were seen outside the hospital.

Injured survivors told reporters how the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky, and how bomblets bounced through the windows and doors of their homes before exploding. A doctor at al-Hilla's hospital said that almost all the patients were victims of cluster bombs.

Even after admitting that cluster bombs were being used, military spokesmen declined throughout the war to say how many were used, saying merely that "an unspecified number of cluster bombs have been fired on Iraq." Other mentions in the US press consisted of statements that talked only about efforts to protect U.S. soldiers from cluster bombs, without mentioning who was dropping them. Several stories, for example, focused on a soldier who suffered a foot injury after stepping on an unexploded bomblet. A San Francisco Chronicle report praised soldiers' Kevlar jackets, which help protect them against shrapnel injuries from grenades and cluster bombs.

After the fighting ended, some U.S. media outlets began to report on aspects of the war that they had avoided while the fighting was actually occurring. On April 28, the Chicago Tribune published a picture of the burial of 6-year-old Lamiya Ali, an Iraqi girl who was killed along with with her 8-year-old sister, when she mistook a bomblet for a toy. Several readers, noted Tribune editor Don Wycliff, called to complain about the photos, calling them "graphic" and "extremely disturbing" and saying they showed "no respect for taste or morals, or that poor child's life." In response, Malone pointed out that during the entire war, the Tribune's front page had shown "fewer than six" pictures of "dead or grievously wounded bodies."

Air Force General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on April 25 that 1,500 cluster bombs had been used during the war but that only 26 had fallen in civilian areas and that there was only one case of death or injury to a noncombatant. However, Myers' statistic referred only to cluster bombs dropped from airplanes and did not include weapons fired from land-based artillery. In the town of Karbala alone, local civil defense workers engaged in postwar cleanup reported harvesting about 1,000 unexploded cluster bombs a day in places the US said were not targets. "His remarks came amid persistent reports from Baghdad that children and other civilians are being killed or maimed by bomblets that did not explode when they hit their initial targets," reported Los Angeles Times writer Greg Miller. "Myers' assertions were challenged by human rights organizations, which said they had learned Friday of new injuries to civilians in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. ... Human Rights Watch and other organizations, as well as doctors in Baghdad, have reported hundreds of casualties from cluster bombs or similar devices."

The Arab View

Just as hyper-patriotism has become a successful marketing strategy for the American media, an equal and opposite phenomenon has been occurring in the Muslim and Arab world, where anti-Americanism has become the best formula to win ratings. When Arab reporters talked about "weapons of mass destruction" during the Iraq war, they were sometimes referring to cluster bombs. "Arab TV, the networks most prominently led by Al-Jazeera but also including Abu Dhabi TV and others, has clearly emerged as a geopolitical force," noted former FCC chairman Reed Hunt. "This TV, principally by and for Arab audiences, has seen the war through different lenses from those covering the American audience's war. Arab TV has naturally reached an audience willing to accept a view of the war from the defenders' side just as American TV has been broadcast to an audience prone to an opposing view. The natural tendencies of the different audiences, though, have not been challenged by their respective TV mediums but apparently have been exacerbated."

"To fully understand this war and its consequences, it's necessary to watch both Arab and American television," said Rami G. Khouri, a political scientist and editor of the Daily Star in Beirut, Lebanon. Khouri spent the war scanning daily through 20 different Arab and American TV services and found it a "painful exercise, because the business of reporting and interpreting the serious news of war has been transformed into a mishmash of emotional cheerleading, expressions of primordial tribal and national identities, overt ideological manipulation by governments and crass commercial pandering to the masses in pursuit of audience share and advertising dollars." The pattern, he said, was similar on both sides of the ideological divide: "Arab television channels display virtually identical biases and omissions, including: heavy replaying of film of the worst Iraqi civilian casualties; interviews with guests who tend to be critical of the United States; hosts and anchors who jump to debate rather than interview American guests; [and] taking Iraqi and other Arab government statements at face value with little probing into their accuracy."

During the war, Al-Jazeera reported a tripling of traffic to its Arab-language web site. Its willingness to broadcast images that American networks chose not to display contributed to its popularity. The Google and Lycos search engines reported that "Al Jazeera" had become the most common search term entered by web surfers, with three times more searches than "sex." Simultaneously, Al-Jazeera became a target of hacker attacks that kept its English-language site unavailable throughout most of the war and knocked down its Arabic-language site for nearly a week. "No one has ever sustained a crippling attack against a web site for so long," noted USA Today.

The Lexis-Nexis database contained only a handful of examples of Arab media coverage of the war, but we can get a sense of what Arabs were watching on a daily basis from the following description by British journalist Robert Fisk of video footage shot by the al-Jazeera cable network:

A remarkable part of the Al-Jazeera tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the explosion of incoming--and presumably British--shells. The short sequence of the dead British soldiers for the public showing, of which Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed such horror, is little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi soldiers shown on British TV over the past 12 years, pictures that never drew any expressions of condemnation from Blair. ... Far more terrible than the pictures of the dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra's largest hospital as victims of the Anglo American bombardment are brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain. A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pajamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A little girl of perhaps 4 is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl's guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. ...

Other harrowing scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another small girl was lying on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child had its feet blown away. There was no indication whether U.S. or British ordnance had killed these children. The tapes give no indication of Iraqi military casualties.

In the American press, al-Jazeera's emphasis was frequently dismissed as evidence of its ideological bias. But bias is itself a highly subjective term. Arab journalists would tell you the same thing that American journalists say in response to similar complaints--that they are simply giving their viewers the coverage they want, and that it is the American media that is biased and politically sanitized. The memories that most Americans will remember from the war will likely be the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue, the rescue of American POWs, and soldiers' joyful homecoming reunions with their families. In the Arab world, the image that come to mind will include: the Iraqi boy who lost both of his arms and most of his family in a bombing raid; the Baghdad skyline lit up by bombing; humiliated Iraqi prisoners of war; and angry anti-American protests in the streets.

In Saudi Arabia, Los Angeles Times writer Kim Murphy witnessed the effect of those images when she visited the conservative Muslim city of Buraydah on April 5. There, she said, "the war in Iraq is gaining new converts every day. ... If hundreds of young men here haven't left for Baghdad to fight the Americans, it is only because they haven't the means to get there. ... As television images of the war settle over an increasingly uneasy Arab public, the growing sense of anger and frustration is felt especially keenly." At mosques throughout the town, she reported, "the noonday air was screeching with dozens of sermons" from clergy like Sheik Suleiman Alwan.

"America and their allies, hell is their destination for the crimes they have committed," Alwan said.

Suleiman Alwan's name is worth noticing. He was one of the sheiks mentioned in December 2001 on the video footage captured in Afghanistan by U.S. soldiers in which Osama bin Laden and several supporters celebrated the 9/11 attacks. An unidentified Saudi sheik who appeared in the video told bin Laden that "Everybody praises what you did," and mentioned Alwan by name as someone who had given a sermon saying that "this was jihad and those people [killed in the terrorist attack] were not innocent." In fact, one of the 9/11 hijackers, Abdulaziz Alomari, is believed to have been a personal disciple of Alwan and was considered one of his brightest students.

If we have indeed "turned the tide" in the war on terror, as President Bush declared in his speech aboard the aircraft carrier, we should expect that preachers of hatred like Suleiman Alwan are no longer recruiting new converts to serve as foot soldiers and martyrs. The fact that this has not happened suggests that promises of victory are premature.